Letters

‘By 1850 Britain had not produced a single composer of any worth,’ Peter Phillips writes, ‘with the possible exception of S.S. Wesley, since the death of Purcell. Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn had come and gone, enslaving the much denigrated local talent and reducing its effectiveness still further. Meanwhile every other branch of classical music-making was treated at best as an amateur activity’ (LRB, 6 February).

There were musical institutions in Britain before George Grove opened the doors of the Royal College in May 1883. The London Philharmonic Society, a commissioning patron of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was founded in 1813, and the Royal Academy of Music, which attempted to train British musicians to the same standard as those on the Continent, in 1822.

Britain did produce composers of worth between 1695 and 1850. William Boyce (1711-79) for example, whose activities as a composer, performer, teacher and editor (of Cathedral Music) have many parallels with those of Charles Villiers Stanford, whose career Phillips was discussing. The first movement of Boyce’s Symphony No. 1 in B flat was played during the procession of the bride and bridegroom at the conclusion of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. His coronation anthem The King Shall Rejoice, composed for the coronation of George III in 1761, was also performed at the coronation of Charles III in 2023. Boyce wrote, in all, eight anthems for the coronation of George III (he retained Handel’s setting of Zadok the Priest because it couldn’t be bettered). He also ensured that the music was thoroughly rehearsed and prepared (with at least three public rehearsals). Yet Phillips writes that while ‘Handel had shown how to write ceremonial religious music … the composers of the hundred years after his death failed to learn from him.’ On Spotify, William Boyce currently has 132,000 monthly listeners; for comparison, Stanford has just 62,000.

Peter Phillips quotes the educational reformer William Henry Hadow, recalling of his own schooling in the 1870s that music had ‘carried the suspicion of an unmanly preference’. That view is still alive and well. Some years ago, a headmaster I know was talking to a couple who were thinking of sending their child to his school and mentioned that his wife played the cello. ‘Your wife plays the cello!’ the father said. ‘Thank God for that. I’d heard it was you.’

Stefan Collini critiques Karl Polanyi’s work from a historiographical standpoint, and finds it wanting (LRB, 23 January). He mentions only in passing Polanyi’s theoretical contribution to the political economy of capitalism: that the commodities labour, land and money are not produced in the way that such capitalist commodities as manufactured goods or consumer services are. For this reason they present profound problems for the reproduction of the capitalist system in the abstract, and for particular capitalist societies.

This insight has influenced an enormous amount of radical writing in the social sciences in the last thirty years. For example, the growing field of reproduction theory is concerned with the complex nexus of waged work and the reproduction of labour power. Marxist human geographers, including myself, have examined the reproduction of people and their labour power within particular localities and regions; an important aspect of this is housing, where land, another of Polanyi’s problematic commodities, comes in.

Collini claims that Polanyi’s work has limited relevance to contemporary capitalism. The opposite is the case. The reproduction of labour power is a growing problem in high-income countries even from the point of view of business, as illustrated by Britain’s current difficulties with recruitment, staff turnover and skills mismatch. Affordable housing of acceptable quality is in desperately short supply, particularly in South-East England, in large part because of commoditised land. As for Polanyi’s third problem, money, the last fifty years have seen the explosion of money creation in the form of debt, securities and derivatives, and more recently in the purely speculative crypto currencies. While the growth of finance has been underpinned by the stagnation of profitability in the production of real commodities, it has in turn worsened that stagnation. Polanyi has never been more relevant.

Stefan Collini refers to ‘the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years … including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams’. In fact Hoggart was never a Workers’ Educational Association tutor; Thompson and Williams were, but only for a matter of months. By the late 1940s university extramural departments were the places to be, and it was in these (at Hull, Leeds and Oxford respectively) that the three radicals’ adult education careers played out, before they went on to join mainstream university departments.

Jonathan Parry writes that ‘no one is ever removed from Who’s Who’ (LRB, 23 January). That wasn’t always the case. The preface to the 1998 edition revealed that a shortage of paper during the Second World War meant that ‘four hundred pages had to be saved’ and more than ‘four thousand biographies … removed … Rough-and-ready rules were adopted and out went “some CBEs of long-standing … DSOs of former wars if they had no extra reason for being in, honorary canons, social hostesses and so on”.’ One of the victims of the cull was my future English teacher, a prolific author on grammar and language (the only member of staff to have appeared in Who’s Who, the school’s obituary for him noted wistfully). At least one person of ‘influence and interest’ seems to have removed himself from its pages. The actor Yul Brynner has an entry in the 1963 edition but does not appear subsequently. Once out, voluntarily or otherwise, individuals relinquish their right to immortality in Who Was Who.

Paul Sutton writes about the Grenadian prime minister Eric Gairy and his fixation on UFOs (Letters, 23 January). In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty and invited each of the Latin American leaders in attendance to an individual meeting. That included Gairy. Carter, his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the NSC staff member for Latin America met with Gairy in the White House cabinet room, where he unfurled a large scroll, highly illuminated. This was an invitation for Carter to visit Titania, a moon of Saturn, from its supreme leader. Carter did not react. But Brzezinski asked deadpan whether Titania had good relations with the other moons of Saturn and whether, if Carter were to visit Titania, he would be expected to give a speech.

Brett Christophers offers a constructive critical response to Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s book Overshoot (LRB, 6 February). But he is studiedly neutral on their claim that politicians long ago shifted ‘focus from mitigation (addressing the causes of warming) to adaptation (learning to live in a warmer world)’. This claim is suspect. It is true that in some instances ‘climate-sceptic’ governments have lurched straight to an adaptation-only approach after finally admitting that the climate is changing. The Australian right did this in the 2010s. The fantasy that ‘we can simply adapt,’ which is influential in some quarters today, is every bit as catastrophic as Malm and Carton suggest. But climate politics, climate diplomacy, climate media, climate activism and climate perception at large all remain preoccupied with mitigation. It dominates the conversation at COP, the priorities of activist groups and the public conversation about climate, such as it is. Adaptation rarely gets a look-in.

My argument (and that of the Climate Majority Project) is that we need a much greater focus on adaptation. First, because the impacts of climate change are already clear, and visibly ferocious. But, second, because while the drive for global climate mitigation is now running into the buffers, it could be revived by making the emerging climate crisis feel more real to citizens, as a crucial step to increasing acceptance of the need for climate action. The best way to do that is by focusing efforts on adaptation. When citizens talk about, see the benefits of and get involved in adaptation, the issue switches from being an abstract matter for culture-war debate to a concrete task on which we are working together.

As Ruby Hamilton writes, Rosemary Tonks was a presence at Miron Grindea’s soirées at 28 Emperor’s Gate (LRB, 26 December 2024). On one occasion, I think it was in 1970, I was perched at a mantelpiece chatting with Pablo Neruda. Rosemary was close by. She heard me ask Neruda if he was thinking of doing a second translation of Shakespeare following his Romeo and Juliet. Before he could reply, Rosemary moved across and said, ‘That’s not the kind of question you should ask a great poet.’ Neruda smiled at me and said that he didn’t know, maybe he would.

A few months later I wrote to him, asking permission to publish a few translations of his poems by Jonathan Griffin in a magazine I’d started, the Journals of Pierre Menard. He replied in green ink: ‘Yes, Anthony, yes. Pablo.’ It seems I hadn’t offended him after all.

Yun Sheng writes about Chinese fanfiction (LRB, 6 February). Lest anyone think a fervent dedication to ‘ships’ and satirical pairings of world leaders is unique to Chinese fandom, it should be noted that Western fans have long engaged in similar practices. Where, for example, Chinese fans might rate the explicitness of a scene using vehicle metaphors – bicycle, racing car, airplane, rocket – English-speaking fans used to deploy the citrus scale: ‘lemon’ for explicit, ‘lime’ for milder content (the comprehensive tagging system on AO3 has made the citrus scale redundant). Yun notes that Chinese writers get monetary tips for their work. That isn’t the case in Western fanfic spaces. AO3 is strictly non-commercial, so as not to get on the wrong side of copyright law. In the rare cases where money is involved, it is usually to raise funds for charity.

Peter Campbell’s memories of working in a print shop reminded me of my days in the University Library in Kumasi, Ghana in the 1960s (LRB, 26 December 2024). Tucked away in the stacks were faded copies of the Ashanti Pioneer, a pre-independence newspaper subsequently suppressed by Kwame Nkrumah. At some point the paper had begun to run out of typefaces and wasn’t in a position to replace them. So the typesetters simply put whatever they had into the type boxes. In any given word there could be a mix of bold, italic and indeed entirely different fonts. The effect was disconcerting at first, but entirely legible and quite enjoyable to read.