This morning as we passed a hotel here in BucerÃas I noticed a cash machine (ATM for my American friends). Somebody had stuck on it a sticker which read “Democrats = Antichrist”. Perhaps this was a joke put there by an ironic Democrat, but I rather suspect not. A terribly sad, indeed deranged sign of our times. Bring back tolerance and intelligent discussion of differing ideas.
On 19 September I had an appointment to visit a dentist in Puerto Vallarta because I was worried that a filling in one of my molars might be failing. The dentist told me that my tooth had fractured and that I would need either a crown or an extraction depending on the depth of the fracture. Alas, an extraction ensued.
The dentist, Minerva, who cares for the dental health of the children at our son’s charity, Pasitos de Luz, works alone in a small office. No receptionist, no assistant to pass the necessary tools.
After a painless extraction, she wrote for me my “indicaciones”:
· Don’t eat pork (the meat is said to be a possible source of infection).
· Don’t spit, drink with a straw, rinse my mouth and spit. Don’t be out in the sun (difficult here). Don’t carry heavy items (easy to comply).
· Avoid foods with small seeds and spicy foods (a disappointment in Mexico).
· Eat plenty of lemon ice cream (apparently it helps reduce the risk of infection).
I am diligently obeying the final instruction.
As we were being driven home the driver announced that he would have to pull over because he may have a puncture: the car was moving from side to side. We stopped at a light where the drivers and passengers of two cars were in vigorous discussion. “They must have drunk too much tequila” the driver said. Then we noticed that crowds of people were standing outside buildings. We had experienced an earthquake.
In Mexico City there are earthquake alarms. Indeed, 19 September is the precise date of the last two quakes to shake the city and a city-wide simulacro (rehearsal or drill) had been held two or three hours before the real quake. There were no alarms here. Our son told us that at Pasitos colleagues left the building promptly, contacted family with their mobile phones, and ate croissants before being sent home early.
All in all, a day to remember. And now to eat more ice cream.
The appalling assault suffered by Salman Rushdie set me thinking, as a former publisher, about censorship. In a sense, the job of a publisher is both to resist censorship and to exercise censorial judgements. A publisher might refuse to publish a work for a variety of reasons. For example, my last employer, Thames & Hudson, published illustrated non-fiction with a strong emphasis on art, architecture, design, history and archaeology. A T&H editor would therefore speedily decline a novel or, for example, a very specialist work about economics.
Books had to be financially viable. When I worked in the academic division of Macmillan large numbers of book costings crossed my desk daily. There was no time for deep reflection about all bar a few, so snap judgements were made about sales. Provided the gross margin (sales less fixed costs such as production costs) was no lower than 50%, the book was considered viable. And if it comfortably exceeded 50% the book was likely a real winner. A trade publisher (of books for a general consumer market such as novels, cookbooks, popular history and so on) would base judgements about books on other factors. There were, of course, financial criteria, notably whether the advance demanded by the author’s agent might earn out (that is, earn royalties sufficient to offset the advance). The editor would also consider whether a book would improve the list already contracted for a future season, whether it appeals to a current fashion or interest, the existing competition, the potential of future books that the author planned to write etc.
A commissioning editor’s background, experience and personal prejudices or ignorance also plays a role. In 1985, to my shame, I challenged a colleague who wanted to publish a book by the feminist author Terri Apter, Why Women Don’t Have Wives, because I could not understand why anybody would buy the book. My colleague was outraged. He explained to me exactly why the book would sell – and it did. In the 1990s a colleague at The Dictionary of Art met, in a Welsh pub, a man who had written a “Watership Down novel about badgers.” The aspiring author asked my colleague whether Macmillan would publish it. I, in turn, asked the managing director of Macmillan’s trade division for her opinion. “No market in badgers”, she replied instantly. She turned out to be very wrong: the pub landlord published the book, it became a bestseller in Wales and Penguin bought paperback rights for a large sum. Unfortunately, the landlord concluded that it was easy to make money from books (it is not), published the next novel and it flopped.
Listening to the news coverage of Rushdie’s stabbing, I hear a writer comment that The Satanic Verses would be unpublishable nowadays. He noted that, until now, only publishers had been attacked and, in some cases murdered, so publishers are understandably reluctant to risk their lives. Religiously-inspired censorship comes in many guises. In the 1990s, when I was publisher of The Dictionary of Art (now The Grove Dictionary of Art), I took decisions not to publish a variety of texts and/or images. The example that immediately sprang to mind when I heard the news about Mr Rushdie was that of the images of the Prophet. Our Islamic art editors, my good friends Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, emailed me to tell me that their new edition of the Pelican History of Islamic Art had been returned by the publisher’s Pakistan distributor because the image on the cover was a painting that depicted the Prophet. The distributor explained that, if he sold the book, he risked being executed. Sheila and Jonathan advised me to check how many images of the Prophet would be included in my not-yet-published reference work.
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| Muhammad at Mlunt Hira, 16th-century Ottoman illustration of the Siyer-i Nebi |
I checked and there were plenty. I contacted our senior adviser on Islamic Art, Oleg Grabar at Harvard. After examining our selection of images Oleg explained to me that the common notion that Islamic principles have always prohibited representations of the human form is not correct. There are many important paintings and illustrated manuscripts produced in Islamic societies that depict humans. However, for many contemporary Muslim populations the depiction of the Prophet is a very sensitive subject. Moreover, there are two ways of depicting he Prophet: veiled and unveiled. The former is much less controversial than the latter. So, we considered the images one-by-one. If an image of a veiled Prophet served just as well as an unveiled depiction, we replaced the unveiled image with a veiled one. However, in some cases an unveiled Prophet was the only option, other than leaving the text unillustrated. We considered such cases on individual merits. If the work illustrated was not especially significant and the text made sense without an illustration, then we removed the image. However, some images were so important to the history of Islamic art that it was simply absurd not to illustrate them: so those illustrations remained.
Erotic art raised comparable questions. The author of an article about the history of erotic art asked for a large number of illustrations because such works were not liberally illustrated elsewhere in the Dictionary. His selection worried me, so I met with two senior colleagues whose judgement I trusted. We decided, in the words of one colleague, that some images “Will have us banned in Saudi Arabia”, while other would not. As it happened, this issue applied not only in countries such as Saudi Arabia and not only on account of Islamic sensibilities. A salesman complained to me one day that he had lost a big sale (and his commission) to a Baptist college in the American South because there was an entry on homoerotic art. This was not a question of illustrations, since the librarian at the college had not yet seen the article in question. She explained that her college simply prohibited the very mention of gay love in any context and therefore the students could not be exposed to any book which referred to the topic, even in the case of a 32-volume work in which homoerotic art was discussed in only a few pages.
Similar problems were not uncommon in the USA. One day in the early 2000s I was walking to an appointment at Brigham Young University (a Mormon institution) when I bumped into a very distressed salesman from the company that distributed my books. He was worried that he would lose a large sale of an expensive textbook, Art Since 1900, over one image: of a performance artist Lynda Benglis (1941-). The photo depicted a nude Benglis inserting a phallic object into herself. The art history professor explained that his students would simply refuse to read a book that included that image. The salesman had suggested that the books be sold to the college bookstore non-returnable and that the store employees could simply sticker the offending image, but this did not work because the bookstore workers were also Mormon and would not look at the image to ensure that they stickered the correct spot. Our salesman wanted me to persuade the professor to accept the image (I failed miserably). Alternatively, he wanted my company to sticker the offending item. In other words, to censor one of its own books. The company rightly refused.
On another visit, to a college in Phoenix, I met a professor who taught an introductory course called Stones and Bones: an introduction to palaeontology and evolution. He explained to me that many of his students were Mormons. I expressed surprise that the students would take a class that contradicted their beliefs. The professor explained that after every class the students took their notes to the local student Mormon centre where they were told what was and was not true according to Mormon beliefs. They were allowed to repeat these untruths in exams to get good grades, but should otherwise ignore them. Some of my competitors pandered to Mormon and evangelical Christian objections to Christianity by including in their textbooks a discussion of Creationism, presented as a valid dissenting theory. I had no difficulty in deciding that I would not lower my standards to this level in my books.
Government bodies have sometimes asked me to censor books. Much of my work on The Ditctionary of Art was carried out during the period of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. This gave us the opportunity to commission Russian scholars whose work was unknown in the West, but elements of the Soviet system persisted. The Soviet copyright agency VAAP insisted that I sign a contract with them: they would then commission authors on my behalf. However, the draft contract contained a provision that all articles about Russian/Soviet artists be “examined” by VAAP. I refused and VAAP failed to insist on that provision.
The Dictionary escaped censorship in Iran, thanks to a resourceful bookseller. I noticed that we had made a gratifyingly large sale to Iran, given the large number of images of nude or partially nude bodies in the book. I asked the salesperson how it came about. Iranian regulations required that a government agency read all foreign books before they could be sold in Iran. The bookseller explained to the agency that this was a very large book indeed: many millions of words in English. Did the government officials really want to read so much? Opting for the easy life, the agency permitted the importation of the book without so much as looking at it.
On one occasion, the British Council asked me to censor an author’s work, but on this occasion in a good cause. We had commissioned some articles on Romanian art from the director of the national art museum in Bucharest. Shortly after the fall of Ceausescu, I received a letter from the director explaining that he would be delayed because his office had come under fire and the consequent fire had consumed his texts. I was about to write a sympathetic reply, when a second letter arrived from Bucharest with a covering letter from the British Council office in the capital. The second letter was from the art historian who had replaced the director and who explained that our author was a creature of the Ceausescu regime whose work should not be published. A group of Romanian scholars offered to write new texts. The British Council’s letter convinced me that in this case the replacement authors would supply a more reliable text.
Government censorship is as old as the book, of course, and sometimes very Heath Robinson. For a time, I was publisher of a venerable reference work, The Statesman’s Yearbook (SYB). Our Indian sales rep told me that every year sales of the book were delayed in India while officials censored any mention of Kashmir being part of Pakistan. She sent me a photocopy of censored pages. Somewhere in India, an official with a very high threshold for boredom carefully examined the book, obliterating with felt tip pens any indication that Pakistani Kashmir exists and redrawing the maps of Pakistan and India accordingly. The sales rep explained that sales would be made much faster if we removed the text ourselves and redrew the maps. I refused because censorship would be a disservice to readers and because the reputation of the SYB as an authoritative source would have been undermined. I could not stop the Indian authorities persisting in local censorship, but that did not justify censoring the book myself.
Another book was the subject of attempted censorship by a printer on behalf of a government. The second edition of my (very successful) textbook Gateways to Art included a new text and image about Ai Weiwei. The printer in China refused to print a book which even mentioned Ai Weiwei. My production director gave me two choices: replace the piece about the dissident artist or switch the printing to Malaysia at higher cost. We printed in Malaysia.
On the other hand, I exercised a degree of censorship in Gateways to Art. An author included a discussion of Jenny Saville, an artist known for her nude self-portraits depicting her body using very foreshortened views. The author chose a particular work which depicted Saville’s genitals quite clearly, which I thought would result in the book being rejected in more conservative parts of the USA. Since Saville painted several similar works which were slightly less explicit, but illustrated the point the author wanted to make perfectly well, I persuaded the author to change the choice of illustration.
Copyright can at times be used to exercise censorship. For the first edition of Gateways to Art I wanted to illustrate a work which became famous when mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani attempted to shut down an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. The exhibition, Sensation, included several contentious works, but the one which attracted Giuliani’s ire was Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, a work that included elephant dung and collaged photos of women’s buttock cut from pornographic magazines. This work has been reproduced in a number of publications. However, the artist’s representative decided on this occasion that it was overexposed and refused permission to reproduce it. We rewrote the text and illustrated it with another controversial work: Marc Quinn’s self-portrait head made of his frozen blood. Nevertheless, the change of image lost me a large sale at a college in Albuquerque, because the faculty decided that I had censored Ofili’s work. They refused to adopt a book of a publisher who censored artworks.
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| Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996 |
On another occasion, the representative of Diane Arbus granted permission to reproduce some of her photos on the condition that any reference in the text to her committing suicide be removed from the text. It was made clear that even if we did not illustrate any works by Arbus in the text, the author would never in future be given permission to reproduce any of her images. This, in effect, would prevent the author from pursuing his research and would damage his career. Much as I disliked censoring the text, I felt that I could not risk damaging the author’s future, so with his agreement the text was rewritten and the permission granted.
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| Diane Arbus, Untitled, 1970-1971 |
In other words, a publisher makes judgements on a regular basis about what should be published. In general, the publisher’s instincts should, of course, be to resist censorship. A publisher’s judgement of the potential and the financial viability of a book inevitably influences the decision to publish or not, but those judgements are never infallible and a good publisher will often find a way to make a book work against the odds if it is sufficiently important. The publisher’s job is to exercise judgement to ensure that as few restrictions as possible inhibit publication of research, opinions, facts and scholarship. If a degree of censorship is prudent or inescapable, it is often possible to find an alternative solution which does not damage the free flow of ideas and scholarship.
Of course, none of the decisions I took over the years required anything like the courage required of Salman Rushdie and his publishers.
We are all familiar now with the concept of dominant virus variants. It seems that the contemporary variants of the herpes simplex virus, the cause of cold sores, that are dominant in Europe share a common ancestor. Scientists in the Cambridge Infectious Diseases research centre studied ancient DNA from 3,000 archaeological sites and found evidence of herpes simplex in four specimens. The oldest was an iron age man buried in the Ural mountains. Two other cases were found in a woman in her 30s or 40s and a man in his late teens or early 20s found at sites in Cambridge. The fourth was a man buried on the banks of the Rhine, whose damaged teeth suggest that he was fond of smoking a clay pipe.
According to the report I read in yesterday's Guardian, the scientists were able to trace the origins of the virus to 4,500 years ago in the Bronze Age. This coincides with mass migrations from the steppe grasslands of Eurasia to Europe. The Cambridge scientists, not content with this plausible explanation, suggest that a new human behaviour may help to account for the spread of the virus: kissing. Apparently, the earlies known reference to kissing is a Bronze Age manuscript from South Asia.
I am not quite sure that the absence of earlier evidence for kissing proves that it originated at that time, but it's an interesting idea. Did some other behaviour precede kissing, rubbing noses perhaps, some form of caressing, perhaps something a little rougher such as a hearty slap on the face? Once, reading a dictionary of a southern African language published by Macmillan, I came across a verb defined as "removing an object from the eye with one's tongue" (I assume the tongue and eye belonged to distinct individuals). Perhaps some such loving act spread the virus rather than kissing.
Whatever, the truth, Dr. Charlotte Houldcroft, one of the Cambridge researchers, told the paper "Kissing is one of those behaviours that doesn't fossilise well." That's an archaeological axiom with which I heartily agree.
Happy kissing, or some alternative behaviour.
For some 120 years pigeon fanciers in the UK have held long distance races starting in France, Spain or some other European country, but the complicated logistics imposed by Brexit may signal the end of this traditional pastime. Since the UK left the EU pigeon owners must register with the UK’s Department for Rural Affairs. Their pigeon lofts must be inspected annually by a vet and the clubs of which they are members must complete export health paperwork. A vet has to certify the birds at the point of departure in mainland Europe and at registration points along the course of the race. The bureaucracy and costs involved have made races uneconomic. A club in Leeds that usually holds six or seven races a year plans none this year.
This sad little tale is but one example of the many ways in which Brexit has inflicted considerable cultural, educational, and social damage on the UK. The economic consequences are proving equally harmful. The Conservatives declare themselves to be the party of low taxes and low regulation. Yet Brexit has entangled our trade with our largest market in complex, onerous and costly bureaucracy and regulation, and new taxes. The website of my former employer, Thames & Hudson, proclaims two years after Brexit “EU shipping is temporarily suspended.” Sales to individual consumers, like the pigeons, are too costly. This is true of many small and medium sized export businesses: shipping to the EU has become so expensive that businesses either abandon exports or set up distribution centres in an EU nation.
You might think that the consequences of a radical rupture of the UK’s relationships with dozens of countries on our continent would merit sober reflection and analysis as to whether in practice this has proved to be a wise decision, and how to address any negative consequences. However, if you were a candidate in the process to choose the next leader of the Conservative Party and therefore our next Prime minister, you would avoid any comments about Brexit that were not entirely positive, regardless of the evidence. To do otherwise would be terminal for your career. Nor would you talk about Brexit if you were a senior figure in the Labour Party. And if you subscribe to the newspapers with the largest circulation, you will find little or no analysis of the negatives of Brexit. Rather our political class seems determined to ensure that the consequences of Brexit, like the pigeons, will not come home to roost.
My country has been ruled since 2010 by the Conservative and Unionist Party (from 2010-2015 in coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party and since then in sole control of the government). The Conservative Party likes to think of itself as the party of law and order, prudent economic management and competence, defending the country from the menace of socialism. However, since 2015 there have been three (soon four) Conservative Prime Ministers, which would seem to indicate that something has not gone quite right and that the party is not very adept at choosing leaders.
The first to be dethroned was David Cameron, who called a referendum about Brexit in 2016, ran a complacent (very much his style) campaign to remain in the EU and lost. He had underestimated the extent to which a determined (some might say fanatical) Brexit had become a majority in his party. His successor was Teresa May, an uncharismatic, earnest character who had a substantial record in ministerial office as a Home Secretary who built her reputation on hostility to immigrants. She endeavoured to solve the fundamental conundrum of Brexit: how to carry out a political project whose consequences are essentially damaging, without incurring damage, or at least as little as possible. Her problem was that this involved an agreement with the EU that was insufficiently aggressive for the Brexiters, who had formed a clique known as the Brexit Research Group. She could not win their support, and of course the opposition parties also rejected her attempts to resolve the conundrum. Furthermore, she made a disastrous calculation to call a general election on the question of concluding Brexit, but proved to be a spectacularly incompetent campaigner. She committed the cardinal sin of losing her majority in Parliament in an election that she did not need to call. Moreover, she was betrayed by Boris Johnson (who had earlier betrayed David Cameron). She was forced to resign and replaced by Johnson, who in turn has been forced to resign.
Now, a reasonable observer might conclude that a party that has recommended a Prime Minister to the country three times on average every 2.3 years, and then itself announce that it has no confidence in the Prime Ministers that it chose, may not be as prudent and competent as it proclaims itself to be. Especially, after the disastrous tenure of Boris Johnson.
That observer might also reflect on some of the consequences of Conservative rule since 2010. These include:
· An increase in child poverty and in poverty in general.
· A transfer of wealth from wage earners to asset owners.
· A decline in the real value of waged employment.
· A radical reduction of the real value of financial support for the unemployed, sick and disabled.
· An increase in the provision by charities and other NGOs of foodbanks, a reflection of increased poverty and hunger.
· An unusually low state pension compared to most other European countries.
· A reduction in the real value of spending on health, already low by European standards.
Leaving to one side, the Johnson regime’s (not merely Johnson himself) use of lies, unlawful acts, breaches of an international treaty that Johnson himself signed and declared to be a political marvel, and the stoking of division, this most recent Conservative administration has undermined some of our most cherished freedoms:
· An untrammelled freedom to vote: for the first time in the history of British democracy, voters will be required to produce photo ID. This change was made to “protect our democracy” despite the lack of evidence of any threat to democracy in the absence of photo ID. The intent of this measure is to deter those who vote for opposition parties from casting their vote.
· Ending the independence of the Electoral Commission by giving a government minister the powers to set its objectives.
· Restrictions on the right of protest.
· The undermining of the BBC for being insufficiently pro-Brexit and because its programming does not “reflect the views of the British people.” The BBC is not a state broadcaster and is not obliged to adhere to a particular political line, but the government funds it and can thus intimidate the BBC. More supine coverage of government policies and actions is already apparent.
· Selling to the private sector the only other national public broadcaster (Channel 4), which frequently challenges the government line (of any government) with no requirement that the public broadcasting element of its programming is sustained.
· Judicial reforms to reduce the ability of citizens to challenge government actions and policies, including a new British Human Rights Act to remove some of the protections provided by the European Convention of Human Rights and restricting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.
· An intolerance of dissent, attacking those who disagree with the government as remoaners/remainiacs (for refusing to believe that Brexit = Nirvana), or as ‘woke”.
· The government regulation of free speech in universities. A government agency can now fine universities if it deems that free speech has been restricted.
· A punitive sentence for a new crime of damaging public statues, prompted by a single incident of the removal by protesters of a statue of a former slave owner in Bristol. This incident was the consequence of very local conditions and circumstances, not a general trend, but the government exploited the incident to create fear of “rewriting our history”.
· The appointment of figures ideologically aligned to the Johnson regime to the boards of museums and other cultural bodies and the denial of appointments to individuals who espoused ideas and approaches not approved by the government.
· The abuse of independent processes to appoint people to government agencies contrary to regulations and traditional norms of public governance.
The removal of Johnson has not made our democracy safe.
The latest scandal in our governing (sic: “governing” comes very close to being a misnomer) Conservative Party involves the Deputy Chief Whip, one Chris Pincher. Mr Pincher was appointed to his post despite having resigned in 2017 from a similar position because he made unwanted sexual advances to a colleague. The Whips’ office is responsible for maintaining party discipline. Any MP who has a complaint (for example of being sexually molested by a colleague) registers the complaint with the Whips’ office. One might think therefore that anybody appointed as a Whip would have demonstrably high standards of conduct and probity. But not in the government of Prime Minister Johnson.
Mr Pincher has fallen from grace because on Thursday evening he became very drunk at the Carlton Club (the Conservatives’ private members club in St. James’s). He resigned that evening because he had, in his words, “embarrassed himself.” It seems that his embarrassment involved sexually touching two men. My newspaper this morning quoted a “Downing Street source” dismissing the matter as being “on the level of somebody’s bum being pinched,” as if pinching another person’s bum is acceptable behaviour (I would not be surprised if it were in 10 Downing Street). I wonder if this source considered that the person (s)he was defending is the appropriately names Mr Pincher. The political of Mr Bum Pincher will probably soon be over.
According to the press reports I have read, one of the Supreme Court judges’ justifications for abrogating Roe v. Wade is the fact that the US constitution nowhere specifically mentions abortion and therefore it cannot be a constitutionally protected right. This, I believe, is a strict constructionist interpretation of the constitution: i.e., a ruling based only on the text of the constitution, ignoring any contextual issues, precedents, any discriminatory consequences of the ruling, any effect the ruling might have on other rights and so on.
This brought to mind something I read in the manuscript of a splendid book written by Professor Carol Hillenbrand, Islam, A New Historical Introduction, which I published at Thames & Hudson. Islamic jurisprudence holds that only practices stated to be permissible in the Q’uran or in the sayings of the Prophet are allowed. One jurist was asked whether it is permissible to eat watermelon: he scoured the texts for references to watermelons and, finding none, ruled that the consumption of watermelon is not strictly prohibited (since it is not mentioned) but that it would be wise to refrain from eating it just in case. I assume that the learned jurist would have ruled similarly if asked about tomatoes, mangos and any number of other nutritious and delicious foodstuffs. I must confess that I have not checked the text of the US constitution, but I suspect that it does not protect the right of citizens to have access to watermelons, mangos, tomatoes and so on. This is, perhaps, an absurd comparison, but perhaps constructionist interpretations are equally preposterous. What happens if one looks to the constitution to protect gay and transgender people (who I expect the founding fathers failed to think about, much as they omitted the rights of African-Americans) or other out of favour people who might be deprived of their rights?
