Letters

Ferdinand Mount’s piece on free speech had me thinking of Tacitus, who in the Histories (c.110 ce) spoke of ‘the rare good fortune of times when you can think what you like and can say what you think’ (LRB, 22 May). Like many people, I first came across this remark in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), where it featured as an epigraph on the title page. Later I found out that the full title of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) was ‘A theologico-political treatise containing certain discussions wherein is set forth that freedom of thought and speech not only may, without prejudice to piety and the public peace, be granted but also may not, without danger to piety and the public peace, be withheld’. Spinoza repeated the claim several times in the book, taking over Tacitus’ words almost unchanged (‘In a free state every person may think what they like and say what they think’).

I found the sentiment (and the connection with the past) very moving, and some years ago suggested to Timothy Garton Ash that he use Tacitus’ words as an epigraph for his book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (2016), and perhaps as a motto for his Free Speech Debate project. He didn’t take my advice, and he was wise not to, because the second half of the sentence has in our time lost its beauty and become monstrous, for reasons made clear by Fara Dabhoiwala in the book discussed by Mount. It looks as if Milton was wrong, in his Areopagitica (1644): ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’ Or perhaps he wasn’t wrong. It’s just that the time of ‘free and open encounter’ is over.

Ferdinand Mount refers to John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon as ‘little-known journalists’ and quotes Fara Dabhoiwala saying that there is ‘an unexplored puzzle’ over the reason they wrote Cato’s Letters. But there is no puzzle. Trenchard was an MP and a ‘real Whig’ who advocated parliamentary reform to counter tyranny and corruption. When Gordon moved to London from Scotland in the early 18th century the two began working together, producing several publications which proved influential in Britain and North America. Writing in the context of the South Sea Bubble, they expressed concern about increasing corruption and encroachments on individual liberty by George I’s government. They also held anti-clerical views and emphasised the connection between civil and religious liberty.

James Butler’s description of Keir Starmer as ‘a besuited void’ reminded me of the nickname Scots gave their late 13th-century monarch John Balliol (LRB, 22 May). He was called ‘Toom Tabard’, meaning ‘empty coat’, a reference to his having to remove all signs of regality from his attire as vassal of the English king Edward I.

Often a seemingly unimportant event or description will be hung round the neck of a hapless politician and prove a goldmine for cartoonists. Alastair Campbell’s assertion that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants was transmuted by Steve Bell into that spindly figure with his Y-fronts over his trousers. Let’s hope that some cartoonist out there will now render Butler’s felicitous phrase into the definitive cartoon image of Starmer – a Toom Tabard for the 21st century.

Colin Kidd mentions the late Jerry Cohen’s YouTube skits, including his impersonation of a Teutonic philosopher talking about freedom (LRB, 8 May). Cohen’s playfulness also used to enliven faculty meetings at Oxford, which he attended assiduously. He once donned a Joseph Stalin mask to argue against a proposal to make the Marxism paper non-compulsory for PPE; on another occasion he wrote down and circulated a one-page parody of a colleague’s long-winded contribution to a discussion even as he was still in the middle of making it.

Alan Hollinghurst writes that the music critic Martin Cooper’s references to Britten and Tchaikovsky show him to have been a ‘hostile straight man’ (LRB, 8 May). Cooper was, in fact, frank about his sexual preference for men from the time that he read modern languages at Oxford in the early 1930s. He is the unnamed ‘embryo musician’ described in Goronwy Rees’s memoirs, ‘who neglected all his studies to devote himself to Schönberg and Webern, and to passionate homosexual affairs’. A published letter of 1936, sent by Isaiah Berlin to Stephen Spender, reports Maurice Bowra and John Sparrow giving a ‘hideously funny’ report of Cooper’s ‘married life’ with a market gardener named Ralph Ricketts, ‘a huge, gentle, ludicrous man, like a muffin as Elizabeth Bowen said’. The papers of Shiela Grant Duff and Douglas Jay in the Bodleian contain accounts of Cooper’s infatuation with a working-class Viennese and other cheerful romps.

Alan Hollinghurst mentions the ‘gloomily detailed diary’ of George Lucas, a minor civil servant and closeted homosexual. A friend, Hugo Greenhalgh, rescued a number of these diaries from a skip during the clearance of Lucas’s flat following his death. Atlantic Books published Hugo’s selections from them in 2024 as The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life.

The gay scene in a Brooklyn high school in the late 1950s makes a salutary contrast to the frightened and criminal world described in the volumes about ‘queer life’ in London reviewed by Alan Hollinghurst. I was part of a ‘theatre’ crowd that included two girls my own age (who, much later, married each other), one gay man (he was for a while married to one of the women) and a few gay-friendly people like me. We hung out together, occasionally frequenting a lesbian bar on Second Avenue in Manhattan, which had a DJ so everybody could dance without the expense of a cover charge to pay a band.

I was too young and pre-sexual to know for sure whether or not I was ‘straight’, but the others in my crowd all seemed to know unhesitatingly what and whom they were into. I was interested enough in my friends’ lives to read Gide’s Corydon, which had been translated into English in 1950, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Those were the books we relied on for information. Not very long after, in college, I read with greater absorption Proust’s narration of the rencontre between Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien.

My gay male friend, a charismatic high-school star on whom I had a crush, told us how glad he had been to be ‘brought out’. After graduation, however, he was sent to a psychiatric institution. I thought it was to cure his drug addiction, but his best friend told me only recently that his parents had had him committed to see if he could be turned straight. The world that I knew as fun and hip and full of people who didn’t care about your sexual choices, and which welcomed me, had grimmer aspects that I was fortunate, I guess, not to know.

James Meek is right to dismiss Trump’s Greenland fantasies, which are rooted in the president’s past as a real-estate developer (LRB, 17 April). There is a fundamental difference between a real-estate deal and a political annexation, which further undermines the idea of American ‘ownership and control’. An annexed Greenland would need a governance regime. The Americans frequently refer to its becoming a ‘territory’. The current model for American overseas territories – there are five, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands – would be unlikely to attract Greenlanders. They would have less autonomy than they have now and no voting representation in Congress or for the presidency, in contrast with their full voting representation in Denmark’s Folketing. What’s more, residents of US overseas territories are treated less favourably than residents of the states in many federal programmes, such as Medicaid and supplemental security income, while Greenlanders currently enjoy equivalent status to Danes in these respects.

Before he was ousted as national security advisor, Mike Waltz said: ‘This is about critical minerals … about natural resources.’ But the model of an overseas territory would defeat the objective of resource control. Puerto Rico, to take one example, has control of its own natural resources, as Greenland does for now. While some states have federal lands that are controlled by the Department of the Interior, it is hard to imagine Greenlanders buying into that arrangement. There is no sign that the American annexationists have come up with a governance model that would reconcile their desire for ‘ownership and control’ with Greenlanders’ desire to keep these for themselves.

Jack Shenker argues that one of the reasons there is no popular movement for housing rights in Britain is that corporate landlords do not dominate the private rental sector: ‘the average landlord is a 58-year-old individual, with a median income (not including rent) of £24,000’ (LRB, 8 May). However, the official English Private Landlord Survey, last updated in September 2024, shows that almost half of tenancies (48 per cent) are accounted for by 18 per cent of landlords who own five or more properties, and the same proportion reported earning at least £100,000 a year, which puts them in the top 4 per cent of the income distribution.

Striking a fair balance between property rights and housing rights requires us to acknowledge that not all ways of holding property are the same. The principle was set by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the case López Albán v. Spain (2019), which established that the proportionality test for evictions ‘entails examining not only the consequences of the measures for the evicted persons but also the owner’s need to recover possession of the property. This inevitably involves making a distinction between properties belonging to individuals who need them as a home, or to provide vital income, and properties belonging to financial institutions.’ While the income from private renting may be essential or close to essential for some private individuals, it would not be so for landlords owning multiple properties, corporate or not. The law should account for this crucial difference.

James Vincent remarks that ‘some creatures instinctively align their bodies with the Earth’s magnetic field during moments of repose’ – dogs, for example, ‘while defecating’ (LRB, 17 April). For almost a month now since I read his piece, I have been systematically observing my dogs defecating and can report that there seems to be no observable alignment at all with the Earth’s magnetic field. Could it be that my dogs are short of magnetite (perhaps a special dietary supplement is called for)? Or are they perversely anti-magnetic, pooing triumphantly at any angle to the Earth’s magnetic field they like, in order to defy the natural order and show me who’s boss? The same goes for deer, which are supposed to align when resting. The large herd that roams our fields rests all over the place in disorderly groups, angled every which way. My dogs and the deer, I think, need magnetising.