Letters

Owen Hatherley mentions that James Callaghan commissioned a modernist house in Blackheath, South-East London, an environment of ‘middle-class radical idealism’, where he had progressive architects, pop stars and TV personalities for neighbours (LRB, 23 October). Even so, Hatherley’s suggestion that Callaghan shared Anthony Crosland’s ‘progressive, pro-modernist’ principles is unexpected. We associate modernity with Harold Wilson’s ‘scientific and technical revolution’, but Crosland’s earlier variation was more expansive. In The Future of Socialism (1956) he demanded ‘open-air cafés’, ‘better-designed street lamps and telephone kiosks’, the abolition of ‘socially imposed restrictions on the individual’s private life and liberty’. In Roy Jenkins’s words, the idea was to create a ‘climate of opinion which is favourable to gaiety, tolerance and beauty’. This programme gave way in some respects to a more technocratic vision after 1964, but survived in the continuation of efforts to legislate in the fields of social reproduction and moral regulation begun under the previous government: abolition of the death penalty, reform of laws governing censorship, homosexuality, abortion and divorce etc.

This cycle of legislation is often seen as having ended with Callaghan’s tenure as home secretary. In fact he had broadly supported these reforms, had always been opposed to capital punishment and was strongly critical of the persecution of homosexuals. But with the publication of the Wootton Report in 1969, which recommended a reduction in the maximum penalty for the possession and sale of cannabis, Callaghan reached the limits of his tolerance. Rejecting the proposal, he told the House of Commons he intended to ‘call a halt to the advancing tide of permissiveness’.

The Wootton Committee had convened in response to a letter published in the Times in 1967 calling for reform of the law pertaining to cannabis, signed by the Beatles and prominent members of the liberal establishment, the social group who had been Callaghan’s neighbours. The usual interpretation of his position on this issue is that it was unsurprising given his respectable working-class and Nonconformist background, but before the deepening economic and political crisis of the 1960s a decisive split between progressive and ‘traditional’ class fractions had not yet taken place. Perhaps Callaghan’s presence in Blackheath in the late 1950s and early 1960s is a small sign of this.

John Dilworth, a distinguished luthier and frequent contributor to the Strad, the leading journal of string instruments, makes two points in response to my review of Kate Kennedy’s book about the cello (Letters, 23 October). The first is that one of England’s great violin shops, W.E. Hill & Son, was founded not in 1762 as I wrote but in 1880. As a matter of business history, he is right. The company officially ceased operating in 1992, but one might say it was founded all over again in 2017 when its great rival J & A Beare bought its name and, more important, its priceless archive. The firm’s crest, as displayed on its website, bears the words ‘Since 1762’.

Second, Dilworth says my suggestion that ‘copies of Stradivari’s work came into being “largely due” to the French luthier Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who “created the modern Stradivarius standard model”’ is mistaken, in that copies of his instruments had been made since 1717. Again he is right, but I may have not made my point clear. Stradivari’s instruments were highly regarded in the 18th century and were used as models by other luthiers. So were the instruments of some other masters. My question was when Stradivari’s instruments ceased being contemporary and came instead to represent the best of the old with which new copies could be compared. Put another way, when did the ‘listening tests’ to compare instruments, as discussed by Kennedy, begin? I have no stake in the outcome of these tests, but they started with Vuillaume, who copied Stradivari on a new scale: three thousand supposedly exact copies of what became the ‘modern instrument’, against which the best among the old ones – the originals – could be compared. In his often reprinted 1836 book, The Violin: Some Account of That Leading Instrument, the English historian of the violin George Dubourg wrote about what happened in the decade before:

Then the long-studied and well-digested acoustic theories of the man of science [the acoustician Félix Savart] being brought into operation, and tested in experience, by the skilful man of art … a brighter result was obtained – so much brighter indeed, that there seems little reasonable doubt of its being possible henceforth to produce any required number of instruments, equal in primitive merit to those of the great Italian Constructors, and only awaiting the indispensable accession of time, for the consummation of their value.

A wild exaggeration but ça commence.

Patrick Cockburn writes about the foreign correspondent Norman Ebbutt (LRB, 9 October). One of the other foreign correspondents in Germany in 1933 was the Spanish journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales. The brief given to him by the newspaper Ahora was to report on ‘what it’s like to live in fascist countries’. In a series of dispatches published in May 1933 he described the growing militarisation of German politics and society, the increasing pace of the absorption of German youth into the Nazi project, the ‘attraction’ of Nazi ideology for German women, the role of the Versailles Treaty in legitimising German land grabs, the elimination of Jews from German society (and intimations of what were to become the death camps), and daily life on the streets of Berlin. He warned of war ‘within three years’.

Chaves Nogales’s articles, collected and published as Bajo el signo de la esvástica (‘Under the Sign of the Swastika’) in 2012, end with an interview he conducted with Joseph Goebbels, recently appointed as Reich minister for propaganda. Did Goebbels think national socialism would find an echo in other countries? ‘National socialism is not for export,’ he replied, ‘but I am convinced that the spiritual transformation of Europe as expressed by fascism, Kemalism and national socialism will be complete within one or two decades. Each people needs to find new forms of expressing that spirit from within its own national characteristics. But there’s no doubt that the peoples who mobilise, now, the irresistible impulse of nationalist sentiment will have a head start on those who don’t.’

The articles show how easy it is to sleepwalk into disaster or, perhaps worse, to try to buy off populist nationalists by aping their politics.

Peter Walker recalls his experiences as a pupil of Sister Mary Gertrude Joyce at Loreto College in Christchurch (LRB, 23 October). I was there at the same time: I don’t remember the art exam, but I do remember the music lessons, with edge-of-ruler attention to knuckles correcting inattention at the piano. Although still a primary pupil, I was a pallbearer at Joyce’s funeral, and one of those tasked with stirring the fire afterwards as a significant pile of letters and papers from her brother James were burned.

Lorraine Daston writes that mass extinction events seem to occur about once every 26 million years, but doesn’t give any reason for this apparent regularity (LRB, 23 October). One theory is that this is the interval between instances of the solar system, rotating around the centre of our galaxy, passing through one of the galactic spiral arms, where the greater density of matter causes gravitational perturbations in the orbits of comets and other bodies. This results in a greater impact rate on the Earth (and the other planets), thus increasing the chance of extinction events.

As John Lahr shows, there is much to be learned about human perception through the filmmaker’s lens (LRB, 23 October). Explaining perceptual phenomena using a single ‘neurological key’ can, however, be fraught, and Lahr’s account of motion-picture perception – the way we perceive fluid motion when presented with a rapid succession of still frames – conflates two disparate visual mechanisms. The experience of cinematic motion depends on the visual system’s capacity to perceive continuity by recognising similarities of contour across successive frames. This neural elision is remarkable, as demonstrated when we look at a single cinema frame, replete with blur and a bizarrely interrupted pose or expression. But it is not, as Lahr has it, a result of saccades, which render the visual system functionally blind for an instant by suppressing neural information in the short time the eye takes to move from one position to another.

The viewer’s ability to integrate a series of continually varying scenes and objects is a quite different perceptual competence, no less remarkable and no less crucial to cinematic experience. Understanding narrative across discontinuous juxtaposition was not a foregone conclusion in the early days of cinema, and the introduction of the editor’s ‘cut’ was a monumental advance. Comprehending the transitions between completely different scenes, locations and times involves multiple cognitive capabilities, and here saccades may well have a role.

Andy Beckett’s piece on the sainted Tony Benn omits his biggest political achievement: splitting the Labour Party and paving the way for eighteen years of Tory rule (LRB, 25 September).

I read Benn’s Arguments for Socialism (1979) and Arguments for Democracy (1981) when they came out and found them compelling, if a bit simplistic. So when, before the 1983 election, Benn spoke at David Butler’s graduate seminar at Nuffield College, Oxford, known as a confidential forum where visiting speakers could discuss their ideas without fear of press coverage, I gatecrashed. After Benn had rehearsed his main arguments, participants began asking questions. Benn did not engage, but simply reasserted his positions, as if on a public platform. Some of his responses were witty, but there was no sense that he wanted or was able to engage in serious debate. I had a similar sense in my few encounters with him over the next twenty years. Like Nigel Farage today, he was a great communicator, but a shallow thinker.

Beckett concedes that ‘Benn didn’t see himself as much of a writer or thinker’ and that he lacked ‘intellectual self-confidence’. But that didn’t stop him banging out the same arguments for the rest of his career, notably that there is no significant difference between a reformist Labour government and a right-wing Conservative government. So why vote? Michael Foot, who was responsible for a swathe of influential legislation on workers’ rights in the 1974 governments, was right to dismiss this Benn-foolery.

Alice Spawls, writing about the anonymous portrait of Nicholas Lanier exhibited at Frieze 2025, observes that the inset picture of Hendrick van Steenwyck’s Liberation of St Peter in the top right-hand corner ‘looks like a stage set’ (LRB, 6 November). Her suggestion is spot on, as a version of this picture in the Royal Collection, presumably added by Charles I, was adapted for a scenic drawing by Inigo Jones for a play so far unidentified.