What's with the word 'radical'?

The execution of Charles I, 1649

Raymond Williams, in his book Keywords (1976), emphasises the importance of word and phrase meanings in scholarly discussions. His book deals with “vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions.” He describes how he was struck by a word being used in a discussion, and how “the problem of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problem it was being used to discuss”. The problems that arise when people do not define their terms were described in a recent blog about the term “neoliberalism”, where the term was being used at times with opposing meanings without explanation.

Blair Worden, a highly regarded expert on the English Civil War, highlights the term ‘radical’ in an interesting review (in the London Review of Books, September 2019) of two books about English Radicalism during the seventeenth century. Worden notes that the term ‘radical’ was used by Christopher Hill in his pioneering books of the 1970s, notably his 1972 book The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, which was a highly fashionable study of radicalism.

Worden points out that term ‘radical’ was not used in the seventeenth century in the sense in which Hill uses it, meaning a view dissenting from the political order of things. He also points out that Thomas Hobbes was as radical as anyone in the period, but is not included in Hill’s collection of radicals. Hill concentrated on small groups such as The Levellers.

So far, I agree. But Worden is a man of rather fixed opinions. The review becomes a rant against Hill, something Worden has done several times before, even though Hill was writing more than 45 years ago. There are many more mentions of Hill in this review than of the two books ostensibly being reviewed.

What is Worden’s complaint about Hill? For Worden, Hill is in thrall to a doctrine that doesn’t fit the facts: 

“The language of ‘radicalism’ enabled Hill to play down differences among his groups and to situate them with an essentially unified ‘culture’ of protest.
“Hill, who saw events as the mere superstructure of history”
“This perplexity did not detain Hill. Taking political and religious dissent to be articulations of a single set of class relations, he [Hill] thought them natural allies.”

Yet one of the books under review is entitled “Radical Parliamentarians”. Clearly Hill can’t have been entirely wrong, then.

 You wonder why the London Review of Books follows this strange practice of giving reviewer X the opportunity to review a book by Y, when in fact we all know that X will write about Z. It might be more helpful to commission a review article, along the lines of “Is Hill still worth reading today”, by someone more balanced.

The close of the review, if I understand it correctly, is about how the American libertarian right has championed John Lilburne as one of their heroes, and praised “Leveller attacks on trading monopolies … as pleas for a free market”.

At this point I noticed how Worden places in inverted commas terms he is not happy about – every mention of the word radicalism appears in this way, as if its meaning were not to be trusted. However, if any term should be distrusted, it is ‘free market’ -there has probably never been a free market anywhere (see, for example, Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism).

Worden suggests, I think, that ‘the British radical pantheon’ [his inverted commas] cannot monopolize radical ideas for the left.  Yet the phrase ‘radical right’ was captured by Raymond Williams in his Keywords way back in 1976. On the one hand, the term “radical” continues in use to the present day (as the book being reviewed demonstrates). On the other hand, the fact that the right-wing has made use of the term “radical” hardly invalidates the term itself. In Justin Champion’s view, in a Guardian interview in 2009, “Blair [Worden] is correct, that the political experiments of the 1650s were defeated … but … once 1649 [the execution of Charles I] had happened there was no turning back.” Worden is unrepentant; he can’t see “what good it did” to behead King Charles I. All this talk about radicalism really comes down to your opinion whether it was right or not to execute the king. 

However, despite Professor Worden's reservations, the word ‘radical’ is clearly still being used in book titles, and no doubt will continue to be used meaningfully by ‘the British radical pantheon’ for a few years yet.

On reading Burckhardt

It’s a long time since I opened a book by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97), Swiss professor, and son of a priest. On turning to his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) I was expecting a stimulating, well-informed overview by a world expert in Italian culture and history (after all, Burckhardt was the author of the famous Cicerone, 1855, subtitled Art-guide to painting in Italy. For the use of travellers).

But what I read in the first few pages shocked me. Burckhardt is to history as the News of the World is to culture – only of interest if it is scandalous and, hopefully, immoral. Burckhardt is not interested in what happened when, who was in power and who came next. For Burckhardt, finding a spectacular crime or an appropriate anecdote is all – and I don’t think he particularly cares if it is not true, as long as it fits his case. Burckhardt’s Renaissance Italy is a creation of pure fantasy, a Sunday scandal newspaper approach to history. This is history as an impassioned statement of wild forces, characterised rather than summarised by melodramatic and lurid illustrations:

And what can be thought of Frederick III? His journeys to Italy have the air of holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity is flattered to entertain an emperor… At Ferrara, on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty titles.

We aren’t told who Frederick III was, where he as emperor, what his background it; only that he was fabulously, thrillingly corrupt. Only a truly immoral man, he implies, would not leave his chamber when distributing titles.

Burckhardt is fascinated as well as repelled by immorality. The term “bastard” seems to raise his writing to fever pitch:

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of the fifteenth century was the public indifference to legitimate birth, which to foreigners—for example, to Commines— appeared so remarkable. … In Italy, there no longer existed a princely house where even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not patiently tolerated.

You recognise the shocked Swiss bourgeois visiting Italy and becoming aroused and appalled by the sense of vice and immorality. No bastards in Switzerland, clearly. 

From henceforth that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became more and more common.

Quite what is a “thoroughly immoral” relation? Was the rest of Europe particularly moral, at the time?

Burckhardt revels in lurid descriptions:

When in 1494 Charles VIII approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity that every house in the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled. the peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called “Christian flesh.”

Alongside the prurient fascination with evil, there is casual racism:

taxes … were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals.

Moreover, Burckhardt succumbs to the same prejudice that affected many 19th-century German academics: a facile stereotypical view by northern Europeans of Italians as wildly passionate, and hopelessly incapable of living in organised societies, for example, the Renaissance princely states … “displaying the worst features of an unbridled egotism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture”. He uses throughout metaphors of health and disease (and it is pretty clear that Burckhardt and his home of Basel are the healthy ones).

When I look again at descriptions of Burckhardt, these characteristics for me invalidate him a serious thinker. What is all the more astonishing is how relatively recent figures praise him to the skies. Jonathan Jones in the Guardian (10 July 2010) states “His book drips with love of Italy and the Italians. It is … one of the most passionate homages ever paid by a northern European to southern Europe … its greatness as a book lies in its imaginative intoxication”. Intoxicated and wrong?

For Professor James Davidson, in the London Review of Books (20 August 1998), comparing Burckhardt’s treatment of ancient Greece with the Italian Renaissance, “Burckhardt’s account of the currents of energy within and between those epochs still depends on the clichés of dissipation, dilution and adulteration”.  That’s exactly what it is, and yet Burckhardt is not condemned for it. Davidson, incidentally, mistakenly describes Burckhardt as an “intellectual voluptuary”, when the phrase was actually used by Peter Gay to describe Macaulay. Davidson quotes, apparently admiringly, a typical anecdote from Burckhardt, on the subject of suicide:

An epidemic of this kind once afflicted the girls of Miletus, and was attributed to a morbid influence in the air; all of a sudden they longed for death, and many strangled themselves. The pleas and tears of their parents and friends had no effect, and they evaded the closest surveillance, until a clever man suggested a public edict stating that those who died in this way must be carried naked through the agora; this put an end to the problem.

Burckhardt’s sense of cultural (and sexual) superiority, of condemning the worlds he depicts, make him highly suspect as a cultural critic - those foolish, easily-led young girls. It’s as if Pevsner were to rewrite The Buildings of England based around the scandalous vicars who inhabited the parishes of which the church buildings are the only remaining evidence. Fun to read, but not history.

What does the Italian Renaissance mean?

You can’t say this blog does not tackle the big questions. No, it’s not the next winner of Celebrity Come Dancing, but the meaning of the Italian Renaissance.

For most people, including myself, the Italian Renaissance means, more than anything else, paintings and sculpture. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa – images as familiar to us as Beatles songs and national anthems. But, of course, devoid of any context, who knows what they represent to the modern eye. Part of it is the way museums hoick paintings out of any background and display them in a neutral gallery, against a blank wall, with nothing above or below.

Like many people, I enjoy looking at paintings in my spare time. I’d like to think it is more than simply train-spotting, just identifying the recognisable pictures in various galleries, but it becomes challenging to explain exactly what I have learned, or imbibed, after a quick tour around a fine art collection. And of all the mysteries, I am more often drawn to the Italian Renaissance pictures than any other (not quite true – to be precise, it’s the period 1500 – 1575, for me, but that’s another story). What is the fascination of the Italian Renaissance?

Well, for a start, the Italian Renaissance is immediately recognisable. There is no doubt in most art galleries which are the Italian Renaissance paintings. They have mastered perspective, which earlier generations did imperfectly, if at all, and while still being largely religious in subject matter, tend to depict their subjects in a more naturalistic way.

But beyond these rather simplistic and trivial details, there is a feeling, which you sense powerfully in Florence, but also in most major western art galleries, that the Italian Renaissance seems to have been something of a whirlwind. Everyone in the Renaissance seems to have been painting like there was no tomorrow. Of course, this might simply reflect the buying practices of the museums: are there more Italian renaissance paintings in Western galleries because more were produced, or is it simply that they are today valued more highly than other schools of art? Whatever the case, the Italian Renaissance is highly esteemed, and often given pride of place in museum collections.

The ubiquity of the Italian Renaissance! As soon as you start looking, you see references to the Italian Renaissance in so many places. Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925) depicts mercilessly the communities of British and American wealthy individuals believing they could somehow imbibe the spirit of the Renaissance by living in the Tuscan hills overlooking Florence. The most famous of these individuals was of course Bernard Berenson, who made a highly effective combination of interests and income living at the villa I Tatti and advising wealthy clients which paintings to buy.

Donald Olsen’s 1986 book, The City as a Work of Art, is clearly a reference to Jacob Burckhardt. After a visit to Florence earlier this year, I recalled reading Burckhardt’s astonishing book for the first time, many years ago. The Florence he describes is not, of course, the real Florence of the Renaissance, but his vision was so compelling, and even the words he used have become fixed in the language: “The State as a Work of Art” is the title of his first chapter. In terms of influencing generations of visitors to Italy and students of Italian history, its importance cannot be overstated. Burckhardt’s vision of artists and thinkers probably led to the proliferation of Renaissance artefacts in Washington, New York and elsewhere as wealthy collectors in their enthusiasm collected objects in the belief that by ownership they could acquire something of this magical Renaissance spirit.

Of course, it’s another matter to decide if Burckhardt’s vision was correct, and if it still deserves its place as an introduction to Renaissance Italy. There is a topic! How far is Burckhardt relevant today, if at all, and does he misrepresent the Renaissance? Quite a theme, and quite a challenge. To be precise, the task would be to identify why Burckhardt appealed so much to his twentieth-century readers, and whether the more recent overviews of the same territory appeal and why.

For a start, Burckhardt’s subdivisions of the book make clear what he is omitting:

Part One: The State as a Work of Art

Part Two: The Development of the Individual

Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity

Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man

Part Five: Society and Festivals

Part Six: Morality and Religion

This does not appear include the private enterprise that was clearly flourishing at the time in Florence. But to look at that in detail would require something of a study of Burckhardt, as well as a comparison with more recent titles. For example,

Peter Burke’s single volume on the Renaissance, Culture and Society in Italy, was consciously modelled on Burckhardt and attempted to update it for the second half of the twentieth century. Some 25 years after reading these books, I again looked at the Renaissance in the shape of a more recent overview, Art in Renaissance Italy, by Evelyn Welch (2000). It would be fascinating to compare the differences in their perceptions of what the Italian Renaissance meant at various points in modern history: 1860, 1972, 2000. Watch this space!

Don’t just eat, just wait

Here is a story of how I failed to get any food by online ordering.

Just occasionally, I am inspired out of my indolence to join the internet world. This evening, for example, for some reason I thought it might be fun to have food delivered. There is a fish and chip shop down the road, and since I wasn’t supposed to be walking very far, this seemed a good opportunity to try online food delivery. A quick glance at the Just Eat site showed they offered food from the local chip shop.

Ordering was no problem; the food was due for delivery in around 45 minutes, at 19:25. Fifty minutes after the delivery time, there was still no food. I looked at the email from Just Eat confirming that the restaurant had received my order, and this is where things got more complicated.

The above message looks pretty straightforward. On my smartphone, however, the word “here” was not underlined and so did not appear to be a hyperlink. So I tried phoning the restaurant, and I was surprised that the number shown in the above message was actually Just Eat, not the restaurant. After being told twice by a recorded message that it might be faster to phone the restaurant (which is what I had done), I was told the Just Eat customer delivery phone number was not operational.

Clearly, the restaurant must have a phone number, so I found it by searching on Google and then phoned them. “I bet you are from Just Eat. We can’t get a driver!”, they said. “Best bet for you would be to cancel the order. It’ll be a long time before we can get a driver. There are two orders ahead of you.”

Given this helpful advice, I had to try again to contact Just Eat. This time, I tried phoning and when asked to select “customer” or “restaurant” I stated I was a restaurant rather than a customer waiting for an order. I’m good at lying. This time I was connected to Just Eat. The customer service representative was very helpful. She explained that some restaurants employed their own drivers; clearly, the restaurant I had picked was an example. These restaurants expected any delivery problems to be resolved by Just Eat, so they didn’t give their phone number on the Just Eat site. I cancelled the order, Just Eat refunded my money and gave me a £5 voucher off my next order.

I was left with lots of questions. My experience overall was as low as it is possible to get. At the same time as trying Just Eat, I could see their adverts appearing on the football broadcast I was watching. Clearly Just Eat are spending vast sums promoting their service – but some restaurants fail completely to communicate to Just Eat when something is not working, like no deliveries. Why was I not contacted about any delay? Why did the restaurant not tell Just Eat to stop taking orders? Why did the Just Eat site not give me the phone number of the restaurant? Why did Just Eat’s recorded message keep telling me to contact the restaurant directly when that it what I was trying to do? Why do Just Eat sign deals with restaurants that fail to deliver?

For my first experience of one of the big online food delivery services, both the delivery and the information provision failed totally. Like so many online services, Just Eat fixes the simple things – taking the order – while leaving the more complex operational aspects in other hands, such as actually delivering the food. They rub their hands with glee at the prospect of creating a monopoly, in this case food ordering, at which point they can charge what they like and ignore customer wishes. Come to think about it, attending to the needs of the customer seem pretty low down on their priorities even now. Rather than just eating, they were happy for me to just wait. I don’t think I’ll use the £5 voucher.

What one word means: neoliberalism

Google n-grams of neoliberalism, neo-liberalism

It’s so long since I read about economics that I quite missed the growth of the term “neoliberalism”; perhaps I was even more asleep than I thought. Actually, the term was only just becoming more widely used in the early 1990s. But when a term becomes so widespread it is given its own volume in the Oxford Very Short Introductions series, it has clearly become mainstream.The blurb for that volumes states confidently "In its heyday in the late 1990s, neoliberalism emerged as the world's dominant economic paradigm". But what does it actually mean? And who uses it? It looked about time for me to try to work out who is using the word and why.

If you are a lexicographer, you would start defining a word by looking at a corpus, a collection of documents and/or utterances. Hoping that your corpus is as large and hence as representative as possible, you will then look at all the examples of the word you are studying, and identify a number of meanings from that corpus. Given enough examples of the word usage, it should be possible to estimate the proportion of each meaning. Equally cleverly, you can track the use of the term over time. Out of curiosity, I looked in Google n-grams for uses of the term “neoliberalism” and its variants. Clearly this is a term that has become increasingly popular since around 1990.

This lexicographic methodology is what two PhD students did for the term “neoliberalism” (and variants such as the hyphenated and/or capitalised forms). In a 2009 article, “Neoliberalism: from New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan”, they looked at 148 social science articles published 1998-2004 and came up with some remarkable conclusions. First, they used their subject knowledge to identify that this one term was being used in different senses across those articles. They identified four main meanings, with the proportion of occurrences of each meaning in parentheses:

• A policy (72%) of reducing the role of the state in the economy
• A development model (39%) a set of economic theories
• An ideology (22%), a belief in how individuals and groups should behave
• A paradigm (14%), a set of assumptions about how an economy functions.

Of course, these meanings are not mutually exclusive, so the percentages do not sum to 100. Nonetheless, there is a striking variation in meaning. Secondly, they found in these articles that the term “neoliberalism” is used with both positive and negative connotations.

Thirdly, and most remarkably, they found that 69% of the articles they considered provided no definition of the term. Here is a challenge for anyone trying to understand natural language! It seems that in academic discourse, a very limited and formal register of English, following very strict rules about citing your sources and using no sarcasm or word play, variations in the meaning of key terms is widespread.

As a student of language, what conclusion would you draw from such a discovery? How can anyone ever learn a language when there is so much variation in meaning of key terms? Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that “neoliberalism” is a rather challenging word.  It seems to cover everything from Thatcherism and Reaganism to a general belief in “free” markets (and I found other articles that took the meanings a lot further). The number of books and articles that confidently use the term without defining it clearly expect the reader to identify whether they are using it positively or negatively from the context; or from the subject domain of the author or the journal in which the article was published.

The authors of the paper discovered more things about this term. It was almost never used self-referentially: nobody declares themselves to be a “neoliberal”. Secondly, and fascinatingly, they found that “neoliberalism” is used far more widely by political studies researchers than by economists. You could say this reveals one of the fascinating and maddening things about economists: many, perhaps most of the commentators about economics come from outside the field, yet still feel qualified to make judgements.

So next time you come across the term “neoliberalism”, ask yourself in what context the term is being used. Is the term defined, or do we have to infer what the connotations are for this context? Here is an example, taken at random, Ferdinand Mount in the TLS, September 6 2019: “Sassoon has little patience with those “neoliberals” who undervalue the role of the state in buttressing capitalism with the rule of law”. Clearly, Sassoon, the author of the book being reviewed, it using it to describe some thinkers negatively. But how do we infer which of the various meanings is in use in any one context? Natural language is quite a challenge - if you don't define your terms.

Postscript, 31 December 2019: As if to demonstrate the above points, the latest issue of the London Review of Books (dated 2 January 2020) has an extended discussion by Susan Pedersen of the term neoliberalism. It isn't defined; it is referred to, as if we all know what is meant by it, as a kind of shorthand for "our financialised, deregulated world". She describes "how the most common and human desires - for decent homes, better schools for our children, better healthcare for our parents, richer and happier lives - were used to help bring a solidaristic social order down under the rubric of "choice". So there is a kind of rather vague definition: the realignment of the state to provide choice instead of the existing social order. We know what she means - don't we?

On not being an expert

Gove: I think the people in this country have had enough of experts, with organizations from acronyms, saying … that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong. Because these people are the same ones who got consistently wrong what was happening.
Interviewer: This is proper Trump politics this, isn't it?
Gove: No it's actually a faith in the British people to make the right decision.
Interview with Faisal Islam on Sky News (3 June 2016)

Michael Gove’s infamous complaint about experts doesn’t really help my case.  With most of the topics I write about, or simply think about, I am not an expert. Even if you are the proud owner of a PhD, you are qualified to speak on perhaps 0.01% of the world’s knowledge. For the most part, you are a non-expert. Perhaps in Mr Gove’s eyes that qualifies me. Unlike Mr Gove, I don’t have any faith in “the British people” (whatever that vague collective may be, and I’m sure I wouldn’t like it if I investigated further what Gove meant by the phrase).

But perhaps, on reflection, Gove’s view has some justification. Let’s take my current reading – a review of a book about neoliberalism. Of all the things I do not know about, neoliberalism ranks pretty high. I even had to look the word up in Wikipedia to learn what it meant. How, then, can I suddenly be qualified to have an opinion on it, or to comment on it?

The answer is, I think, helpful for clarification of what Gove was saying. Economic policy is an area that affects us all. Whether a country should invest in public projects, whether it should aim to balance its budget, whether there should be a minimum wage, these are all questions of political economy, by which I mean economic questions that have a political dimension. These questions cannot be resolved simply by reference to economists. If a market is perfect, it does not mean that market is necessarily satisfactory by all (non-economic) criteria. If I can pay someone in a supermarket car park to wash my car for £10, a price I am prepared to pay and a price at which a supplier is prepared to provide this service, then we have a market in perfect equilibrium. But for all I know, the person washing the car may only be earning £1 out of that £10 I pay, and I don’t want to be a party to exploitation of cheap labour. So I agree there should be a minimum wage, so I know that whoever washes my car gets at least some kind of reasonable reward.

As Ha-Joon Chang states in his 23 Things They don’t tell you about Capitalism (2011) there is a case for everyone being involved in and understanding the thinking behind such things - specifically, neoliberalism:

Even though the 2008 crisis has made us seriously question the way in which our economies are run, most of us do not pursue such questions because we think that they are ones for the experts. Indeed they are – at one level. The precise answers do require knowledge on many technical issues, many of them so complicated that the experts themselves disagree on them. It is then natural that most of us simply do not have the time or the necessary training to learn all the technical details before we can pronounce our judgements on the effectiveness of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the necessity of G20, the wisdom of bank nationalization or the appropriate levels of executive salaries … However, it is not necessary for us to understand all the technical details in order to understand what is going on in the world and exercise what I call an ‘active economic citizenship’ to demand the right courses of action from those in decision-making positions.

Chang claims we can all understand enough about something to be “active economic citizens”. In that sense, we can all be experts.

Perhaps, then, what Michael Gove meant, or what I would like him to have meant, is this. There are some issues that are so important that we all of us, as citizens, should be equipped to comment in some way about those issues. Whatever the letters after your name, or however grand your job title, your pronouncements on neoliberalism are likely be coloured by political assumptions. Even though the literary periodicals are full of reviews by experts about books by experts, there is a case, not just for us mere mortals to read about these topics, but have our own ideas. So next time I see a review of a book such as Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: the end of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard, 2018), I will read it, and share what I am learning as I learn more about it. By communicating what I have learned, and what makes sense to me, I am not invalidating experts. But I am both learning to understand, and learning to communicate with others who will disagree; in other words, being an active economic citizen. In that sense, the experts from organizations with acronyms are indeed not sufficient.

Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi)

Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985) was a deceptively simple film. Since the film starts with the death of the main character, the end is clear, but Varda’s achievement is to entrance the viewer throughout. The main character, a woman who lives without a home, as a drifter, remains remarkably impassive throughout. She appears to remain indifferent whether other people treat her callously or with friendship; but she is admirable for her will to survive. Only in the final few minutes does the end become increasingly likely.

The question, of course, is why does Mona reject all avenues offered to her? She is young, she has the world ahead of her, so why turn away repeatedly from all long-term involvement? Rejecting offers of crass casual sex from lorry drivers are not surprising, but why walk away from a family who have gone back to live on the land, and, when she says she wants to grow potatoes, offers her a space, and to plough that land for her? Instead, she sits in the caravan provided for her and seems to do nothing but smoke cigarettes.

When she takes a lover, she smokes all his month’s supply of dope in four days, and then gets impatient because he doesn’t have any more. When a researcher into tree diseases explains to her what is happening to the trees, she wilfully misunderstands and repeats a mangled version of the tale back to a man who has given her work. A Tunisian immigrant shares his food and accommodation with her, but she complains when his six colleagues return and don’t want her around. When a stranger buys her a sandwich in a café, she puts money into the jukebox, thereby showing everyone she doesn’t need someone else’s money (although she takes it just the same). It’s difficult to comprehend just what these responses mean.

No explanation is given for her wilful rejection of any kind of job or stability. Yet, interestingly, the people she meets (largely played by amateurs) repeatedly project on to her what they would like to see. People dream of her freedom; there is very little freedom from what we see of her in this film. Other people struggle with existing relationships, dealing with drunk partners, but the film never shows Mona revelling in such freedom. In that way, the film gains stature, as we realise how disturbing she is for all of us in fixed jobs and ways of life.

Even though the film compels because of its narrative – like a picaresque novel, it has hardly any plot development. One reason for continuing to watch is simply the quality of the camera work; Varda has a gift for identifying powerful shots and scenes. In contrast, The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I happened to see the night before, probably had ten times the budget but failed to show any visual imagination. It’s not surprising that Varda started life as a photographer; many of the shots in the film are startling in their immediacy. She manages to capture both beauty and ugliness – the beauty of a couple of moments of fleeting happiness for the main character, Mona, and the sheer ugliness of much of the despoiled French countryside where the film is set. We follow where her camera moves, because we are fascinated.

Varda is aware of the power of images and their conventional interpretation. As with most French films, there are bare breasts, but they do not transmit the usual message of eroticism. One unpleasant character starts out naked in the bath, and then reveals herself to be intolerant and brutal, in dismissing a woman in her employment simply because the woman’s boyfriend has been implicated in a theft. As a viewer, your expectations are confounded as the scene evolves.

If the film has a moral, it is perhaps that of compassion.  Mona gains some of the viewer’s sympathy but as fast as it is gained, she by her actions rejects a simple admiration. Some people she encounters are brutal and horrible to her; others respect her and do not make demands of her. She is almost a kind of blank canvas against which the world displays its good and bad qualities. Perhaps the film makes us look again at those on the margin, and to rethink our dismissal of people we do not want to know; but this film is no hymn to the outsider.

Last Supper at Pompeii

Who could fail to enjoy this exhibition, at the Ashmolean, Oxford, about the food and dining habits of the Romans, one of my favourite themes. I couldn’t imagine anything more pleasurable than to participate in one of those Roman meals every night, served, it would seem, by naked slaves. 

Farmer going to market, to provide food for all those banquets

Yet there is something curious about the exhibition title. The term “last supper” is used by the curator, Paul Roberts, to bring together two themes of the exhibition: the Roman tradition of fine dining, and pleasure in all things culinary, with the dramatic end to so many human lives with the eruption of Vesuvius in CE 79. Something doesn’t quite add up. The phrase “Last Supper” means most often in English a very Christian event, the Last Supper of Jesus and the disciples. Clearly there is no reference to that event, or to that tradition – in CE 79 Christianity had no significance in the Roman world. So why use the term? 

On reflection, I had my doubts about this exhibition, which, in an effort to show a theme, perhaps simplified things a little, and emphasised one angle at the expense of several others. The theme was: the Romans enjoyed dining, as their predecessors the Etruscans did. In the midst of dining, they were aware of death, which turned out to be highly relevant, because they all died in the eruption of Vesuvius. Later, many would-be Romans in England followed a similar elaborate style in their eating habits (although they didn’t die suddenly). Is that a theme? Kind of. The evidence for this theme is one highly displayed mosaic: a skeleton holding wine jugs. Artistically, it is about at the level of a schoolboy drawing in a playground. From the emphasis given to this rather trivial mosaic, it is clear that this exhibition favours themes over artistic quality. 

Mosaic, death holding wine jugs

Other doubts about the exhibition soon began to follow. Firstly, what exactly was the connection between the Etruscans and the Romans? They both liked all things Greek, and they both enjoyed dining, but was it the intention of this exhibition to suggest that the Romans got their taste for dining from the Etruscans? The clue this show provides is a few examples of Etruscan cinerary urns depict the dead person as if at a banquet – as at the banquet, so in the afterlife. Still, it is a bit simplistic – after all, Roman funeral sculpture doesn’t show people in a banquet (as far as I can recall). In other words, to demonstrate such a link would need a bit more evidence.

Then there are the few objects at the end of the exhibition, mostly of lower quality, showing things English. The intention is, I assume, to show that the English had similar dreams about fine dining as the Romans did. That isn’t surprising, even if the English had less money and so tended to make objects out of pewter rather than of silver. But the English items are something of an anti-climax, because the Pompeii objects are carefully orchestrated to culminate in a life-size effigy of a woman who died in the disaster. No sudden deaths for the English Romans (unless they choked on a dormouse).

A pewter dish from the Appleford hoard, not illustrated in the exhibition catalogue (or book)

Other gripes: the catalogue of the exhibition does not illustrate all the objects shown. This is a pain when one of the loveliest objects, a near life-size bronze sculpture of a male, is not illustrated in the catalogue (which is firmly called a “book”, not a catalogue, in the acknowledgements). The index to the “book” does not list the objects in the exhibition, although it does list the illustrations. The book contains a 24-page “catalogue of objects and organic samples” and will tell you which objects are “unpublished” – helpful for some people, but not for me – but not which objects are illustrated in the book. I can’t help feeling the book is telling you the less important things while leaving out the basic things.

When I buy a catalogue, I like it to show the things I saw – at least, the big-ticket items. Thus, there is a wonderful almost life-size bronze statue of Apollo in the exhibition, but Apollo is only found under “gods” in the index. Although there are seven pages of forewords and acknowledgements, there is no list of illustrations either. If you scroll through the entire book, you will find a detail of the Apollo statue illustrated (on page 143, to save anyone else the bother), but there is no way of identifying which of the 299 objects listed in the catalogue this statue might be. Unhelpfully, the illustrations include the museum catalogue number (so the museum at least knows which object it is, even if we don’t). The illustrations in the book don’t always include the dates of the object displayed. These dates can be found in the catalogue – if you can find the object. When the catalogue doesn’t illustrate the major objects and the illustrations aren’t keyed to the catalogue, you start to wonder. It’s a hotchpotch! This is an Ashmolean publication, and they have plenty of experience of producing exhibition catalogues, and even books.  

The statue of Apollo, in case you don't find it in the catalogue

The audio guide cost £3, and contained very little that was not already stated in the captions to the objects. More useful would have been some optional background information, such as extracts from the Satyricon, which is after all a description of a banquet much like the one depicted in this exhibition. Incidentally, it costs £1 (not refundable) to leave any items in the lockers. I don’t know of any other gallery that has a similar practice.

Finally, there is the whole “Last Supper” idea. Perhaps the dining habits of the Pompeiians become all the more poignant because we knew, as they did not, that it would all end suddenly and dramatically one day. But even though we, with hindsight, are fascinated both by the sudden end and the incredible evidence it offers us, this is not something that the Pompeiians ever thought of. If they had considered it, surely they wouldn’t have died so suddenly and dramatically on that fateful day. Was Paul Roberts, the curator, suggesting that the emphasis on fine dining and “carpe diem” was because all the inhabitants of Pompeii realised that every dinner could be their last? A bit like Russian roulette?