The Saturday Read: Easter rising
Inside: The Supreme Court's gender ruling, Keynes, Julian Barnes on his political evolution, Beckett, Russia, and your favourite books of the 21st century.
Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the best of the New Statesman, in print and online this week. This is Finn with Nicholas and George.
In a Trump-lite news week (I don’t suspect we will have the privilege of saying that very often), the Saturday Read is happy to merely wish you all a good Easter. London has cleared out, the weather is passably Spring-like, and there’s plenty to read down below about tariffs. We also have a wonderful re-reading of a Beckett novel, my reflections on the 1916 Easter Rising, and Andrew Marr’s tribute to Russian art.
Last week we asked about your favourite books of the 21st century, and received a flurry of submissions. Sorry I could not respond to every one. But George and I pored over them all, and he delivers the verdicts down below. As ever, thanks for reading and writing in. Have a great weekend.
1—“Sybaritic American lifestyle”
Robert Skidelsky is the J M Keynes whisperer, with a three volume biography of the economist to his name. Here he is with the New Statesman asking what Keynes would think of Trump’s macroeconomic sledgehammer, and whether a supranational reserve currency should replace the dollar. FMcR
This rhetoric was the staple of 19th century US populists. “We shall not be crucified on a cross of gold,” thundered Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896. But does it have any relevance for today? The question can be rephrased as follows: why should a trade deficit be a problem if other countries are willing to finance it? To consume more while working less, to live beyond one’s means – has not this always been the spendthrift’s dream?
2—“Sex is biological”
The trans issue has defined the last decade of gender politics across the UK, but nowhere more than Scotland. Now a legal case brought by For Women Scotland has seemingly settled the issue for good. Our Scotland editor, Chris Deerin, traces the downfall of a campaign that once believed it was on the right side of history. NH
In the Sturgeon camp, there has long been an acceptance that the battle was lost, even if she publicly refused to reconsider her position or admit to her mistakes. The more honest among her followers concede that the whole affair was badly handled – that small gains for trans people rather than one giant leap would have been a smarter political approach. It is hard to look at the trans community today, at where it finds itself, and think it is any better off than it was before this all began.
3—“Strong opinions, strongly held”
What a delight to have Julian Barnes back in the pages of the New Statesman. He writes with typical candour about never changing his mind on matters of politics – call it laziness or stubbornness, he says. It is a rare virtue, I reckon. FMcR
I haven’t always owned up about my voting. I worked for the New Statesman in the late 1970s on the books and arts pages, and for more than a year didn’t let on that in the previous general election I’d voted Liberal. When I finally confessed, my fellow staffers treated my obvious simple-mindedness with surprising indulgence.
But though I’ve voted for six different parties in my life – and some independent candidates in local elections – I don’t regard myself as having changed my mind. Or not much. It’s the parties that have changed, swerving this way and that, dodging for votes; I, the voter, have remained a man of principle. And I suspect many of us think this. We keep the faith; it’s the parties that are faithless, promiscuous, short-termist, shamelessly flexible of principle.
4—“Vast ambitions, risky bets”
Nvidia makes the world’s most coveted microchips. But Ian Leslie is more interested in the psychology of the man behind it. America’s techno-oligarchs tend towards the strange, uncool and self-regarding. Jensen Huang stands out for his sanity. FMcR
Huang is married to a woman he met at university; they have two children. He rarely opines on politics and has not as yet floated any theories about the apocalypse. He doesn’t post memes and he doesn’t cage-fight. Other than wearing a leather jacket at all times, he does not appear to suffer from excessive vanity. Huang is, as Stephen Witt’s biography The Thinking Machine makes clear, an exceptionally driven individual who can be ferociously unpleasant to employees who displease him, but he does not appear to be as emotionally unbalanced as other billionaire CEOs. This might have something to do with where he came from.
5—“A terrible beauty born, and all that”
All countries have foundation myths. Some are the product of more dubious historiography than others. Finn takes us to Ireland, and back 109 years almost to the day, to ask if the 1916 Easter Rising really was the prologue to this 21st century liberal island. GM
It is extraordinarily difficult to judge the historical resonance of events when they are happening: will Donald Trump’s “liberation day” be a turning point, or a macroeconomic blip? Yeats, writing just a few months after the rising – though the poem had its first public airing in this magazine in 1920 – was likely overstating it when he wrote “all changed, changed utterly”. But distance causes problems too: the distorting effect of time allows shoddy analogy to fester (hence the modern liberality with Hitler comparisons) and a cartoonish version of the past to take hold.
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Finn asked last week what 21st-century novels would endure into the 22nd and you answered in force. As would shock no one, the New Statesman audience evinced a serious literary breadth, and all kinds of books were floated.
Some explained that you forego new books, preferring to sit back and let time sift for quality first. Of course that process has to start somewhere, but you showed little faith in our most conspicuous “first guesses” – the major annual novel prizes. 2023’s Booker winner, Prophet Song, saw one mention, but no one spoke up for the most recently triumphant Orbital.
“You won’t like hearing this but Normal People has its place in the canon” was a message I in fact very much liked hearing. Many pub evenings, and, yes, one or two office hours have been lost to the question of Rooney renown. It will be handy, next time I find myself out batting for the defence, to have your opinion behind me.
Safely victorious across your votes was the magnificent Hilary Mantel, selected more than any other for the books of her Wolf Hall trilogy, which chronicles the life of Thomas Cromwell, fixer to Henry VIII. The New Statesman enjoyed a rich affiliation with Mantel, who died in 2022, so there are lots of pieces about her to choose from our archive. I have always loved the profile Sophie Elmhirst wrote in 2012, after visiting the author at her Devon home.
6—“Plot, character… begone”
And further to the Hibernian theme, what better than some Beckett to accompany your morning coffee? Eimear McBride commemorates a reprinting of the 1953 novel The Unnamable with this funny re-reading, and finds it “his most bleak, oblique and anti-participatory” work. That’s a hard contest for Beckett to win against himself. FMcR
If this makes the novel sound like a voyeuristic spectacle of existential suffering though, fear not: the reader suffers too. In classic modernist fashion both voice and reader are abandoned to their respective experiences with little authorial concern for their ensuing discomfort. Certainly, the reader’s omnipresent fear that they too are clawing their way through the text towards nothing never entirely dissipates. However, a clammy awareness does slowly dawn that a point is being made about how inadequate the clubbable comforts of identity are for understanding the deepest nature of self – the self we truly are beneath the dress-up and linguistic razzamatazz of individualism.
7—“The Scouse fault line”
How could a proud “left-wing city” play host to a race riot? Yes, Liverpool voted for Corbyn with a banana republic-sized majority; but in the 1970s it was a Tory town, and social conservatism predominates still. The head of the NS’s Scouse bureau, Jonny Ball, explains the Liverpool paradox. NH
Roughly 80 per cent of votes went to Corbyn’s Labour here in 2017 and 2019, and huge Corbynite rallies were witnessed on St George’s plateau. But that by no means implies a city-wide immunity to the same anxieties that nurture today’s national populisms across Europe: high migration, the palpable deterioration of economic opportunity and the public realm, rising crime, or ultra-liberal culture war over-reach.
8—“A cultural severing”
No Beatles, Stones or Dylan for teenaged Andrew Marr – Shostakovich. Then Pushkin, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and so many more. Taken in all, Russian “is the greatest of European cultures.” We must not take recent animus as a reason to starve our souls. GM
So, cultural boycott is an awful weapon. It hurts nothing so much as the imaginations of those doing the boycotting. Does attending The Cherry Orchard or The Nutcracker leave anyone coming out into the night thinking, “Well, Vlad has a point”? This goes beyond Russia, of course. There are many reasons not to see the Disney remake of Snow White, which looks emetic. But boycotting it because of the casting of Gal Gadot, an Israeli actor who has supported Israel in its war against Hamas, is not one of them. Who would see it and come out thinking differently in any way about Netanyahu or Gaza?
Turning our backs on musicians, actors or film-makers is a one-way degradation.
9—“Condemned to Auschwitz”
80 years on from the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau, Zuzanna Lachendro contributed an astonishing piece of family memoir to our spring special. This is the story of her grandfather, a Polish folk musician and resistance fighter who was murdered by the Nazis in the camps. NH
The chief of the Gestapo in the region… recognised my great-grandfather as he was brought in for questioning. He greeted him by name: “Herr Piksa, ist da” – Mr Piksa, it’s you. Michał and Eugeniusz, then aged 20, were put on trial for conspiring against the Nazis. After two weeks Eugeniusz was released without charge, but Michał was condemned to Auschwitz. Allowed briefly to return home to prepare for the 108-mile journey by cart from Łącko to the camp, he collected his accordion, and a box of ivy leaves.
10—“Mutant strains of neoliberalism”
Quinn Slobodian – honoured this week with a Guggenheim Fellowship – has become the world’s leading historian of neoliberalism. In this extract from his new book, Hayek’s Bastards, he shows how populism’s supposed revolutionaries are fighting within our economic system, not against it. NH
Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere... We cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, far-right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarising ourselves with their often-tangled genealogies. Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings, and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections, and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for new adaptive ideological strains.
George’s Best of the Rest
Max Boot: How trade war turns violent
Marina Hyde: That space trip was vacuous
Helen Shaw: London theatre’s mirrors and memories
Sarah Ditum: Minecraft mayhem saves cinema
Geoff Dyer: How my mother learned to be invisible
Janan Ganesh: What abundance can’t achieve
Claire Messud: Pure Lolita
Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on distant planet
Cavemen used suncream! No bronze age for them!
And with that…
I recently listened to a woman on a podcast say that drinking a glass of wine was like looking at a painted masterpiece. The layers of flavour in the glass are akin to the layers of meaning in a painting she said, stupidly. It was a bad enough analogy to worsen my mood. Painting is richer, and there are objective standards for the canvas (unfashionable though it may be to say). Wine has more variables – age, company, food pairing yada yada.
But we don’t have to pretend wine is as serious as The Last Supper to appreciate its own pleasures and complexities. Which brings me to the New Statesman’s Wine Club. We try some wine, recommend all the best stuff to you, and offer that at a discounted rate, this week via the suppliers Mr Wheeler. We hope you enjoy it, and don’t forget to write in and tell us what you like, or didn’t like. And once again, happy Easter.
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— Finn, Nicholas and George.
I disagree entirely with Finn's assertion that comparing the drinking of a glass of wine with viewing a painting is 'stupid'. There may indeed be many layers in both though I will admit that the vinous ones are ephemeral. Company when tasting is therefore essential though I feel that solitude is to be preferred when viewing a picture. Andrew Grainger