Author Archive for William Skidelsky

Why Federer should have won

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on July 8, 2008
in Sport
. 10 Comments

There can be no doubt about it: sport does not get any better.
Sunday’s battle was the greatest Wimbledon final of all time, the
perfect match in every respect except one: the wrong man won. My
admittedly biased view (I’m a Federer fan) is that poetic justice, and
the narrative arc of the match, would have been better served by
Federer, and not Nadal, triumphing in the dying light. Here are five
reasons why:

1) Comebacks make for the best sporting stories, and a victory for
Federer would have been the most remarkable of comebacks, eclipsing
Murray’s against Gasquet in the fourth round.

2)  The greatest sporting performances are those in which a player
reveals, in the course of a match, qualities that no one suspected
them of possessing. Nadal didn’t reveal anything new during Sunday’s
final; we knew before it started that he was a player of machine-like
strength and consistency, able to maintain a certain level of
performance whatever the situation. But few people could have
suspected that Federer was capable of such bloody-mindedness, such
courageous determination to stay in a match that he should have lost
in three sets. Steeliness isn’t a quality one associates with Federer,
largely because he has never had much need for it; his talents mean
that he has rarely had to fight.

3) Federer is, though only 26, like the king whose grip on power is
waning. He clearly does not feel ready to hand over power, and there
is something both heroic and tragic about the spectacle of him
clinging so desperately on. It matters, of course, that Federer is
such a likeable king; few people felt much sadness, for example, when
Sampras was toppled. It would have been a glorious act of defiance had
Federer managed to resist Nadal’s onslaught.

4) Surely a player as great as Federer deserved to beat Borg’s record.
In many ways, he has been unlucky that his career has overlapped with
Nadal’s - the best ever clay court player. Had it not done so, he
would surely have won at least two grand slams by now, equalling Rod
Laver’s record. So it seems almost cruel that Federer should have been
denied the chance to break Borg’s record as well.

5) Federer’s backhand passing shot to save the second match point in the
fourth set tie-break was so brilliant, in the circumstances (and
remember his backhand hadn’t been working very well up to that point
in the match), that it alone deserved to win him the title.

The meaning of a maximum

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on April 28, 2008
in Sport
. 1 Comment

Ronnie O’Sullivan scored a maximum this afternoon in the final frame of his 13-7 victory over Mark Williams in the second round of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield. You can watch it here. O’Sullivan’s last 147 was also in the final frame of a match, but in much more pressured circumstances, as it came in the deciding frame of his 9-8 victory over Mark Selby in the semi-finals of the UK Championship in December.

A maximum (that is, potting 15 all reds and blacks and clearing the colours in a single visit) is an interesting phenomenon, and I’m not sure it has an equivalent in any other sport. It is widely regarded as the supreme test of skill in snooker, but, at the same time, it has almost no bearing on whether a player wins a match. In the strict terms of the game, it is pointless; one gets no additional advantage from scoring a maximum over and above winning the frame (which one does long before one finishes potting the reds), and in fact a lot of frames must have been sacrificed over the years as a result of players attempting harder shots in order to keep their chances of a maximum alive. Of course, there is a financial incentive—Ronnie will get £157,000 as a result of today’s effort—but, aside from that, the only reason for going for a maximum is glory.

Of course, other sports have what might be considered similar supreme tests of skill—hitting a hole in one in golf, scoring a goal from inside your own half in football, serving a game of aces in tennis, hitting six sixes in a row in cricket. But all these things follow on naturally from simply trying to play one’s best (with the possible exception of six sixes: here a batsman might opt for the glory of the achievement despite it increasing his chances of getting out). But with a maximum a player makes a conscious decision: I am going to play in a way which marginally decreases my chances of winning this frame (and thus the match), in order to better demonstrate my audacious skill. Why is why, of course, Ronnie’s scoring a 147 in the deciding frame of his semi-final against Mark Selby was such a staggering achievement.

Gelato comes to Covent Garden

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on April 3, 2008
in Food and drink
. 1 Comment

Always around this time of year, my mind turns to ice cream. I like eating the stuff when I’m out and about; I’m not the kind of ice cream eater who sits at home in front of the TV nursing a tub on his lap (although I have been known to do that too). Until recently, however, there has always been a rather large cloud on the horizon of my spring-time ice cream delight: the knowledge that, in order to get a proper Italian gelato—which must surely be acknowledged to be the supreme type of ice cream—I would have to wait until my next trip to Italy, which might not come around for…I don’t know, years!

However, I’m pleased to say that such gloomy reflections no longer trouble me, because these days London’s Covent Garden boasts an ice cream parlour serving Italian gelato that is the equal of what you might find in the best parlours of Florence or Venice (well, perhaps not quite that good, but really not far off). Scoop, on Shorts Garden, is an excellent addition to the capital’s food scene, and must be visited and supported by as many ice cream enthusiasts as possible, as often as possible. (Handily, it’s not far away from the Prospect office.) Gelato, incidentally, is a very different thing from the ice cream you usually find in this country. It is usually made with milk rather than cream, and doesn’t tend to be stabilized with egg (so it’s lighter and healthier). It needs to be stored in a special gelato freezer that keeps it at a higher temperature than a conventional freezer—which means that it is semi-soft when it is served, and melts quicker.

By the way, if you are in Florence any time soon, I suggest a visit to Vivoli’s, near Santa Croce, for what may well be the ultimate ultimate ice cream.

Jeremy Paxman checks into the brain gym

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on April 3, 2008
in In the news and Media
. 3 Comments

There was a hilarious interview on Newsnight last night between Jeremy Paxman and an Amercian called Paul Dennison, who is the creator of “Brain Gym.” Brain gym, for those of you not in the know, is an exercise technique increasingly used in schools all over the world (including several thousand in the UK, apparently) as a means to sharpen children’s mental powers. Seemingly derived from acupuncture, the technique works on the assumption that there is a series of reflex points, or “brain buttons,” positioned all over the body, and that stimulating these improves blood flow to the brain, thereby increasing concentration, mental alertness and so on. Dennison’s grilling by Paxman was preceded by interviews with various scientists, who dismissed the theory as nonsense.

A wide-eyed mumbo-jumbo spouting Californian would-be guru like Dennison was always going to prove easy fodder for the likes of Paxman; and so it proved. “Can you just explain what a brain button is, please?” Paxman began, feigning interest, before having fun with Dennison’s wackier claims—among them, the belief that the human body is “electrical” and that “processed foods do not contain water.” (By way of justifying the second of these propositions, Dennison expressed his view that “pure water is more active and immediately available to the brain,” which to my mind made him sound unerringly like the demented General Ripper in Dr Strangelove, with his talk of “pure bodily essences” and the threat of “fluoridation”).

The inverview is well worth watching—someone should put it on YouTube—but at the moment the only way to see it is by going to the Newsnight site, clicking on “Watch Last Night’s Programme,” and then scrolling through the programme until you get to it (it starts on just over 30 minutes).

Extra Note: Actually, I tell a lie….as as the enigmatic commenter “K” has pointed out, you can actually see just that bit by clicking on the relevant link here.

Extra Note mark 2: Actually, it’s not me, but “K,” who is telling the lie; that link only connects to the report that preceded the interview. I think you do have to scroll through the actual programme to see the interview.

Ross Raisin’s novel

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on March 28, 2008
in Arts and culture and Books
. 0 Comments

In the September issue of Prospect, we published a short story called “Infested” by Ross Raisin, a young writer from Yorkshire whose first novel (still to be published then) had already got the literary world buzzing with excitement. “Infested,” a macabre tale of revenge set in a pest control deparment, certainly showed talent. Cleverly plotted and written in a deceptively unshowy style, it announced the arrival of someone with a singular way of looking at things, and with the ability (by no means to be taken for granted among fiction writers) to use his imagination.   Ross’s novel, God’s Own Country, has now been published by Viking, and, having just finished it, I can confirm that it justifies the hype. It really is a good book. Its narrator is a young farmer named Marsdyke who lives and works with his parents on the Yorkshire Moors, having been expelled from school. Marsdyke is an engaging, often likeable character, with a dour wit and a rich imagination, but he is also not quite all there. When a middle class family from London move into one of the neighbouring houses, he develops a crush on their teenage daughter, with ultimately calamitous consequences.   The book, which has been widely compared to Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (but also reminded me in places of Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange), cleverly combines seemingly opposed qualities: it is creepy but also very funny; it is linguistically ambitious yet very accessible. What knits it together is the ingenious, highly original narrative voice that Raisin contrives for Marsdyke. Rarely can a novelist have made such effective use of local dialect. Words such as “glegging,” “gradely,” “viewsome” and “usselves” (some of which I suspect Raisin simply made up) recur throughout the narrative, as well as all manner of grammatical contortions. The result is that a unique linguistic world is created, with its own rules and conventions, and this acts as a corollary for Marsdyke’s basically deranged, but also oddly coherent, moral universe. 

Writing the nation

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on March 26, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and Inside Prospect
. 4 Comments

The “state of the nation” novel, it seems, is back in fashion. This spring sees a rush of novels taking in Britain’s recent past, from the 1970s to the Blair years. One of them—The Northern Clemency—is by Philip Hensher, who in this month’s magazine writes about the origins of the genre, and surveys the novels that are competing alongside his own in this suddenly rather crowded corner of the market. Hensher is less than impressed with the competition. Surveying new works by Hanif Kureishi, Louis de Berniers, Richard Kelly and Helen Walsh, among others, he writes: “Where these books fail, I think, is in their point of departure. Too often I felt that the author had started not from memory and the painstaking reconstruction of long-forgotten sensations…The started, instead, from journalistic accounts of a period, from their own nostalgia-laden record collection and from a vague recollection of the drugs people used to talk about.” He also has some entertaining things to say about Kureishi’s shaky grasp of English grammar. If you have any thoughts on Hensher’s essay, or on the “state of the nation” genre more generally, do leave comments below.  

A Cairo conversion

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on March 26, 2008
in Books, Inside Prospect, Middle east and Religion
. 2 Comments

In 2005, Hugh Miles moved to Cairo to work as a freelance journalist, and fell in love with a doctor. They decided to get married. There was just one problem: the Koran forbids marriage between Muslim women and non-Muslim men (Muslim men, on the other hand, can marry outside the faith, so long as the woman in question is either Christian or Jewish). Miles, therefore, decided to convert to Islam, and in this month’s Prospect he writes an entertaining account of the process. Readers may be surprised by how simple becoming a Muslim is, at least at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo (elsewhere it is more arduous). Little evidence of any religious commitment is required, and the whole thing takes less than two hours. The piece is based on the final chapter of Miles’s new book, Playing Cards in Cairo, an account of his year in Egypt (published by Abacus).  

Supermarket wars

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on February 19, 2008
in Food and drink and Media
. 3 Comments

There was an amusing example of bien pensant thinking at its most removed from reality in the Sunday Times last weekend in India Knight’s column attacking supermarkets (which are in the news at the moment because of the Competition Commission’s recent call for curbs to be placed on them). Knight had little time for the argument that, for the majority, supermarkets are a) convenient and b) more affordable than the alternatives. “I find the poverty-grotesquely bad diet thing completely wrong-headed,” she wrote. “Rubbish highly processed food is not cheap, whereas you can make enough rice and dhal for six people for about £1.50.” Indeed, India, I’m sure you can. Helpfully, Knight opposed the argument that shopping locally is inconvenient for “lower socioeconomic groups” by citing the past—”I don’t expect that their grandparents bulk-bought Sunny D.” Indeed, India, I’m sure they didn’t. (And your point, exactly…?)

A more sensible view was provided, perhaps unexpectedly, in the Observer by Jay Rayner (the paper’s restaurant critic), who defended supermarkets on the grounds that they are “bloody convenient.” He is right: I am a keen cook, I instinctively prefer small shops, and I don’t have a family to shop for, but even so, at least some of the time I find it more convenient to go to the (excellent) Waitrose down the road, or the even closer Tesco Metro, than to traipse around the (widely spaced and not all terribly good) small shops that my area of north London boasts. And I bet India Knight, despite her protestations, does at least some of her shopping at supermarkets too.

There is an annoying tendency among the middle-classes to complain about the fact that Britain is not, in essence, more like small town France or Italy. It isn’t—and nor is it ever going to be. Get over it. But let’s be cheerful about the fact that, in food terms, things are vastly better than they were ten or twenty years ago—and yes, in part, supermarkets are partly responsible for this.

The four lives of John Gray

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on February 8, 2008
in Books, Inside Prospect, Media and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I was somewhat surprised, perusing today’s Independent, to be confronted, in the “5-Minute Interview” slot, with a picture of the philosopher John Gray, under the headline “Not many people know that I have a wellness centre…” Begads, I thought, I certainly didn’t know that. Somehow, the idea of a wellness centre doesn’t square with my image of Gray, who is known for his apocalyptic cast of mind and his suspicion of all schemes for human advancement. Upon looking more closely, I was reassured to see that the subject of the interview was not, in fact, John Gray the philosopher, but John Gray the author of the bestselling self-help book, Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The paper had simply made a mistake, and plucked the wrong John Gray from its photo archive.

This, in fact, is a surprisingly easy mistake to make. On page 11 of the current Prospect, there’s a picture of the American writer Robert Coover, wrongly identified in the story next to which it appears as Raymond Carver. On this occasion, the fault wasn’t entirely ours: the picture agency we purchased the picture from had muddled the two men. When it comes to John Gray, the potential for confusion is all the greater because of there being so many famous (or semi-famous) men of this name. In addition to the philosopher and the self-help author, there’s also John Gray the multi-millionaire founder of the Spearmint Rhino chain of strip clubs (and husband of a former porn star), and John Gray the American Christian comedian. Which leads me to think that they should all agree to do each others’ jobs for a week, and film the result: the resulting reality TV series would surely be a huge popular hit (title, anyone?). In the absence of that happening, look out for a review by John Gray of J G Ballard’s new book in the next issue of Prospect. I’m not going to reveal which of the four John Grays we’ve commissioned, but you can probably guess.

Reviewing the reviews

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on January 30, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and Inside Prospect
. 13 Comments

In the new issue of Prospect, I’ve written an essay on the state of book reviewing in Britain. As I point out at the start of the piece, several articles on this topic have appeared in the US in recent months. Here, for example, is James Wolcott’s fantastic essay-review in the New Republic of Gail Pool’s book Faint Praise. And here is Steve Wasserman’s long essay in the Columbia Journalism Review.

The problem is much more extreme in the US, where most newspapers have drastically reduced their books coverage in recent years. A similar contraction hasn’t happened in Britain—but my fear is that it may well do soon. In the face of new threats such as blogging and an increasingly commercialised publishing scene, book reviewing has declined in authority and prestige, and it will have to fight if it is to survive in its current form.

Many people’s reaction, of course, will be: who cares? What does it matter if book reviews cease to exist? They’re cliquey and increasingly irrelevant anyway. My response would be: yes, it does matter. A healthy literary culture is one where books can be publicly discussed in a serious and informed way. I don’t think the blogosphere comes close to providing such a space at present, largely because it is completely unregulated, but also because blogs are so bitty. What you get is little snippets of opinion and gossip—the virtual equivalent of a conversation in a pub. That is a valuable thing, of course. But sustained critical evaluation of books is different—and to my mind it is even more valuable. I’m not saying that good criticism can’t happen on the internet. Of course it can. But it doesn’t happen very much at the moment. And that is why the destruction of the culture of book reviewing would be a bad thing.