Paul Fussell: Poetic Meter & Poetic Form

      This is a pretty old book – even the revised edition is over 40 years old – but I found myself thinking, “I wish I’d had this when I was teaching.” It’s a slim volume that does what it says on the cover, comprehensively. I like Fussell; his books on the effects of the First World War, and on war itself, are great insights into how people and artists have been affected by this plague on the species. He is American, and at times his scansion reveals this…

This book is quite technical, almost mathematical at times, but always in a useful sort of way; it requires serious concentration as the different kinds of poetic meter are explained and illustrated, in a logical and historical sequence. It’s highly informative, and very much worth the effort, and even after years of teaching poetry and practical criticism in the English school system, I had a greater awareness of the hidden or unnoticed artifice in the construction of poetry.

There are myriad excellent helpful examples and illustrations in the section on metre, with relevant parts inflected for clarity. He offers pithy and cogent judgements throughout, particularly about free verse and its excesses; he illustrates both bad and good, which is illuminating, and there are helpful comparisons at times. I found him particularly good on the sonnet.

Overall, the book offers a good and logical way into the joys and complexities of practical criticism, and despite the necessary analytical approach, nowhere does Fussell lose sight of what poetry actually is, what it does and how it can affect us. His ultimate aim is clear: the ‘trained reader’, for ‘the innocent eye sees nothing’. If you can track down a copy, well worth it.

Quarks, Elephants and Pierogi

     To my shame, as half-Polish, I cannot speak the language; I can just about get by, if I need to. This is a result of having one English and one Polish parent, and being born and raised in England. The Polish language is an extremely complex language grammatically; the pronunciation is the easy bit, trust me. And I’ve attempted a number of times, in different places, to learn Polish properly, but never came across a decent teacher in all my attempts. Excuses, excuses.

There is a marvellous website, Culture.pl, which publishes a wide range of articles explaining and showcasing Poland, its places, people and culture, and this book is an offshoot of their articles on the language. It reminded me of both how much I knew and how much I didn’t; it’s full of fascinating information and details, links and connections with other places and other languages.

But what pleased me most about the book is that it’s a beautiful object per se, in a day when production values of books have generally plummeted with the aim of keeping price low and maximising profit. It’s a solid hardback, printed on good quality paper, with excellent design and illustrations – hardly a surprise, given the country’s reputation in the graphic arts. It’s nicely bound, and the red stitching contrasting with the white paper was a nice detail too. It was a real pleasure to read, and I shall be revisiting it often….

Off to uni

I’m reminded that it’s now half a century since I applied to university. That is scary. And how different it all was way back then. You could make five choices from the 40 or so universities there were in the UK at the time, and support your application with a personal statement, much as students do today; your school wrote a reference and you waited. No change there then.

Universities rejected you if they didn’t want you; if they were interested, they usually interviewed you. Then you received offers or not. And you could accept a firm offer, as it was called, and retain a reserve offer if you didn’t get the grades for the firm offer. I applied to read Latin and French; I also applied to take a year out (it wasn’t called a gap year then; I was too young and also I wanted to earn a bit of money to keep myself once I got to uni). I had an offer from Leeds, and interviews and offers from Manchester and Liverpool. I fell in love with Liverpool as soon as I arrived at Lime Street Station, and they made me a ridiculous offer which I couldn’t not accept.

I remember very little about the actual business of A level exams; revision went smoothly as did the exams; I still haven’t forgotten the 36 sides of foolscap I covered in one day, having 3 hours of English Lit in the morning and another 3 hours of French Lit in the afternoon (or maybe it was the other way round?). Results day was a postcard from the headmaster with the comment ‘That should be good enough for Liverpool!’. It was, but having done well at English I was minded to write and ask if I could change to joint French and English. They said I could.

I managed all this at age 17 with no help from my parents, who had no idea what any of this might mean, and little advice but plenty of encouragement from my school. It felt a million miles away from the help, advice and support students needed and received when I was a sixth form tutor, and later, a head of sixth form.

The university experience was an eye-opener, with the expected helpings of sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. The first big shock was on the first day in the French department: jaws hit the desks when the Prof said casually, ‘of course, all our lectures and tutorials are in French…’ I don’t remember any greats in that department, but do remember from my studies of English Literature the wonderful lectures of Kenneth Muir, who could walk about the auditorium talking about any and all of Shakespeare’s plays as needed and the required quotations would trip effortlessly off his tongue. And the lectures of Hermione Lee, now well-known in academic and literary spheres, then in her first academic lecturing post (I think), introducing me to the hidden joys of Jane Austen.

My father, with the benefit of his meagre four winters’ schooling and the refusal of his father to let him take his education beyond primary level, had always encouraged me in learning, and told me that I should go to university one day: I did, although I was never sure he approved of what it did to me. It was a revelation, the beginning of a lifetime of study and teaching and commitment to literature. I’ve loved it and I’d do it all over again…

Fifty years on…

The older you get, the more anniversaries there are; it recently occurred to me that it’s now 50 years since I sat my A Levels… good grief! And what a simple business it all was way back then. All exams, for a start: no continuous assessment, no coursework or anything like that. Just sit in silence and write and write and write.

English literature (well, obviously); I think we’d studied eight set books and only had to write about six, so there was a choice. Othello and King Lear, Doctor Faustus, Paradise Lost 9 & 10, Chaucer’s Merchant’s Prologue and Tale, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Shadow of a Gunman, Andrew Marvell’s poetry… is that all of them? Don’t recall which I avoided…

French: dictation, I remember, unseen and prose translation, essay, and literature. Le Mariage de Figaro, Le Roi Se Meurt, Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, Confession de Minuit. The killer was, that French Lit and one of the English lit papers were timetabled on the same day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon; eight essays altogether and I remember I filled thirty-six sides of foolscap (predecessor to A4 if you need to know) that day and had a seriously sore hand.

Latin of Classical Civilisation (yes, weird title) with unseen, prose translation, a Roman history paper and set books, though I can no longer remember what they all were, apart from tiresome Livy Book 30.

I’d already passed two A levels in previous years so I knew what to expect, roughly, and I had my revision plan and just powered on through it; I certainly have no recollections of pressure from other or myself, and no stress about any of it, either. Innocent days, perhaps; the end of school, certainly. I recall getting pissed in the village pub, raiding the kitchens where we took and ate all the strawberries, a naked dip in the freezing pool and ceremonial urination on the cricket pitch. Then it was all over.

I had offers from three of the five universities I’d applied to and had fallen in love with Liverpool, so that was my first choice. With two A levels already, and since I’d originally applied to read Latin and French, my offer was one D grade, in French. Results day meant an envelope in the post and a scrawled note from my tutor saying, ‘That should be good enough for Liverpool’ (about my 2 As and a C). Done. Except my A in English Literature was making me review my options, and I knew I’d really rather read English than Latin. So I wrote and asked – I’d already made the rather unusual for those days request for deferred entry – could I change my course based on my results. That would be fine, they said.

Do I make it all sound far too easy? Maybe. I did take naturally to study, because I enjoyed the subjects and they fascinated me; I was also quite an organised student, and I had really good teachers. I put in the time and did the work; at a Catholic boarding school there were few other distractions, which meant I was rather a slow learner in other areas of life.

What I took away from the whole experience is rather more important: a deep love of literature and languages instilled by teachers with a genuine passion for their subjects, and I suspect already at that time the prospect of becoming a teacher and passing on some of that enjoyment to future students was beginning to form itself somewhere deep in my unconscious.

What I realise now is the simplicity of those days, without pressure or expectation, which students of today cannot know or enjoy; no real thoughts about what would come after university; the comfort of knowing that with my place would come a grant to cover my living expenses, and the course costs I didn’t even have to think about, because there were no tuition fees. I have often wished that such freedom was on offer nowadays, because I have always been a great believer in learning for learning’s sake, and studying what you enjoy, rather than because it will bring you a high salary. I’m aware that university students were an elite then, a very small percentage of the population rather than today’s 50%. The greater democratisation and accessibility of higher education is surely a good thing, but I’m also aware that it’s primarily a great money-making opportunity for so many different people, with the needs and rights of the actual students quite a way down the list of priorities.

I’ll finish with a line from Virgil. Forsan et olim haec meminisse juvabit…

First World War poetry: more for students

 

If you’re going to write intelligently about poetry and the First World War, you need to know and understand something about that war, to be able to judge how it affected the many writers who fought and were killed during those four and a half appalling years. You don’t need to read a history book, but you do need an outline that you understand of what led up to the war, the major battles, the aftermath, and the effects on those who survived. This link takes you to a short-ish account I wrote as an outline for my students. I’m not a historian; it doesn’t set out to be impartial, but to make you think, and if you are seriously interested, then you can search for more to read. I’ve also prepared a list of all sorts of reference material and other texts you might at least like to consider looking up.

Maybe you, or someone in your family, has visited some of the sites of battles in Flanders or France, perhaps in search of a relative who was killed. Ask them about their impressions of those places.

If you like listening to stuff, then this website – librivox – has a number of different accounts by people who took part in the war in many different ways, read by volunteers as audiobooks into the public domain (ie they’re free). Do a search.

Do some thinking about form. Why were there so many poets, or so much poetry written during that war? Far more, and it seems, far better than came out of the Second World War. Easier to scribble a few lines in a dugout or a trench, into a notebook? You can hardly write a novel or a play in an underground bunker. What can you do with in a poem, that you cannot do so easily in a novel or in a play? Equally, consider what you can do well in a play, or in a novel? If you’re sitting down to write something longer, having survived where your mates haven’t, then you have the time to look back, to think about and reflect on what you went through… What are the advantages of each of these literary forms? If you’re thinking at this level, and able to explain some of your ideas, then you are heading into the highest grade territory, not that that’s the only reason for doing it…

Take your thoughts to another level, and realise that there were many countries involved in what was a world war, and not only the British wrote about it: find out something about what the French, or the Germans wrote from their perspective. Think about the fact that although hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were killed, Britain wasn’t overrun and occupied by the Germans, whereas all of Belgium and large parts of France were. What difference might that have made?

Finally for this piece, do not be afraid of your own opinions and reactions: be ready to express them, as clearly as you can. As long as you can support your comments with evidence from the text you’re writing about, what you have to say is valid and worthy of credit. You can like something, or not like it, it’s doesn’t matter as long as you can explain and show why you feel like that.

Maryanne Wolf: Proust and the Squid

     Something prompted me to return to this fascinating book on what happens to the brain when we learn to read, or indeed, if for various reasons we have difficulties with the process, such as dyslexia. It probably never occurs to us that, although we are born with brains wired for us eventually to develop speech, this is not true of reading or writing, processes that every human needs to learn from scratch. The open architecture of the brain allowed the possibility of humans developing writing and reading…

And then we must take into account the transformative power of these last two achievements on humans and their societies, compared with those which are only oral.

Wolf explains pretty clearly – to this lay and unscientific reader – the astonishing complexity of the processes which take place in the human brain, first in the process of learning to read, and then, when we are readers, in the processing of the texts we read.

Initially, humans developed representative and repeatable signs which could be learned, and eventually derived more sophisticated alphabets where the complete array of sounds could be mapped onto signs or letters. It was fascinating to discover that the human brain functions differently if it has to process ideograms in languages like Chines or letters in languages like ours. Equally, the regularity of an alphabet in the way it maps sounds to writing can lead to earlier fluency in reading: English orthography does not help us here!

There are more interesting historical and philosophical questions for us to reflect on, too: did the alphabet, leading to reading and writing, liberate humans from the hard work involved in sustaining an oral tradition (remembering everything and ensuring it was all passed down accurately through the generations), and thereby allow more complex thought? It may be that writing changed the way we think…

Apparently Socrates was very wary of reading and the written word, feeling that it was dead (thoughts and ideas frozen by being committed to paper), inflexible (once written down it is canonised, in a way) and that it destroys memory (look, for instance, at how little we expect school students to memorise texts such as poems nowadays). And, ironically, Socrates’ thoughts only survive for us now over two millennia later because Plato wrote them down…

Wolf is also very interesting on problems with reading – those often grouped together conveniently under the general heading ‘dyslexia’ – again seeking to explain what happens differently, often much more slowly, in the brains of those faced with such difficulties. It becomes very technical, although to realise that there are differences in how dyslexia affects people according to their language I found very interesting, and I also realised how helpful some of this material would have been early on in my career as a teacher.

There are implications in all of this for our future, which Wolf does not neglect: what changes may be being wrought in the human brain at this very moment with the move from printed to digital text, and the different ways that text can now be used and consumed? She contrasts immediacy with critical effort, and I think that this is an important area for further reflection and consideration; there is a certain kind of ease in the use of digital text which makes me ‘uneasy’. I can recall being unnerved when students used to say to me – of an older generation used to remembering and recalling things at will – “Oh, I don’t need to learn/ know that, because I can look it up…” Where might that lead our species, eventually?

Ten of the strangest books in my library – part two

The Index of Possibilities

I haven’t looked at this for years: it’s a relic from my hippy days, a British version of the famous Whole Earth Catalog, an encyclopaedia for those alternative times, with pointers and links to all sorts of esoteric stuff, as well as the very early green movements, different spiritualities and radical therapy. It was a bible and an eye-opener for me back in my younger days.

Road Atlas of the Soviet Union 

Back in the days of the Soviet Union and its other socialist allies, consumer goods were in very short supply; this caused problems if you wanted a present for someone. You might have a really good idea of what you’d like to give, and no chance of buying it. Which is how I ended up with a road atlas of the Soviet Union as a present from a relative at some point in the 1970s. The idea that I’d ever get to drive on any of the roads in that country was a bit of a joke for starters. Then you think of the size of the country and regard the slimness of this volume and you get a better picture of the problem. Vast tracts of the country do not appear at all. Secrecy? No, just no roads at all. In some regions you can see a single road that proceeds for hundreds of miles, before stopping, ending: you make that journey all the way to the back of beyond, before realising that you then have to turn around and return the exact same way… Truly, this is a surreal book in so many ways.

I love it; it’s a very well-worn and well-used companion to travel books about Russia, and I supplemented it with a larger more general and larger scale Soviet atlas a decade or so ago

Sunday Compline

This is the slimmest volume in my library. I’ve written about my love of this religious office which brings the day to a close here. And, although I have a great nostalgia for the vanished Latin services and rituals of my childhood days – not out of any sense of belief, but for the spiritual feelings they still awaken for me – this is in English. Way back in the mid-1960s, shortly after services were done into the vernacular, a version of compline appeared, a decent translation using the same music, and there was a phase in the Catholic life of England when this service was much performed in churches. Only a couple of years ago I tracked down this copy at a secondhand bookshop in Edinburgh, and was happy to pay ninety times the original cover price to own it. It’s a nicely produced and illustrated booklet, the same as the one we used to use all those years ago.

Baedeker’s Northern Germany

In the days when travel was a serious business and involved careful planning, Baedeker’s guidebooks were a must. This one is pre-First World War, and I originally bought it for its marvellous maps, but it’s also a mine of useful information about places that were formerly part of Poland and would become again after the war, as well as places that eventually became part of People’s Poland after 1945. The maps of Danzig (as was) I found very useful when reading Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, following Oscar’s adventures and peregrinations around his home city. There was also a Baedeker’s Russia from 1914, which was never widely distributed or sold because war broke out; it’s now one of the rarest travel guides there is, fetching hundreds of pounds and more. This, and the bizarre Nazi vanity project that was Baedeker’s Generalgouvernement (a tourist guide to the rump state created from the remains of Poland as a dumping-ground for unwanted people and site of extermination camps), are, fortunately, available free on the marvellous Internet Archive website.

Vassily Peskov: Eremites Dans Le Taiga

I was astonished when I originally came across a reference to this story, I think via a link to the Smithsonian website: a small family of Old Believers, a Russian sect, had lived completely apart from the entire world, in the depths of Siberia, for over forty years, leading a hand-to-mouth existence, when Soviet surveyors noticed signs of life in a remote area thought to be uninhabited. The story of the family’s existence and survival is almost beyond belief, and yes, I know that Russia is a truly enormous country, but to have vanished for so long in the twentieth century! The account was written by one of those who re-discovered and helped the family, and yes, I found it in French first…

Bonus: English as She is Spoken (A Jest in Sober Earnest)

Many years ago there was a concert interval talk on Radio 3 featuring extracts from this truly crazy book, which is a phrasebook and guide to conversation in English for Portuguese students, written at some point towards the end of the 19^th century. The only problem is that the Portuguese author didn’t actually speak English, but somehow complied the book using a French phrasebook and a dictionary: a very high percentage of the English phrases therefore verge on complete drivel, and the book is a hoot. I found a reprint a long while ago and look through it for a laugh every now and then; if you’re interested it’s downloadable from the Internet Archive.

On grammar

I’ve written about grammar, and its teaching, before, and if you’re interested, you will be able to find those earlier posts. But I’ve returned to thinking about it as a result of re-reading the Latin book I posted about yesterday, and my rediscovery of Winnie Ille Pu, which is a lot harder than de roma antiqua… more colloqualisms and invented words needed there!

My experience of English grammar has been fairly mixed: I was at school in the progressive late 1960s and early 70s, when grammar was rather out of fashion, and I never really acquired a structured and thorough knowledge and understanding of it; I did some study and serious preparation when I needed to teach it myself, but was aware that there were colleagues whose knowledge was far more comprehensive, and to whom I sometimes needed to refer.

My knowledge of grammar came from my learning of other languages, which I was then able to apply to English. Back in the day you could not get to Latin O Level without the famed Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer (which I still have); everything was logically explained and copiously illustrated, usually from actual classical Latin authors. Because there is much more inflection in Latin than in English, there were many more rules which one could learn and apply quite logically, to end up with correct sentences in prose composition exercises. This application of rules clarified how my own native language worked, and how the correct use of grammar aided clarity and accuracy…

The same was true of other languages: French grammar was drilled into us by a teacher who, unlike many other MfL teachers at the time, put a clear emphasis on speaking the language, and used the same textbooks that French school pupils used, so we were totally immersed in the language. The rules were practised and absorbed. German was a very different kettle of fish: I learned it conversationally, and grammar rarely got a look-in, with the result today that, although I can speak the language and make myself understood reasonably well, my grammar is pretty poor, really: the correct cases don’t drop into place as I speak, my verb tenses are all over the place, and as for prepositions governing cases, well… My rather more rudimentary Polish suffers from the same issues, sadly. But Spanish, which is my newest project (still in progress) is well-rooted in grammar and I am really fortunate to be in a small class and taught by a traditional teacher who also understands and believes in the necessity for grammatical rigour.

It’s also the case that, in talking with all sorts of friends and acquaintances in various conversation groups that I’ve been part of, invariably they say that their knowledge of grammar has come from their study of MfL and not from any English lessons they had at school. So what is the problem?

I think that grammar went out of the window in English schools (along with quite a few other things) because it came to be perceived as dull and boring, at a time when school was meant to be exciting (!); also there was a fashion for believing that certain things would be learned ‘as you go along’ almost by osmosis as it were, without any conscious effort being required. There’s a baby and bathwater situation there, I feel; learning needn’t be dull, but sometimes there are things which cannot be rendered un-tedious and which have to be mastered; not all of life is going to be wild whoopee and excitement, and that in itself is a lesson worth meeting when one is younger…

The effect of the disappearance of grammar teaching then had its effect on MfL, which became rather less structured and rather more conversational (that not a bad thing in itself, but it lacked the necessary underpinnings) so that we eventually ended up with students memorising lists of sentences that they did not necessarily fully understand, in order to pass oral examinations in French or German. This then made the leap to advanced study of a language of such a magnitude that many students regarded it as far too difficult, with the consequent disastrous effect on the study of modern languages in our schools and universities…

And the disappearance of Latin from our schools, to which I referred yesterday, has its place in all this, too. Such structure and discipline could underpin the study of MfL as well as English, except that it no longer does. Too difficult… unnecessary…irrelevant… when one starts to apply such a purely utilitarian logic to learning and education, all sorts of things fly apart. But that is a much wider argument, so it’s probably a good place to pause.

de roma antiqua

I found this slim volume a few days ago when I was having my annual clearout; I bought it twenty years ago, and it’s still marvellous, a book all about ancient Rome written entirely in Latin. Usborne is/was a publisher of books for children and this one is illustrated with coloured drawings in the same style. But I can’t figure who the target audience would be, as you need a decent level of Latin, particularly vocabulary, to access it. And although some state schools in this country – including the one I used to teach at – offered Latin two decades ago, you’d never have reached the level you’d need to read it. So maybe it was one for the teachers?

All aspects of Roman history, society, civil life, government, warfare, daily life are briefly and comprehensively covered – it’s a gem of a book, really. It appealed to me in the same way as my copy of Winnie the Pooh in Latin – which I really must find again – does, in that I can appreciate someone taking the trouble to write and produce such a book for such a tiny potential audience. I’ve had the argument about the irrelevance of teaching Latin more times than I care to remember, and I will still defend it as a school subject as valid as any other, and an important key to our retaining real connections with part of our history, language and cultural background.

All things considered, in many ways the Romans were a pretty cruel civilisation, but I never cease to be astonished by how much they achieved and how long their empire lasted: far longer than any of our more modern ones to date. O tempora, o mores…

On England

I like England.

I may have given the impression, particularly in some of my more political posts, of finding my home country reactionary, hidebound and stuck in the 18^th century, and if I have, good because it is all of those things, and yet I like the place. And no, I’m not about to go all patriotic and John of Gaunt-y on you.

This country welcomed my father when it needed allies against Nazism during the Second World War; most grudgingly after the war was over it allowed him and his mates to stay: they didn’t have to return to the gulag. So without England, there would be no me.

As a generous and socially-minded place it nurtured me, via the NHS, through my childhood, with orange juice, rose-hip syrup and cod-liver oil, and extracted my tonsils. It ensured I had a good, free education, including as many years as I could possibly have at university, funded by student grants and without fees. When I was unemployed, it paid me benefits. I had a very satisfying career as a teacher and I have a pension which currently allows me to relax and do some of the things I enjoy most. And the UK joined the Common Market, which became the EEC and then the EU, and for my entire adult life I have enjoyed its increasing benefits, particularly to travel simply and freely about the union; travel has always been one of my favourite pastimes.

I’ve sampled all sorts of wonderful food and drink from all over the world, and yet nowhere else has TEA like we do here, proper tea made with leaves in a teapot. Lots of countries make very good beers, many of which I like a great deal, but nobody else makes anything approaching bitter. And – disloyal to my Polish roots, just as my father was, I have to say that I’ll take a dram from that close neighbour of ours in preference to a glass of vodka any day. I could never be a vegan because I cannot imagine a life without cheese, and our friends just across the channel make some stunning fromages, but again, given only one choice, I can’t decide whether it would have to be Stilton, or tasty Lancashire. And much as I love cakes of all lands, Yorkshire curd tart is pretty unbeatable.

You’ll notice I started with food…people who know me won’t have been surprised.

But my life’s work was all about our language, and that’s a thing I can wax lyrical about. I can speak pretty fluent French, get by in German, just about in Polish if pushed, and I’m learning Spanish at the moment. And – witness this blog – I read widely in the literature of many nations and languages, if mainly in translation. But no language comes anywhere near English, for size of vocabulary, powers of expression, complexity of poetry. We have Shakespeare. I could stop there; I’m not dismissing the greats of other languages and nations, but there is something special and enormous in the sheer variety, depth and power of our national writer. And we have Milton, and Jane Austen… and quite a few others who we could argue over.

We have some history, a lot of which we should be ashamed of: colonialism and empire and slavery. There’s the colossal act of cultural vandalism that was Henry VIII’s Reformation, too. But there’s our inventiveness – the Industrial Revolution (perhaps a double-edged sword, that one) – our explorations and discoveries: yes, white men discovering what was already there, perhaps, but nevertheless, that urge to get off our island and see what was out there. We have been on the ‘right’ side in some wars, although it would have been better not to be fighting in the first place. And somewhere there’s a tradition of tolerance that developed over a long period of time, that allowed us to accept and sometimes assimilate different peoples and ideas, giving them the freedom to be themselves while becoming part of England too. Over the years, my father came to appreciate that.

We are proud of our democratic traditions – Parliaments, Magna Carta, habeas corpus, extension of suffrage – though much of the time this wasn’t about empowering ordinary folk, but letting the less rich get their snouts in the trough occasionally. But for me, our problems now stem from our being stuck in the past, trying to live off our past reputation and greatness, unaware that we are actually a small, fairly remote and pretty crowded island, home to three nations not just one, and that our traditions and pageantry and royalty and aristocracy may look charming to tourists, but at the same time they are seriously daft as far as the twenty-first century is concerned. Poland had an elected monarchy once; it did her no good at all and when she finally regained independence in 1918, one of the first acts of the new commonwealth was to abolish the nobility – just like that. No need of guillotines or firing squads in cellars. End of.

I won’t live to see it, but what if England were able to conceive of a way of facing the century as a small nation that was a member of a much larger union or alliance, with a voting system which allowed a real voice to all its citizens (not subjects!), and putting the energies of its best minds to working in concert with the other neighbouring nations to address the real problems that face the planet? The successes and achievements of our past suggest we could make a real difference…