Listen to Melissa Benn, one of several contributors to Mark Lawson’s recent Radio Four programme on the representation of politics in fiction and the arts.…
Monthly Archives: November 2009
2001: how it really turned out
I have just been to see 2001: A Space Odyssey with my family: part of a Darwin season – yes, really – at our new local cinema. The film itself provoked a storm of discussion within our little group with opinion divided between those who pronounced it ‘complete and utter tosh’ and those who argued that it was ‘ glorious, original film making, working to a different timescale.’ ( The film is very slow by modern standards.) Let’s just say, I was in a minority of one in enjoying its explosion of colour and concepts, its imaginative recreation of The Dawn of Man as well as Jupiter, Infinity and beyond. Everyone else was bored rigid.
But to return to the central question of time. I about ten years old when I first saw the film and like so many, saw it as a serious attempt to predict the future in terms of space travel, computer technology, furnishings and clothing and so on. It didn’t do badly, as it happens, with the imaginative projection of a a Skype like arrangement for telephone communication and some strange free standing raspberry furniture I am sure I have seen in several modern office blocks recently.
But of course the once distant future becomes the recent past. 2001 is now nearly a decade ago, a year that created its own story, its own extraordinary history. To watch now this projection of a far flung future is to feel the forceful limitation of prediction. As we, the viewer, free wheel through space to the strains of Wagner and Strauss ( amazing music, I thought) all I could think of was the Twin Towers burning and the bodies falling and the resilience and grief of New York.
Who could have guessed all that or understood what it meant? Who also could have guessed that interest in space travel would wane as the new century unfolded? That, in fact, there would be no regular package tours to the moon, in fact few missions to the moon at all, let alone a mission to Jupiter…………………
Latest news and views…………….
Listen to an interview with Melissa Benn on the website of poet and writer James Nash……………….and later this month, on November 21st at 8pm, Melissa is one of a number of contributors to a special programme on Radio Four, written and presented by Mark Lawson, on the representation of politics in fiction and the arts. The Radio Times are doing a special feature on the programme. Check out the Radio Four website for more details nearer the time.…
How forgiveness really works
Read here the extraordinary story of Mary Foley, a forty six year old mother of three whose fifteen year old daughter Charlotte was stabbed at a party in 2005 and who went on to forgive her daughter’s killer.
Mary came to speak to a year 11 group at QPCS, our local secondary school yesterday. A group of parents at QPCS bring in visiting speakers and writers on a regular basis, so that students can listen to the experience of adults from a wide range of backgrounds, life experience and work.
For obvious reasons, Mary’s story was of particular interest. You could have heard a pin drop in that class, as she spoke for half an hour or more, and then took questions for another half an hour.
Perhaps the most moving moment was when, in among the searching questions, one of the students said simply and directly to Mary, ” I think we all want to say, we are very sorry for your loss.”…
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War
PETER MANDLER, 2020
Oxford: Oxford University Press
361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145
Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.
In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.
On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’
Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.
More information here.
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