On styling life peers

I know that this is a matter of limited interest, but as long as the House of Lords is around, I'd like to see its members styled properly. So, Seumas Milne in The Guardian, 'Lord Mandelson', not 'Lord Mandelson of Foy'. Peter Mandelson's peerage was gazetted as 'Baron Mandelson, of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham'. That first comma tells you what the everyday substantive part of the title is.

And yes, there are too many lords for a media staffed by those bred up in egalitarian times to cope, hence the confusion over when to use a territorial designation. 'The Rt Hon Peter Mandelson, LP' [Life Peer] or (hence it be inferred that such a peer revolves at 33.3 per minute on a turntable) 'The Rt Hon Peter Mandelson, MHL' [Member of the House of Lords] would be welcome options.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - October 2009 update

It was not my intention in establishing this blog simply to point to my publications elsewhere, but this is the second of two posts doing just that. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography yesterday published its fifteenth online update since the new dictionary first appeared in September 2004. As usual, a comprehensive introduction to the new material has been provided by the dictionary's editorial team at Oxford University Press. Among the new entries, and curently on the 'public shelves' allowing non-subscribers to read them, is my entry on William and Blanche Gibbs, nineteenth-century philanthropists and master and mistress of the Victorian Gothic house of Tyntesfield in Somerset, their lifestyle funded by an export monopoly for Peruvian guano.

The fifth anniversary of publication has been celebrated by taking a selection of articles published online since then and allowing them to be accessed free of charge, presumably for a limited period. These entries include the writer Douglas Adams as well as the judge Dame Rose Heilbron, Sarah Moulton (Sir Thomas Lawrence's 'Pinkie'), sanitary engineer Jesse Cooper Dawes and first woman American presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull.

The Book of English Magic

I have contributed a reader review of The Book of English Magic to History Today's books blog.

The Pitmen Painters

Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters is revived for the second time at the National Theatre, still with its original principal cast - led by Ian Kelly (himself something of a Renaissance man, being an award-winning biographer as well as an actor and director) as art lecturer Robert Lyon, and Christopher Connel (also recently seen in Newcastle as Alan Shearer in You Really Couldn't Make It Up, alongside Mark Benton as Newcastle United chairman Mike Ashley) as the 'star' of the Ashington Group of painters, Oliver Kilbourn. My placing of the tutor before the student may be unintentionally revelatory, but inadequately represents how far the painters led their own development. Ideology is a theme - principally the inadequacy of any of the dogmas current in the 1930s to explain what the pitmen painters did, and the packaging of the mining painters as a 'group' by the art establishment of professionals and patrons, obscuring their varied talent as individuals. The first half is practically a play in itself; the second, a coda set during the Second World War and after on the eve of nationalization, dwells on the aspirations of the Attlee era, building up to the unfurling of Kilbourn's Ellington Colliery banner and its promise of mock Tudor houses and gardens for the workers, symbolizing in the play the storming of the bastions of cultural privilege by the working class. As a surtitle notes as the end, as Hetton Silver Band's recording of the mining composer Robert Saint's hymn tune Gresford, the miners' University of Ashington never arose, and there are today no working collieries in the area. Perhaps the most powerful scene for our times, though, shortly before the end, comes when Oliver Kilbourn visits Robert Lyon in his studio, relocated from Newcastle to Edinburgh after Lyon was appointed professor at Edinburgh College of Art largely (the play suggests) on the back of his self-promotion as tutor of the Ashington Group, and is rendered in chalk and charcoal by Lyon as a sentimentalized rustic labourer. The exchange on privilege, where it lies, who has it and what it means to use it is certainly one for today's cultural commentators to chew upon.

British comic reprints in The Guardian and The Observer

The Guardian this week launched a week of 1970s and 1980s comic reprints with a 1975 edition of Jackie. I was never in its target audience, though a long time ago I met a housing journalist who claimed to have worked at D C Thomson writing the letters page. Pages of small text (minuscule by today's standards - though I seem to recall that Jackie in the mid-70s was published in a larger format than the A4 size used by The Guardian reprint) reflect the readers' interest in David Essex and Donny Osmond, likewise text-heavy adverts for the WRNS and Barclays Clearing Department aim to lure the mid-teenage girls who would soon be leaving school, while adverts for Anadin and Feminax help the reader cope with the state of being "well on the way to being a woman." Though generally promoting positive images of womanhood, the advert for the Woman's Royal Army Corps still shows an uncertain looking girl being instructed in cooking by a moustachioed male chef. Tomorrow, the 2000th issue of The Beano - the copy which I bought on publication is in a box at my parents' somewhere - and then on Monday over from D C Thomson to IPC (now Egmont) for the football-led Roy of the Rovers, which was as little my territory as Jackie.

The decline of British comics is as much the result of underinvestment and the freezing out within the businesses concerned of many of those with the mental agility and sense of the market which could have found avenues to perpetuate them, as it is the result of the growth of alternative forms of entertainment for the target audience. Memorabilia magazine published an article in 2002 examining the place of girls' comics in the magazine world in what we might call the age of Bunty - the longest running of a generation of girls' titles, and published by D C Thomson between 1958 and 1991 - written by John Freeman (himself a comics editor, writer and designer of note) and which was reprinted on the very informative official fan site for IPC's gothic girls' title Misty here.

That The Guardian and The Observer are running this promotion at all shows how long ago the age of these comics is. The target audience is presumably those thirty- and fortysomethings who juggle mortgages with employment instability which defies the security promised by those adverts in Jackie, while battling to comprehend, let alone meet, the demands made by their children, inspired by today's globalized youth consumer culture. A dose of escapism into a remote comfort zone, when five pence a week bought you another thirty-six, thirty-two or twenty-four pages of turf in a shared world (though only sixteen if you were one of the hapless loyal readers of Polystyle's TV Comic after spring 1979) perhaps less universally accessible, and perhaps less immediate, than today's piped forms of information and entertainment, might be a tempting proposition. Jackie in 1975 looks like a product of a transitional age, fascinated by visual culture but in its heart wanting to converse with its readers through densely-composited text stories and the stark monochrome Helvetica and Roman of its problem pages. The rest of the week is dominated by boys' and humour titles, both more self-consciously visual forms.

Apologies for my absence

It strikes me that I have been neglecting this blog, continuing to make frequent posts pseudonymously elsewhere and not under my own name under this proud eighteenth-century masthead. I will remedy this soon.

From Russia with Love

I dipped into the James Bond season currently running at the Phoenix in Oxford today, and joined a thronged screen 2 for the remastered From Russia with Love. I'd not actually seen this one, though discussion a few nights ago had revealed the secret of the opening tag scene, which asserts and promotes Sean Connery's Bond as a cinematic icon as well as demonstrating how well Connery can act.

The Bondian world of From Russia with Love is less self-consciously fantastical than it would become in later films, but there's already a joy in the expression of dialogue such as the assessment of Grant as a "homicidal paranoid" and thus perfect agent material for SPECTRE. The regular cast are at ease with one another, and Desmond Llewelyn delivers his reactions to Connery's blithely cocksure Bond with such imperceptible effort that it's no surprise that his brief walk-on and off here as the officer from 'Q division' becomes a regular role.

The film is also a lesson in 1960s attitudes to sexuality. It's implied that the training establishment at SPECTRE Island caters to all of Grant's physical needs, underlining the argument that compared to Bond (himself deeply flawed as a role model in the eyes of his deskbound colleagues in London and his girlfriend in what is presumably Cambridge, but in Istanbul able to negotiate peace between the two fighting Gypsy women by charming them into states of submission) he's emotionally stunted, dependent as he is on institutions for sex. Rosa Klebb is presented as dually deviant, both as an older woman with a sexual appetite, and also demonstrating attraction both to Grant and to Tatiana (Tania) Romanova; but this again is presented as guaranteeing her position in SPECTRE, at least making her less expendable than the coldly boastful chess grand master Kronsteen. Tania's seemingly relaxed attitude to the impermanence of her liaison with Bond at the end of the film is an obvious male fantasy; when we first encounter him Bond, in a punt with his girlfriend Eunice who makes her disapproval of his lifestyle plain, is as close to the henpecked husband stereotype as we see him. There is perhaps not that great a distance between Connery's Bond and Sidney James's Carry On characters as might first be assumed.

From Russia with Love is at times an exuberant travelogue and recalls the days of credit controls and limited foreign travel well; Hagia Sophia is rarely out of shot in Istanbul, and when the camera actually enters its walls it lingers over its architecture as much as it does on other occasions on the contours of leading lady Daniela Bianchi. The scenes in the Byzantine underwater reservoir (not Pinewood as I'd told myself and readers when I first published this review, but a location in Istanbul) are just as exotic; the audience in Britain or America is taken from one layer of an unfamiliar but familiar world, to another, stranger one. We are offered juxtapositions of confinement with open spaces throughout, whether on location in Turkey, Switzerland or Argyll (the latter doubling as the Istrian peninsula), within railway carriages or sheltering within rock chambers or the back of a florist's wagon. This language is starkly derived from Buchan via Hitchcock and eloquent in itself about the multiple worlds inhabited by the many personae of the Bondian secret agent.

An enjoyable game was spotting the Doctor Who actors in the cast. The porter on the Orient Express whose wages are regularly subsidized by Bond's Turkish ally Ali Kerim Bey is played by George Pastell, The Tomb of the Cybermen's master logician Klieg; it was only when watching the credits, after struggling to place him, that I learned that Kerim Bey's chauffeur son was Neville Jason, much later Prince Reynart and his android double in The Androids of Tara. Francis de Wolff from The Myth Makers is the Gypsy leader.

The soundtrack is memorable too, and I'd heard much of it in other contexts. One piece which has been a favourite at the National Film Theatre before screenings is, I now know thanks to the presence of the soundtrack on Spotify, '007 Takes the Lektor', by John Barry.