Monthly Archives: September 2022

Joe Biden during his primetime presidential address. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Dear Reader (Especially the newest member of The Dispatch team, Allahpundit!),

Full disclosure: Im vexed. So Im going to try to preventor delaygoing full splenetic by easing into my first point.

Remember those idiots who wanted to burn the Quran? I probably need to be more specific because I vaguely recall there were a lot of idiots who wanted to burn a lot of Qurans. But the moment I have in mind was probably this one in 2010, when a tiny fringe church led by Terry Jones in Floridagrandly called the Dove World Outreach Centerannounced it would burn the Islamic holy book to make some point it thought was clever. In 2011, the church literally put the Quran on trial for six hours, found it guilty of all charges, and set it aflame.

It was a dumb, hateful, un-Christian (spare me the lectures about the book burning at Ephesus) stunt intended to insult as many Muslims as possible. And it succeeded. Fatwas for Jones death were issued. A handful of protesters in various cities died in some riots. No doubt some terrorist attacks on Americans, Westerners, or Christians were at least partly inspired by the burning.

The whole thing sparked an intense debate about free speech, and I hated it. I hated it because it forced all sorts of people, institutions, and governments to take sides on the question of free speech for no productive purpose. It didnt bring anyone closer to Christianityor to free speech. Yes, forced to choose, I sided with his right to do it, but I was far more passionate in my belief that he was wrong to do it.

In other words, being right about a principle isnt enough. Think of it this way: We all have a constitutional right to be bigots. In no way is that a defense of bigotry. Burning the Quran forced people in favor of free speech to question their commitment to free speech. People in favor of free speech were put in the unnecessary and ugly position of defending an unnecessary and ugly act.

Right, rights, and wrong.

Some of the most important questions in our politics often get turned into arguments about whether so-and-so has the right to do wrong as a way to avoid answering the question of whether they were right to do it in the first place.

For instance, in both of Donald Trumps impeachment trials, his defenders argued that the president was within his rights to do the things he was impeached for. In the first impeachment, they argued that since he can bully a foreign leader for dirt on his political opponent for partisan ends, any further debate is irrelevant. He has the authority to withhold congressionally approved military aide in service to that bullying, so lighten up. In the second impeachment, people actually argued that since the frickn president of the frickn United States merely came close to the Brandenburg standard for incitement and (arguably) didnt cross that line, senators shouldnt rely on any other standard. Never mind that the standards for impeachment arent laid out in criminal law, but in the informal rules of statesmanship, stewardship, and decency. Also put aside the fact that allowing a president to come a hairs breadth short of meeting the exacting standards of criminal incitement is to declare you have no real standards at all.

The same thing happened during the Clinton impeachment. Diddling an intern isnt against the law, countless partisans argued, so we have no right to apply any other standard. Indeed, any other standard becomes a mere matter of taste and partisan persnicketies.

Time and again, the question of whether a presidentor some goofball pastorshould do X is dismissed as pharisaical partisan sanctimony and replaced by lawyerly procedural sophistry. Its pathetic, cowardly, and dangerous. Yes, Im all for the rule of law. But the rule of law is the skeleton of the body politic. The flesh, blood, and sinew of a healthy society are the morals, customs, standards, and principles that define not just our culture, but our conceptions of right and wrong. If the only argument you can muster in defense of someones action is that they can do it, youre conceding that you have no other defense.

Soul of a campaign speech.

Which brings me to Joe Bidens speech last night. I thought it was a perfectly defensible campaign speech. I agreed with some of his points, particularly at the beginning. His spirited defense of Americas founding and the Constitution was welcome to hear from the leader of the party that gave oxygen to the 1619 Project and often talks of the Constitution as if its a relicat least whenever it proves inconvenient to their preferred policies.

But it wasnt billed as a campaign speech. It was an official primetime presidential address, introduced by the Marine Band and guarded by Marines. I believe it was the first such official address in 40 years that neither made news in the form of an official policy announcement nor responded to a major event.

Some people point to Donald Trumps acceptance speech of the 2020 GOP nomination at the White House. I dont know if that was billed as an official presidential address, nor do I care. First, his speech would have been covered by the networks no matter what. Second, and far more important, I thought using the White House as a political convention venue was grotesque and indefensibleand so did all of the people citing it as a precedent for what Biden did last night.

Do you get the point? Countless defenders of Bidens speech say he was perfectly within his rights to use a national monument and a presidential address for partisan purposes because Trump did that kind of thing all the time. Theyre right that Trump did that kind of thing all the time, but if you condemned it for Trump, why are you celebrating it for Biden? For instance, when CNNs Jeff Zeleny matter-of-factly noted Bidens break with White House tradition, former Sen. Claire McCaskill blew a gasket.

This is the kind of garbage politics you get when everything is reduced to can rather than should. Your team did wrong and got away with it, so our team can now do wrong, but well call it right because its our team doing it now. A morality that cites the authority of your enemies sins as proof of the same sins virtue when theyre yours is not, in fact, morality. As I wrote in the Wednesday G-File:

My problem with whataboutism is that its virtually never a substantive retort. Its an effort to paint simple truths as simplistic distortions. To take an example from today, lots of people respond to eminently credible charges that Donald Trump mishandled classified information by saying, What about Hillary Clinton?

Well, what about her? If what she did with her server and emails was badand it wasthat doesnt make what Trump allegedly did good. If you were outraged by her mishandling of classified documents, saying Trump did the same thing should be an indictment of Trump, not an exoneration.

This hypocrisy goes down to the bone on both sides. Right now, a huge swath of right-wingers are whining that Biden was mean to them because Biden said mean things about Republicans or MAGA Republicans. We can argue whether Biden was right or wrong about what he said, but my God, spare me the tears. Contrary to some absurd spin that Trump never disparaged whole categories of people, Trump disparaged whole categories of people all the time. Deal with it.

But the problem is much bigger than mere hypocrisy. One of my complaints about the Quran burning stunt was that it divided Americans along partisan lines on an issue that should unite them. We believe in free speech in this countryor at least were supposed to. But because culture warrior right-wingers liked to dunk on Islam and identity politics besotted left-wingers patronizingly made allowances for Muslims they would never countenance for Christians, defending free speech rights got subsumed into the broader partisan food fight.

Biden did something similar last night. He claimed to be delivering a high-minded speech about the sanctity of democracyand some of it was exactly thatbut he included in the stew all manner of partisan ingredients that indisputably ruined the flavor. He tried to connect contempt for democracy with opposition to abortion. He insinuated that if you agreed with him on the high-minded stuff, you should be onboard with his domestic agenda and vote accordingly. He played verbal games about just how many Republicans he was indicting as a threat to democracy, but he clearly wanted the persuadable voters he was talking to hear pretty much all of them. To be sure, he had all the requisite to be sure caveats that will give partisan defenders permission to defend his partisanship. But I doubt theres a political professional on either side of the aisle that didnt see that speech for what it was: a rallying cry for Democrats going into the midterms and an effort to make the election about Donald Trump. It was unifying if you agree with him, but that is true of virtually every partisan speech ever given.

By melding a partisan agenda with an attack on what he claimsand probably believesis a real threat to democracy on the cusp of the general election campaign, he made the debate about the threat to democracy even more partisan. And thats reprehensible.

Donning the cynics hat.

But it might work. As a political strategy, making the election a choice between the forces of Trumpism and the forces of Bidenism is a hell of a lot smarter than making the election a referendum on Biden and his policies.

It could also backfire.

The Democrats fortunes were improving in no small part because Trump was back in the news thanks to his own unforced errors. I think a wiser course of action might have been to stay out of it. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, when your enemy is beclowning himself, best not to get in the way. It would be very bad for Bidenand the countryif Trumps legal troubles seemed like the fruit of political persecution, which is precisely why Republicans are trying to spin it that way.

One of the nice things about cynicism is it keeps you from taking things too personally. Save for my passionate and patriotic desire for Trump to never soil the White House again, I really dont care which team benefits from all of this. I dont have a partisan rooting interest here, which is why I see hypocrisy in every direction.

Victims progress.

But let me change gears a bit and address what I think is the generator of a lot of the hypocrisy soaking our politics: victimology. Conservatives love complaining about the liberal cult of victimhood. Indeed, many have convinced themselves that victimology is solely an animating spirit of the left. But conservatism these days is shot through with its own cult of victimhood.

The whole deplorable fad was an exercise in victimhood. J.D. Vances struggling campaign rests on pandering to the grievances of people who blame their problems on them. The idea that you have to vote for Trump because the FBI was unfair to him is nothing if not some barmy epiphenomena of a collective persecution complex, as is the potted idea that if you insult or offend Trump, youre insulting or offending the 74 million Americans who voted for him. Kevin McCarthy demands an apology from Biden for saying some Trump supporters are semi-fascists. We can argue about the numbers, but it strikes me as unequivocally true that some Trump supporters are, in fact, semi-fascists. CPAC had some installation art intended to make peoples hearts bleed for the January 6 rioters. They even ran an electronic banner wallowing in their victimhood status proclaiming, We Are All Domestic Terrorists. Just this week, Trump promised that if elected he would issue pardons and an apology to the convicted criminals he encouraged to assault the Capitol. I cant believe I have to say this, but if you willingly beat up a cop or defecated in the halls of Congress, you are owed neither an apology nor a pardon.

Trumps cult of personality fuels this cult of victimhood, but its a larger phenomenon. The rights obsession with media bias and cancel culturedespite the obvious merits of many complaintsis only understandable in this larger context. Lots of avowed Christians see their victim statusand the politics that attend itas an outsized source of their identity. White supremacists are nothing if not peddlers of theories of their victimization.

Inherent to seeing yourself as a victim is bemoaning the unfairness of the system, double standards, etc. This only makes sense. If you thought you deserved your plight or some insult, you wouldnt see yourself as a victim. Losers only whine like victims when they think they lost unfairly. The insulted only complain when they think the insult was misplaced.

Theres plenty of room to complain about unfairness or even injustice without crossing the line into a quasi-religious theory that denies individuals of their personal agency and personal responsibilitytwo concepts that are foundational to both conservatism and the American project. Conservatives see this clearly when criticizing the left, but they are blind to it on their own side. Thats in part because populism has become institutionalized on the right, and populism as a political and psychological phenomenon is always about perceived victim status. They are against us, and we are righteous.

Various & Sundry

Im going to invoke authorand editors privilegeand give a small example of the above in defense of The Dispatch and specifically one of our writers. A few weeks ago, we ran a piece by our excellent reporter Alec Dent about the young new right in Washington. In the course of writing the piece, Alec came into possession of a recording of a Twitter Spaces chat in which Nate Hochman, a former Dispatch intern and current writer at National Review, engaged in a colloquy with Nick Fuentes, an infamous racist, antisemite, and white supremacist (though he denies these things through an incels coporaphagic grin). Alec included some quotes from that exchange and a fulsome statement from Hochman admitting his error in engaging Fuentes too generously and, at times, seemingly approvingly. Hochman says he did so to goad Fuentes into a more fulsome debate. Whether that was a good idea or notI vote notHochman admitted the error, and we quoted the admission at length. I said some really stupid things, which I don't actually believe, he said.

Personally, I think nothing good is gained from treating fever swamp bigots as a faction of the right with some valuable contributions to make, either as part of some broader popular front or as worthy interlocutors within the right. Over the years, National Review, sometimes painfully and tardily, exerted a lot of time and energy arguing for bright lines and fortified borders between such voices and respectable conservatism.

Bethany Mandel disagrees, and thats fine. She has every right to embrace a different strategy in dealing with bigots, and she thinks more is to be gained by trying to talk them out of their wrongness. This might be a commendable interpersonal strategy, but I think its profoundly wrongheaded as an institutional, public approach. We simply differ on this. Everyone has a right to their opinion.

But not to their own facts. In a piece for The Spectator, In defense of the canceled Nate Hochman, she accuses Dent and The Dispatch of shoddy practices. Note: She doesnt say the story is wrong. She concedes that the Dispatchs reporting is accurate and adds that Hochman admits as much.

But she says that we tried to cancel Hochman. Having excellent sources when it comes to my own motives, not to mention our internal editorial discussions, I can report that this is false. Mandel might have known this if she actually called anyone at The Dispatch for comment, as youd think she might in a piece opining on good journalistic practices.

She also says that the Dispatch sent the quotes, without context, to Hochmans employers and claims that the Fund for American Studies (TFAS) revoked Hochmans Robert Novak Fellowship based on an email Dent sent TFAS asking for comment about Hochmans praise for Fuentes. (In contrast with his manful admission of error, Hochman has recently publicly complained about the unfairness of Dents email, too.) The problem is that this isnt true either. Dent talked with TFAS at great length and on numerous occasions and provided the organization with the full 75-minute audio file (which Hochman is free to release if he thinks more context will cast him in a better light or us in a worse one). This leaves out whatever other fact-finding TFAS did on its own. Similarly, we provided National Review with ample additional contextas did Alecs actual article. Mandel is right that we didnt provide more context beyond an initial email to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, another sponsor of Hochmans work. But thats because ISI refused to talk to Dent, apparently preferring to feed a misleading tale to Mandel, who promptly wrote it up credulously.

This is all very inside baseball and not worth even this much time or space. Nate Hochmans a promising young writer, and I wish him well. But I think that helike a lot of people on the very young, very online, so-called new rightis misreading the moment in myriad ways that are good neither for him nor conservatism. I think he made a mistake, and I was glad he admitted as much. I think he should have left it there and Mandel probably should have too. But as his initial admission seemed to confirm, hes not a victim and Dentsby all accounts accuratearticle doesnt make us victimizers, never mind cancelers. And no amount of tiresome and uninformed grievance peddling on social media is going to change that fact.

Canine update: The quadrupeds had a grand time in Maine and New Hampshirewhen there wasnt thunder. Gracie got in some very important sleeping. I think Pippa may more properly be called a New English Springer Spaniel, she likes that neck of the woods so much. Though who can doubt how much shed like the mother country? But Gracie really didnt like the drivein either direction. She complained vocally for hundreds of miles. But man, shes such a great cat. On the drive back, the Fair Jessica would let her out in grassy secluded spots and the Queen would find a shady spot to pee before trotting back to the car. Still, I think the days of long drives for Grace are at an end. Meanwhile, everyone is still struggling a bit to get back into the familiar routines here at home.

ICYMI

Last Fridays comforting G-File

Last weekends Ruminant

The Remnant with Sarah Isgur

Deconstructing Bidens student debt proposal

Grading Gorby on a curve

The Remnant with Katherine Mangu-Ward

The Dispatch Podcast on the DOJs disclosure

And now, the weird stuff.

Fiduciary trouble

Casually

Devilled

Customer service

Goated

Go here to read the rest:
Rights and Wrongs - by Jonah Goldberg - The G-File - The Dispatch

Ukraines largest book festival is to partner with Hay festival for the first time, with Hays CEO describing it as an act of solidarity across art, culture and audiences.

Lviv BookForum, organised by Ukraines Publishers Forum, is in its 29th year and will take place from 6-9 October, both in person and online.

As digital partner, Hay will broadcast all the festivals 15 events free online, and has also curated a number of events with an international digital audience in mind.

Julie Finch, who has replaced Peter Florence as CEO of Hay festival, said she hoped the events would bring a new audience to Ukrainian writers and their work, while offering a space for a dynamic exchange of ideas between different cultural perspectives.

She went on to describe the partnership as an act of solidarity across art, culture and audiences.

Lviv BookForum will have a hybrid programme this year, with guests appearing in person or in virtual live appearances. It will blend the greatest contemporary Ukrainian writers with internationally acclaimed literary figures in conversations ranging from art in times of conflict, memory, gender-equality, loss, corruption, imperialism, and hope, said an announcement from Hay.

Sofia Cheliak, programme director at Lviv BookForum, said the festival would give people the chance to learn more about Ukraine. Using culture and literature is a way we can explain what is going on [here], she said. Its our chance to tell our true story and who we are and why we are fighting, why its important for us to be independent.

The programme for the festival is incredible said Cheliak, and she hoped the event would be the beginning of Ukrainian literature promotion.

Authors who have appeared at Lviv BookForum in previous years include Ukrainian writers Oksana Zabuzhko and Ivan Dziuba and international authors Paulo Coelho and DBC Pierre.

Hay, which named the DECs Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal as official charity partner of its main festival in Wales in May and June, has also specially curated five online events pairing icons of global literature with their Ukrainian contemporaries.

Finch said that with freedom of expression under attack globally, organisations such as Hay festival and Lviv BookForum are more important than ever before as catalysts for change by exercising freedom of speech and the tolerant exchange of ideas.

Hay festival champions free speech, empathy and curiosity, she added. Russias invasion of Ukraine is not only an attack on Ukraines territory and people, it represents a desire to destroy the very idea of Ukraine, its right to generate its own culture, identity and stories.

The partnership is the beginning of a longer term relationship where we can showcase Ukrainian artists, writers and thinkers internationally, said Finch.

Lviv is the largest city is western Ukraine and the sixth largest in the country. It has remained largely safe from fighting, although in April Russian rockets smashed into the city, killing seven people.

The partnership between Hay festival and Lviv BookForum is part of the UK/Ukraine Season of Culture, which is supported by the British Council and the Ukrainian Institute.

David Codling, director of the Season of Culture at the British Council, said the season would celebrate cultural exchange between our two countries and the vital importance of free expression and independent critical discourse at this time.

Ukraines literary culture always has much to contribute but more urgently than ever now, he added.

The seasons other events include Cheltenham literature festival and the International Book Arsenal festival in Kyiv partnering for a special Ukraine Day event, celebrating emerging voices in Ukrainian literature; a Ukrainian to English literary translation summer school at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, bringing together translators and authors; and a Ukrainian programme at the 2022 Huddersfield contemporary music festival, focusing on contemporary Ukrainian opera and chamber music.

The Lviv festival events broadcast online will be live-captioned in English and Ukrainian, with viewers able to choose which they would like. Post-event, captions in Spanish will be added to all sessions.

The full programme for Lviv BookForum will be announced in mid-September on the Hay festival website.

See the rest here:
UK and Ukraine book festivals partner to protect freedom of expression - The Guardian

Ian McEwan was on holiday on the remote coast of north-west Scotland when he heard the news that his great friend Salman Rushdie had been attacked in New York. His wife, the writer Annalena McAfee, let out a cry from the next door room in the small hotel where they were staying. The numbness of his first response was quickly followed by a feeling of horrible inevitability: How could I have been so blind? Like Rushdie, McEwan had hoped the threat of the fatwa was over. The tragedy of this is Salman always wanted to get back to having an ordinary writing life, and that seemed to have happened, McEwan says on a video call a week after the incident. The 74-year-old novelist is back in his Cotswolds home, surrounded by books and looking slightly beaten up after his first bout of Covid.

The grim effects of coronavirus added to his sense of visceral disgust at the violence of the stabbing. It all seemed one with my own perception of it, he says. A colossal weariness and also disgust at the thought that it takes a lot of hatred, a lot of zeal, to push a knife deep into someones eye. It is beyond the edge of human cruelty. And only an intact ideology, not available to disprove in any way, could bring you to the point.

We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwans epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novels far-reaching look at postwar British history. It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman, he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasnt an issue: We didnt even deny religion, it just didnt come up. So when the fatwa was decreed, it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.

Although not originally part of the notorious gang of writers Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and the late Christopher Hitchens who made their names in the 70s and dominated the literary scene for much longer (too long, according to their critics), Rushdie arrived a few years later with the publication in 1981 of Midnights Children, which transformed both British and Indian writing, and won the Booker prize that year. It was amazing, it expanded horizons, McEwan says. Salman is a great conversationalist, with a great taste for fun and mischief, he adds. So we all got on straight away.

Audio extract: Lessons Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook of Ian McEwan's forthcoming novel

Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/05/05-61553-gnl.fw.200505.jf.ch7DW.mp3

McEwans ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which global events penetrate individual lives, of which the fatwa was a perfect example. It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech, he says. It was a very steep learning curve. It seems strange to remember that 1989 was also the year the Berlin Wall came down, a central event in the new novel. The fatwa just preceded a rather wonderful time when democracies were sprouting out across Europe, free speech was on the rise, free thought was on the rise, he says. Everything has changed from 33 years ago. We now live in a time of heavily constricted, shrinking freedom of expression around the world: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, you name it. Plus the self-inflicted free speech matter of the rich west.

It is exactly this trajectory from youthful optimism to disillusionment and despair that the novel charts, following the life of his central character, Roland Baines, from the Suez and Cuban crises right up to Brexit and the pandemic. McEwan finished writing Lessons before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or else he would have included it as a further example as part of the trashing of his hopes, which he compares to the thwarted dreams of Orwells generation at the end of the 30s. If he was still writing, the attack on Rushdie would be in there, too. It is horribly consonant with the times, he says. We live in an age of casual death threats, of the kind that washes towards JK Rowling, for example. For some lone, insufficient individuals, its a short step to carry out some terrible act. This is a very dark moment.

Things look much brighter when I meet McEwan in his immaculately white Bloomsbury mews back in July. He is tanned and healthy from a recent walking holiday (he is a committed hiker) in the Lake District with McAfee.

He shows me a photograph of Lingcove Bridge, which they visited, the site of a late scene in Lessons, when Roland, on the eve of his 70th birthday, has a tussle with a Tory peer and is pushed into the river. That was me feeling I was defeated by Brexit, McEwan admits. He describes Lessons as a sort of post-Brexit novel. Our world has got smaller, he says. The ceiling in our rooms has lowered by two feet. Its the day before Boris Johnson is forced to resign, and he tells a jolly story about a delightful hour he spent discussing Shakespeare with the former prime minister (who is writing a biography of the playwright), after a dinner, long before Brexit. He needs to get back to that book, McEwan says drily.

Few interviews fail to note the disconnect between the genial man in linen shirt and jumper, who might just as easily be an eminent scientist, and his enduring reputation as contemporary fictions prince of darkness. Over his 50-year writing life, which has included winning the Booker in 1998, becoming a fixture on school reading lists and blockbuster films, not least Atonement, McEwan has been accorded the position of national novelist; national psychologist even, a tag he winces at now. Lessons is teasingly alert to the perils of being white, hetero and old as a writer today.

If there is no longer a commotion when his novels dont make it on to the Booker longlist (Lessons hasnt), hes not complaining. We had our time, he says sanguinely. My generation, when we were first publishing in the 70s, it was very boyish. It was a tight world. Were all in our 70s now. We cant complain. And I especially cant complain. And for very good reason. We got the prizes and some money, and we had the writing life. And now its this tsunami of other voices. Everything has opened up wonderfully.

He started writing Lessons in 2019, after a long publicity tour for Machines Like Me. All he wanted to do was stay at home and write throughout 2020. One should be careful what one wishes for, he deadpans. All novelists are locked down. Lockdown is what we do. But I never thought Id have such opportunities for total immersion, seven days a week, often 12 hours a day, broken only by walking the dog. I really wanted to write a long novel, to relax into it, to live in it.

Coming in just shy of 500 pages, it is far longer than McEwans characteristically short, smart and saturnine novels, as John Updike summed up his work in a 2002 review of Atonement. So much for his assertion in previous interviews that he was going to spend his 70s writing novellas. I think you have written your last novel, a writer friend wrote after reading the end result. Even though I hope you will write more. As McEwan concedes, you know what he means. It is a novel of the backwards look.

Billed as the story of a lifetime, it is in many ways the story of McEwans life. Ive always felt rather envious of writers like Dickens, Saul Bellow, John Updike and many others, who just plunder their own lives for their novels, he explains. I thought, now Im going to plunder my own life, Im going to be shameless. Before readers assume that he was abused as a boy, or went through any of the misfortunes that befall Roland, parts of McEwans past are fictionalised and interwoven with the narrative. It is certainly my most autobiographical novel, but at the same time, Roland is not me. He didnt lead my life, McEwan explains. But in a way he lives the life I might have led. All of us have these moments, when we think about them later, where we could have gone down some other path. I could so easily not have become a writer.

While McEwans previous historical novels have zoomed in on specific periods unforgettably the second world war (Atonement), the cold war (Sweet Tooth, Black Dogs, The Innocent), the 80s (Machines Like Me) and post-9/11 (Saturday) Lessons marches through the political landscape of postwar Britain, taking in Thatcherism, New Labour (Tony Blair with his copious hair, good teeth, an energetic stride) to the new populism (Trump and Johnson are pointedly unnamed). He wasnt aiming to write the British equivalent of the Great American Novel: We dont have that phantom bearing a whip that American writers have. Instead he wanted to show how the actions of those all too human gods, our political leaders, can wreak havoc on mere mortals: a piece of dust as it were from their heels flies in your eyes.

The opening section, a minutely played out affair between the young Roland and his 25-year-old piano teacher at boarding school (very like the one the author attended), which Roland ony later realises was abuse, is vintage McEwan: psychologically gripping, erotically intense and morally troubling. On the brink of the Cuban missile crisis, the only question among Rolands classmates after lights out in the dormitory was what if the world ended before you had it? It. Roland isnt about to take any chances: chasing up overtures made by the seductive Miriam, he fetches up at her front door. The pair embark on a summer of throbbing duets and Lawrentian allusions. This was what the far-off belligerent gods, Khrushchev and Kennedy, had arranged for him, Roland reflects helplessly.

This story was not, McEwan makes clear, drawn from his own life, but from an abandoned earlier novel, part of which became On Chesil Beach, also set in 1962. Having taken on the biggest contemporary issues the climate emergency as comedy in Solar (2010), artificial intelligence in Machines Like Me (2019) it was only a matter of time before McEwan turned his dark-seeking antenna to the subject of historical child abuse. He admires Zo Hellers 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, about a relationship between a teacher and one of her pupils. But the decision to have a female abuser was not simply McEwanesque contrarianism. I wanted to write it from the point of view of the victim, to show the consequences for the rest of the life, he says. But I didnt want to appropriate a womans experiences.

McEwan hadnt intended to write about his family history, but his discovery in 2002 of a brother, David Sharp, a bricklayer, was so powerful an illustration of the novels central idea that he found he couldnt step away. His parents came from very poor, hard-working families: both left school at 14, his father, David (Robert in Lessons), to become a butcher boy, before joining the army, where he worked his way up to major; his mother, Rose, went into service as a chambermaid. They met when his father was training in Aldershot and his mother was already married. After her first husband was killed fighting they married, but never reclaimed the baby who had been born as a result of their wartime romance. Wanted, Home for baby boy, age 1 month; complete surrender, reads the heartbreaking advertisement his mother put in the paper offering her illegitimate child for adoption.

McEwans father, with his Brylcreem and spit-and-polish ways, as well as the frustrations of a highly intelligent man deprived of formal education, which led to drinking and often violent anger, and his mothers anxiety and unexplained sadness, all that just fell on to the page. By the time the secret was finally revealed, his father was dead and his mother was in the late stages of dementia. My mother was worried, frightened and sad as a person, he says now. There would be moments when shed relax and laugh, but I think this matter hung over her all her life. When the story became news in 2007, it was widely described as like something out of an Ian McEwan novel. Now it is.

As a boy in Libya, growing up in an obscure crevice of history, as he puts it in the novel, the Suez crisis gave the young McEwan his first taste of freedom and adventure, when he spent a rapturous two weeks at a military camp, an experience he gives to Roland. It was just bliss, he says now. The long shadow or the light it cast over the rest of my life meant I never wanted a full-time job. This became clear to him after a visit to the careers office at the University of Sussex, when he was presented with a chart of civil service salary scales from 22 to retirement: Just looking at that, I knew I could never do anything like that. Ever.

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Rolands peripatetic adult life unfolds alongside his childhood. It is 1986 and Roland is in his mid-30s. Theres a hosepipe ban and ominous news of a radiation cloud from Chernobyl. Rolands wife, Alissa, has suddenly deserted him and their seven-month-old son to return to her native Germany to fulfil her ambition to become the greatest novelist of her generation.

Ive read so many literary biographies of men behaving badly and destroying their marriages in pursuit of their high art. I wanted to write a novel that was in part the story of a woman who is completely focused on what she wants to achieve, and has the same ruthlessness but is judged by different standards, he explains. If you read Doris Lessings cuttings they will unfailingly tell you that she left a child in Rhodesia.

While McEwan was never left to bring up a baby single-handed, both his sons lived with him from their early teens after a messy custody battle with his first wife. Unlike Alissa, he never felt it was either/or in terms of his writing. His office door was always open If children come in and out, they rapidly find its very boring and he would work in the school hours. Theres no messing around, theres no third cup of coffee, he says. Today he keeps the door of his study, a converted barn, open for his sheepdog, who also likes to wander in. He works on two desks an old kitchen table and a headmasters desk he picked up in a junk shop in London in the 70s one reserved for the screen and one for longhand. He maintains the old disciplines: Do an hour, then empty the dishwasher, he advises firmly.

Decline and death inevitably creep into the final section of the novel. Ive had so many friends die of cancer, he says, the complicated last three years, the intrusiveness of the treatment. He wanted to pay tribute to their amazing bravery and incredible sense of purpose. He has also lost many people to less talked about smoking-related illnesses, he adds ruefully: his father; Malcolm Bradbury, his creative writing teacher at UEA; Ian Hamilton, his editor at the New Review; and he was at Hitchenss bedside shortly before he died.

He compares ageing to driving a car: The car is your body and one day you notice the wing mirror has come off. And someones taken the front bumper away in the night, and the passenger side door no longer opens. Then theres systemic change of course. Rushdies age makes the attack particularly cruel, he says when we speak later. People use the phrase life-changing injuries. This is very hard at 75. Being 75 is life-changing enough. It is going to take a good while for him to get to the other side of this and face the new kind of life.

Does he worry about his own legacy? I dont know, maybe. Honestly? Yes. Id like to continue to be read, of course. But again, thats entirely out of ones control. I used to think that most writers when they die, they sink into a 10-year obscurity and then they bounce back. But Ive had enough friends die more than 10 years ago, and they havent reappeared. I feel like sending them an email back to their past to say, Start worrying about your legacy because its not looking good from here.

He was greatly saddened by what he describes as the assault on Updikes reputation; for him, the Rabbit tetralogy is the great American novel. Saul Bellow, another hero, has suffered a similar fate for the same reasons, he says. Those problematic men who wrote about sex Roth, Updike, Bellow and many others.

Surely the reputations of his generation, many of them the self-styled British disciples of those problematic American men, none of whom have been shy about writing about sex, now seem similarly precarious? Weve become so tortured about writing about desire. Its got all so complex, he says. But we cant pretend it doesnt exist. Desire is one of the colossal awkward subjects of literature, whether its Flaubert youre reading or even Jane Austen. People will be compelled, theyll just have to write about it. He recalls listening to a young writer on the radio who said how difficult it is to write about male desire. I thought, oh, poor kid.

McEwan, like Alissa in the novel, was criticised for comments about gender at the end of a speech on identity at the Royal Institution in 2016. I said: Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of most people with penises as men, he recalls now. I did say most men, I didnt say all. He was accused of inciting violence against transgender people. Violence! he exclaims now.

It is important to resist the temptation to think because youre coming to an end, therefore the world is, he cautions. But its very, very tempting. He finds it chastening that many young people also feel fearful about the future, and timid in the face of history. Theres no big project, as it were, for a new kind of society. He worries about the return of Trump, or someone even worse, he says. We could be looking at a very authoritarian state, that could probably swing it so the Democrats are never in power again.

He recently set himself the challenge of writing a short story in which he had to be optimistic about the future up to 2060 (there are a couple of strategic nuclear explosions cheery). I thought, am I just writing a delicious fantasy? That old saying that most things arent as bad as you fear? But he is reluctant to make any real predictions. The world is so connected now its like a giant mind, he reflects. And just as with our own minds, or with our own fates, we can never predict what were going to do next collectively.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the new novel, it is that true comfort and happiness are to be found at home, and Lessons is touching on the quiet consolations of domesticity. One of the few compensations for getting old, he says, is becoming a grandparent. Like Roland, McEwan is a doting grandfather (he has eight grandchildren). Just when you think that youre never going to meet anyone new, you have this love affair, he says. There is another explosion of love in later life. Even having plundered his life for Lessons, he doesnt rule out writing a straightforward memoir: I keep saying I will and then I dont.

He is a firm believer in what, borrowing VS Pritchetts phrase, he likes to call determined stupor between novels: I just read and soak things up. His greatest pleasure when he is not writing is walking. Over the years he has hiked all over the world, especially across America. But he never feels totally free in the US. One of the things he most loves about England is the footpaths, historically laid down over the centuries. Every village more or less is connected; in every town, if you walk to the edge of it there is a footpath. He often hikes with a close friend with a bottle of good red wine in his rucksack. To be high on a ridge with a glass of wine in your hand absolutely transforms the landscape, he says looking wistfully into the distance. Suddenly its your vast drawing room. Its your space.

Lessons by Ian McEwan is published by Vintage on 13 September at 20. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Hell be discussing it at the Southbank Centre in London on 14 September; tickets from 15.

This article was amended on 3 September 2022. Ian McEwan has eight grandchildren, not four as an earlier version said, and the bridge in the photograph that features in Lessons is Lingcove Bridge, not Lincoln Bridge. The author told us the VS Pritchett phrase he quoted as productive indolence should have been determined stupor; this has been corrected.

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Ian McEwan on ageing, legacy and the attack on his friend Salman Rushdie: Its beyond the edge of human cruelty - The Guardian

CONTACT

Edith Bullard, chief communications officerebullard@acluva.org804.418-1852

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. In a challenge brought by the ACLU and the ACLU of Virginia on behalf of local booksellers, ajudge rejected an effort to label two books as obscene and illegal to sell or lend in the state of Virginia.

The Circuit Court for the City of Virginia Beach rejected two petitions arguing that Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. K. Maas are obscene by holding that the statute pursuant to which the petitions were filed violated First Amendment free speech rights and the constitutional right to due process. Likewise, the Circuit Court vacated a lower court determination of probable cause for obscenity.

We are pleased with the outcome of todays proceedings, said Matt Callahan, Senior Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Virginia. The First Amendment protects literary expression, even when some people find portions of the works difficult or objectionable. All people should be able to choose what they wish to read.

The proceedings were initiated pursuant to Virginia Code 18.2-384a law that has not been used for decades, but which purports to allow any individual to file a petition claiming that any book is obscene. Under the statute, a book could have been deemed obscene and its distribution could have been made criminal without any noticemuch less an opportunity to be heard on the issue to the countless bookstores, book lenders, and other distributors who would have been governed by the result.

The books being challenged through two separate obscenity proceedings in Virginia state court are Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, an autobiographical graphic novel about adolescence, gender and sexuality, and A Court of a Mist and Fury, a fantasy romance novel by Sarah J. K. Maas. Gender Queer was the most banned book in the United States in 2021, according to the American Library Association.

The ACLU, the ACLU of Virginia, and Michael Bamberger of Dentons, and general counsel to Media Coalition, filed a motion challenging the proceedings on behalf of amici curiae Prince Books, Read Books, One More Page Books, bbgb tales for kids, American Booksellers for Free Expression, Association of American Publishers Inc., Authors Guild, Inc., Freedom to Read Foundation, American Library Association, and Virginia Library Association.

Click here for more on the proceedings.

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Virginia Judge Rejects Obscenity Proceedings Against Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury - ACLU