Roald Dahl found the genre fiendishly difficult: “I am a short story writer myself, and although I have been doing it for 45 years and have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, I have never succeeded in bringing it off.” Yet James produced a whole clutch of haunting yarns. Not all are strictly stories about ghosts. There are witches, sorcerers, revenant counts and devils aplenty. Many are true classics. In Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, a traveler buys an ancient volume and finds that his purchase comes with an unwelcome freebie; Casting the Runes sees a cursed man try to outwit a practitioner of black magic; The Mezzotint allows an academic to watch a grisly crime unfold before his eyes.

How did he do it? An excellent new biography by Darryl Jones, For the Dead Remember: A Life of M. R. James, sensibly avoids tackling that question directly. There isn’t much about James that you can tackle directly, apart from the bare bones of his career. Born in 1862; prep school; Eton; King’s College, Cambridge (student, don, provost, vice chancellor); Eton again (provost); died in 1936.

He was a phenomenally hard worker, often publishing several books a year. James spent most of his life consumed by Biblical apocrypha and the cataloging of manuscripts. On the side, he became a noted authority on medieval stained glass and the occult. He enjoyed Charles Dickens and bicycling holidays in France. Politically, he was conservative, and deeply suspicious of change. Friendship was his chief pleasure. Colleagues at King’s wondered how he was able to sustain such a pitch of scholarly industry while hosting convivial gatherings in his rooms almost every evening. There was no romance. James was attracted to men, or at least loved them, but that’s as far as it went. As Jones writes, “If he had an inner life at all (and I have sometimes wondered), it stayed resolutely inner.”

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Inner lives are all very well, though they are rarely of interest to a stranger. It is the work that matters, and James’s stories still tick today. The world, always weird, is getting weirder. Familiar shapes dissolve, lights flicker, your cup isn’t quite where you set it down. Millionaires are pumping themselves full of their own children’s blood, vulnerable adults are falling in love with computer programs and drinkers are queueing in pubs. The life James knew is definitively gone, remote as Elmet, but that doesn’t matter to the stories. James’s strength lay in his ability to articulate weirdness and, occasionally, give a sense of how it might be weathered.

You don’t have to be conservative to write good ghost stories, but it probably helps. Most supernatural tales are about what happens when a debt goes unpaid, or a life is taken, or an ancient boundary marker moved. So much supernatural fiction hinges on an awareness of how fragile our little world of custom and convention really is. James was certainly a man of conservative instincts. As his choice of academic specialism suggests, he disliked abstraction, preferring the solid realities of manuscripts to grand theorizing. He was part of the 1897 campaign that prevented women from taking degrees at Cambridge, though it is only fair to note that his stance on that issue was not an unusual one for the time. Even his approach to stained glass was marked by a suspicion of change: he hated the thought of restoration; once a thing was gone, it was gone forever, and there was no point pretending otherwise. Jones observes that “the ghost story is a characteristic product of nineteenth-century forces. It is a reaction to the secular, materialist, industrial modernity that animated the dominant, progressivist Victorian utilitarian ideology.” It was the natural genre for a man like James.

Some biographers have a tendency to patronize their subjects, to strain a writer’s work through the DSM 5 and see what sticks. Jones is too good to fall for this guff, simply observing that James’s tales return to similar themes again and again. A horror of hair — luxuriant, invasive — is one such motif. Bedrooms are dangerous places, as are antiquarian booksellers and libraries. Curtains, bedsheets and other household objects are usually worth a second glance, just to be sure that they aren’t something more. But James’ great theme is that of curiosity punished.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” is perhaps his most famous story, in part due to the extraordinary 1968 television adaptation, which ranks among the best dramas the BBC has ever made. It goes like this. A Cambridge don travels to East Anglia for a golfing holiday. Naturally, he can’t stick to golf. Some amateur excavation in a ruined preceptory uncovers an ancient whistle engraved with Latin text. He takes it back to his hotel. Late that night, with supper over and the bedroom quiet about him, he picks the whistle up and blows.

That’s enough plot. Anyone unfamiliar with the story should discover the rest for themselves. Suffice to say that “Oh, Whistle…” deals with many of James’s deepest preoccupations. The don, disdainful of anything that smacks of the supernatural, is saved by another hotel guest, a retired colonel whose muscular Anglicanism and intellectual humility prove much more valuable than any amount of book-learnt skepticism. England’s countryside — Jones notes that James has been unfairly overlooked as a landscape writer — is alive and old. At one moment, the world is reduced to bands of black and grey, a cell of groynes and shingle and graphite sea. Above all, there is the warning to the curious. Do not interfere with things that you cannot understand. They are more than capable of interfering with you in turn.

It isn’t all doom and groyne. James blended the truly unnerving with moments of coziness and comedy. This is because most of his stories were not written for magazines. They were performance pieces, delivered at Christmastime to an audience in his rooms at King’s. Wry asides about donnish peccadillos were designed to elicit chuckles of recognition. James had a reputation as a mimic, and so most of his tales include a Worthy Cockney or Knowing Rustic, their over-long contributions a vehicle for the author’s talents. While James is worth reading and rereading, I sometimes wonder if it isn’t better to listen to his work instead. After all, these stories were meant to be heard, not read. How strange that a writer so mistrustful of innovation should prove such a natural fit for the audiobook.

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James doesn’t seem to have taken his ghost stories particularly seriously. They were an amusement, both to write and to perform. His main work was scholarly. Later, he found himself vice chancellor of Cambridge during the Great War, and was consumed by the construction of temporary hospitals and the settling of Belgian refugees. Perhaps this is part of his tales’ enduring appeal. They were not labored over. While Dahl struggled his whole life to write just one decent ghost story, James would appear before his audience with ink still wet on the page. When a story didn’t come off, he simply abandoned it and moved on to the next.

In 1931, James was asked to write a preface for his Collected Ghost Stories. The task clearly irritated him: “In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover…” Today’s fashion is to state why an author is worth reading now. It is no longer sufficient to say, “because they are a very good writer.” For reasons that do not seem clear to anyone in the publishing industry, an argument must be made for tongue-blistering relevance. This is how we end up with front covers claiming that a particular subspecies of mollusc “Made the Modern World”.

Thankfully, Jones has been allowed to write a very good book about a very interesting man. M. R. James, you will be relieved to hear, did not Make the Modern World. In fact, he did everything he could within his small sphere to keep it at bay. His relevance is linked purely to a chain of excellent supernatural yarns that have entertained and chilled readers for over a century. He influenced many other writers of the uncanny too, from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson to Susan Hill. Yet I happen to think that his tales still are worth reading now. Because they are very good, yes, but also because they are weird stories for weird times. They ask sensible questions. Does that mound need to be dug up? That whistle blown? There’s some excellent advice for daily life in there, too: “Be careful how you handle the packet you pick up in the carriage-drive, particularly if it contains nail-parings and hair. Do not, in any case, bring it into the house. It may not be alone…”

In 1924, the critic Charles Whibley wrote that a certain novelist would not be forgotten “until the hunting field, with all that it means and has meant to English life, is utterly abolished.” Perhaps he was right. The moment of abolition has arrived, and who but a small band of enthusiasts has heard of Robert Smith Surtees? His creations, displaying characteristic self-interest, have decamped to the works of better-known writers. Messrs Sponge and Jorrocks, his most celebrated offspring, are found in the pages of Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh and John Buchan.

None thought Surtees required any introduction. They assumed that his characters were as familiar as David Copperfield or Elizabeth Bennet. His best novels — Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, Handley Cross, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds — seemed to have secured a permanent place in the minds of British readers. They had also attracted foreign admirers. Teddy Roosevelt enthused over “the immortal Soapey Sponge”, while the French critic André Maurois described Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities as nothing less than “le chef-d’oeuvre du roman anglais”.

Robert Smith Surtees was born five months before the Battle of Trafalgar. He died two months after the opening of Charing Cross railway station. The second son of County Durham gentry, he set up as a London lawyer, though quickly succumbed to journalism. In 1838, he inherited the family estate, Hamsterley Hall. He stayed there for the rest of his life, hunting, shooting and writing. His books are often described as “sporting novels” because they’re notionally about hunting. But foxes were never his real quarry. Surtees was far more interested in running his fellow men to earth.

Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1852), the novel so loved by President Roosevelt, sees “Soapey” Sponge traveling around northern England. His goal is to hunt as much as possible without spending any money. In fact, he’d rather like to turn a profit. Sponge by name and nature, he secures tenuous invitations to country houses and then fails to leave. He eats, drinks, smokes and hunts. He tries to sell his troublesome horses, both handsome beasts with serious behavioral issues, for far more than they are worth. When not hunting, he spends hours scouring Mogg’s Ten Thousand Cab Fares, an exhaustive guide to London’s transport system. “It’s a book I never travel without,” Sponge explains. “It’s invaluable in town, and you may study it to great advantage in the country. With Mogg in my hand, I can almost fancy myself in both places at once.”

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Sponge’s travels allow Surtees to deploy battalions of venal, selfish, ludicrous and delusional characters. Many are unforgettable. Mr Jawleyford, one of the first to get sponged, is a case in point. Free with invitations, though outraged when they are accepted, he fills the walls of Jawleyford Court with portraits of himself. Ingratiating with the rich and powerful, he serves corked port to everyone else, and only rides to hounds if there’s a chance to hobnob with county bigwigs. Such an attitude to hunting is typical of most characters in the novel. Consider Mr Waffles, an epicene swell who views hunting as an opportunity to host lavish dinners and wear exquisitely cut coats. Or Mr Puffington, who becomes master of the Hanby hounds “because he thought they would give him consequence.”

Surtees knew that there was much more to hunting than the chase itself. Writing about huntsmen also meant writing about ostlers and eligible young women, coaching inns and ball rooms, grocers and gentry, horse-traders and dandies. Jorrocks himself is no drawling squire, but a Cockney grocer made good, who hunts because he loves it. This all chimes with a point that defenders of trail hunting have made time and again: that it’s much more than an activity. It is a community, stretching back through time, that provides meaning and belonging to a much wider variety of people than is commonly acknowledged. The communal aspect of hunting was appreciated long ago. In a 1680 poem called “The Fox-Hunting”, an entire village comes out to watch the chase. Excited mothers throw down their children, farmers cheer, and even the vicar gets involved: “A clergy-man I understand / Unto this sport was hasted / Having a psalm-book in his hand / And at the fox he cast it.”

Still, Surtees was a clear-eyed sort with no illusions about human nature. As Rob Williams, chairman of the R. S. Surtees Society, told me: “Mr Sponge loves hunting and very little else, but the people he meets mainly pretend to love it – because they think it lends them social ton or will help them with finding a wife.” Reading Surtees for the hunting scenes is like reading Patrick O’Brian for the naval battles — yes, they occur, but less often than you might expect, and they aren’t really the point of the enterprise. Surtees lavishes far more attention on the foibles of his infuriating, delightful characters than on hunting. But the hunt is always his point of departure, his gateway into broader human comedy.

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Take the moment that Mr Sponge and a friend write up the day’s chase for the local newspaper. Full of energy and enthusiasm, they sit down to compose their article. The procrastination begins at once. First, cigars are smoked. Next, dry ink is revived. Then they discover that the pens are “clotted up to the hocks with ink, or split all the way through”. Would you believe it, there’s no penknife either. After much discussion, a straight razor is found and used to achieve a writing point. Satisfied, the men sit down once more. Silence. How to begin? “‘Begin!’ replied Jack, ‘begin, oh, begin, just as you usually begin.’” The silence deepens. Eventually, a first sentence is dragged onto the page. But is it quite right? Was the pack splendid or stunning? And so it continues. “You don’t s’pose one’s pen goes of itself,” growls Soapey, a complaint familiar to anyone who has written anything longer than a tweet.

The real pleasure of Surtees is found in scenes like this. Small moments of human frustration, tightened into humor. There are many other reasons to read him. When Jorrocks rides down the Strand in full hunting rig, Surtees delivers the feel (and vanished Cockney accents) of early Victorian London by introducing a crowd of piss-taking newspaper boys: “My eyes, vot a swell! — vot a shocking bad hat! — vot shocking bad breeches!” This gift for atmosphere extends to the small struggles of daily life. Sponge and his acquaintances are on a constant quest for a warm room and good food. “Great was the noise of eating” is a typical Surtees line.

The writing is always clear. The plot, less so. No straight shots on the turnpike here, but stately tours along winding, tree-choked lanes, with the occasional need to jump a fence and hack across country. Surtees’s books are huge and meandering. Like Sponge’s horses, they set their own pace. Characters appear, have great attention lavished on their appearance and background, and then wander off for 200 pages. Some are never seen again. Storylines come and go, gleefully abandoned if it means time can be spent in Mr Jawleyford’s vulgar new gallery or plotting new job prospects with saucy grooms like Peter Leather. Surtees is made for dipping, each chapter offering a self-contained narrative and a return to a familiar, comforting fictional world.

When Charles Whibley wrote of the hunting field’s abolition, it was as a rhetorical flourish. A century later, both Surtees’s novels and long rural tradition have faded to the margins. When Labour’s ban on trail hunting goes ahead, England will become a little less lived in. For many, this will be good news. For others, it will be the end of a way of life. This is true of huntsmen themselves, but also the tailors and the hounds and the crowds that come out every Boxing Day. Any good anthropologist would include hunt saboteurs, too, who may find that they miss their own sense of purpose and community when the last horn sounds.

But Surtees would not approve of too much gloom. This is a good time of year to read him, especially if, like Mr Jorrocks, you require a period of quiet convalescence after “too much roast-beef and plum-pudding at Christmas, and prolonging the… festivities a little beyond the season allowed by Moore’s Almanack.” While it’s unlikely that he will ever be a household name again, the vanished England which Surtees wryly recorded and affectionately mocked remains an object of fascination for many. And, as Rob Williams points out, there will always be a market for “his relish in exposing cant and teasing the faux-pious.” The R.S. Surtees Society has kept his books in print, ready for another generation of readers. Like Mr Sponge, the novels of Surtees have proved adept at securing new, if tenuous, lodgings. Let’s hope the invitations never dry up.

At first, Seymour wondered whether anyone would reply to his invitation. He needn’t have worried. “Within a fortnight I had sufficient material to make a book,” he recalled later; “within a month I had so much material that I could pick and choose.” Seymour’s True Irish Ghost Stories was published the following year. Reading the book on the last train home, my face doubling in the window during the black interludes between stations, I wondered what a more modest appeal for Irish ghost stories would produce today. So I began to ask around.

Claire, one of the people I heard from, used to work in the Old Library at Queen’s University Belfast. One evening, not long before closing time, a man strolled in through the door. Normally Claire would approach latecomers to remind them that the library would soon shut. But on this occasion, she decided to leave well alone. “I made a snap judgment”, she says, “that there was something a bit off about him, and actually I didn’t want to speak with him unless I had to”. He was dressed in an antiquated fawn raincoat, and there was something strange about the way he moved through the old building, first built in 1868 and subject to many changes since. “His path through the library,” Claire says, “just seemed somehow out of line with the entrances and archways.”

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He walked deeper into the library, towards an area dedicated to reference works, and disappeared from view. When the time came to close up, Claire realized that she hadn’t seen the man leave. Not wanting to lock him in for the night, she went looking for him in the reference section. He was nowhere to be found. She thought little of it at the time, despite his unsettling demeanor. He must have left without her noticing. It was only years later that she discovered two things. First, that a student once claimed to have seen a man walk through the wall of the reference section. Second, “there used to be an exit in that area, that had later been blocked off. It was behind the wall.”

A ghost in the workplace is unnerving enough. But while haunted libraries can be avoided if need be, there is no avoiding your own home — a place where, as Seymour noted, the “poor human being is placed at such a disadvantage”. Orla, another contributor, was three years old when she saw a ghost at her house in Portstewart. She doesn’t remember the experience herself, but the story has entered family legend. “My grandfather had died the week before,” she tells me. “Apparently I was looking out through the door into the hallway and saying ‘Poppa, Poppa, I want to see Poppa’.” Orla’s mother said that there was no one there. Orla insisted that there was. “My mother was genuinely spooked, I think because I was so earnest about it,” Orla recalls. “Things like that are scary enough to experience yourself, but it’s worse to see it through the eyes of your child.”

Seymour didn’t believe that Ireland was any more haunted than other parts of the world. Nor did he think that the Irish were any more given to superstition than the average Englishman. He did, however, suspect that religion had a role to play. As an Anglican cleric, he wondered whether Irish Catholicism had incorporated “certain elements which may be traced back to pre-Christian times” — resulting in a more richly supernatural cultural lexicon. This is rather amusing coming from a man who had written a book about witches and subsequently spent a year eagerly collecting ghost stories for publication, especially since a great many of his respondents were Protestants themselves.

Nevertheless, it’s certainly true that Ireland can draw on a wealth of ancient ghostly lore. One of the earliest Irish ghost stories appears in the Ulster Cycle, a series of linked epic tales preserved in medieval manuscripts, but certainly much older. The Adventures of Nera takes place on Samhain night, at the court of Queen Medb at Raíth Cruachan. When Nera is challenged to tie a supple twig around the ankle of a hanged man, the swinging corpse offers him helpful advice on how best to secure the binding. He then demands a drink, and Nera carries him from house to house until something is found to quench the cadaver’s thirst. Things go downhill from there, as Nera is subjected to horrifying visions of destruction and eventually finds himself in the Otherworld. This is a truly Irish tale, born of the island’s ancient literature. The complex of archaeological sites associated with Cruachan still lie in County Roscommon today, as does the so-called “Cave of Cats”  — a granite opening said to be one of the entrances to the Otherworld.

Other phantasmagorical traditions have emerged over the years. There’s an entire scholarly industry devoted to what you might call the “Irish Protestant weird”, exemplified in the fiction of Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell. And, of course, each townland will have its own stories, its own reservations about certain lanes or bridges after night has fallen.

If I have a misgiving about Seymour’s book, it’s that his tales don’t reflect the depth and complexity of Ireland’s ghostly cultures, whose antiquity and energetic cross-pollination resist summary. For the most part, they are ghost stories that happen in Ireland, not Irish ghost stories. You could transpose them to Caithness or Norfolk without losing much. This may have something to do with his method of collection. Ask the readers of The Irish Times for paranormal experiences and you are going to receive answers from a very particular stratum of society.

Yet there are certain threads that feel quite specific to Ireland, chiefly the matter-of-fact way in which the supernatural is discussed. So, when a visiting Major is shoved awake in the middle of the night and grasps a human hand, “warm, plump, and soft”, the servants inform him that this is merely old Aunt Betty, 50 years in the grave. And when a squireen is driven from his new country pile by phantom knocks at the front door, a local herdsman says not to worry — it’s just the specter of a former resident. Yes, it’s a bit of a nuisance, but the knocking will stop in time. If Seymour’s tales seem a bit dated, then consider the 2015 case of Jack McKee. A councilor in Larne, McKee objected to the installation of a plaque in memory of eight women and one man who were pilloried and jailed as witches in 1711. His grounds for complaint were simple: he “could not tell whether or not the women were rightly or wrongly convicted”.

Orla agrees there’s a frankness about ghostly matters in Ireland. Recently, sitting with her boyfriend’s family, she realized that everyone had a tale to tell, including one alarming experience of a headless rider on the Donegal backroads. When I ask whether she thinks that Ireland is a more haunted place than England, a country with its own proud ghostly traditions, she doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely. 100%. Perhaps because a lot of bad things happened here. Or whether we’re just more likely to take this stuff seriously… But it’s not a reach to say this is a much ghostlier country [than England]. There’s definitely truth in that.”

Naturally, Ireland has always had its skeptics too. A flick through the August 1812 edition of the Belfast Monthly Magazine uncovers a pseudonymous piece entitled “On Ghosts”. The author wonders why, given the marvelous advances of the age, so “many remnants of superstition still linger amongst us”. He concludes that stories learned in childhood are chiefly to blame, and admits that “in spite of skepticism, I am rather afraid to remain in a room without light, which I ascribe to the numerous hobgoblin stories I heard in infancy”. Even William Carleton, the great 19th-century collector of Irish folk tales, warned against “the popular nonsense of ghosts”. This would be a more forceful statement if it did not come at the end of “The Fate of Frank M’Kenna”, in which Carleton breathlessly relates the tale of a ghost who insists on the charitable donation of his best breeches.

Still, even those who are unconvinced by ghostly phenomena can have uncanny things happen to them. At the age of seven, Stephen attended a family wedding at Glenavna House Hotel in Whiteabbey, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where he and his cousin spent the day playing in the grounds. “We were just running about, and the two of us saw…” He pauses for a slightly embarrassed laugh and continues: “When we saw what we immediately went and told people was a ghost of a young woman wearing blue.” She was moving through the trees. And then she wasn’t. Gone. “We both saw this independently. And it wasn’t as if either of us were prone to making shit up, basically. But whatever we saw, we saw something.”

Stephen doesn’t believe he saw a ghost that day, merely describing the experience, and what followed, as “a deeply weird coincidence.” Weird enough to remember — and weird enough to bear repeating long after that afternoon in Whiteabbey. Because, as with Claire, the conclusion came some time afterwards: “It must have been 15 years later that I found out about a particularly grisly murder that happened there, almost in the exact spot that we supposedly saw whatever we saw.”

Like Orla, Stephen thinks there’s something about Ireland. A small tremble where there should be stillness. In part, he attributes this to both geography and history, an island at the end of Europe that has seen centuries of turmoil. “The wound of the famine is surely in a collective residual memory in one way or another,” he says. “I can’t imagine that there isn’t something that’s left after that. So I think that there’s not a lot of…” He pauses, hunts for words. “English rationality kind of doesn’t exist in the same way.” He finishes with another laugh.

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I’m not sure I believe in English rationality — the oeuvre of M.R. James is dedicated to the slow sanding away of that particular veneer — but I take Stephen’s point. It seems to me that ghost stories are a good way of metabolizing time, change and pain. They may not be believed by the listener, or even by the teller. When Claire, Orla and Stephen speak to me, they all give caveats of one sort or another. None are convinced that they saw a ghost. And yet the unsettling moment is remembered. The story is told.

“On November eve,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “the dead are abroad, and dance with the fairies.” Halloween or Samhain, whichever you prefer, is a time for uncanny tales. Most of all, a time for tales that encourage us to pay attention. Stephen likens ghost stories to old customs around fairy thorns. “You don’t cut down hawthorn trees,” he says. “They serve a purpose in the places that they are. I’d wonder if seemingly irrational explanations for things are actually the result of however many hundreds of generations of received wisdom.” Perhaps strange stories and traditions, whether Irish or English, have this in common: they invite us to take care. To pay close attention to the world around us. They remind us of doors, long bricked-up, waiting patiently behind the wall.

The series begins in 1868. Sir Benjamin Guinness is dead, and his two eldest sons inherit what is now Ireland’s largest brewing concern. From small beginnings in 1759, when Arthur Guinness took out a 9,000-year lease on a site at St James’s Gate in Dublin (rent: £45 per annum), the eponymous stout had gained ground year on year. A degree of brand recognition must have been achieved by 1815, when a cavalry officer found himself desperate for a jar of the black stuff after sustaining wounds at Waterloo. “When I was sufficiently recovered to be able to take some nourishment,” he wrote, “I felt the most extraordinary desire for a glass of Guinness.” By 1840, more Guinness was sold in England than Ireland, and when Sir Benjamin died, the brewery was on the cusp of global success.

House of Guinness follows Sir Benjamin’s children as they scheme, slurp and swive their way through Victorian Dublin. Some work hard, others hardly work. This is all a good laugh, but the most interesting thing is not what these baby Guinnesses do, but who they are. In the words of one proto-Republican, the Guinness family are “the Protestant gentry that make us Irish suffer at the hands of the British.” Another character refers dismissively to “dice-rolling Protestants.” And these brewers aren’t just Protestant. They’re English, too. The family feels the weight of this identity, knowing that success in business has brought other, unwanted responsibilities. When a homosexual Guinness is blackmailed, he is warned that “The Fenians would use you as proof of a degenerate English Protestant ruling class.”

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All this might come as a surprise to some international viewers. House of Guinness is, in part, the story of how a quintessentially Protestant product became a quintessentially Irish icon. Dramatic license is used in spades — each episode begins with the legend, “This fiction is inspired by true stories” — but confusion about whether England or Ireland is home surfaces frequently and rings true. Arthur, the eldest Guinness brother, educated at Eton and living in London, is chided for his English accent and rigid Unionism. His younger brother Edward, raised in Dublin, has a more pragmatic view of the Irish question. Taken together, the two young men embody the contradictions of their ethnicity and class. Knight sensibly avoids the term “Anglo-Irish”, but that is what they are, or at least what they had become.

Who were the Anglo-Irish? Mainly the scions of those English colonists granted large estates during the plantations of the early 1600s, and in the wake of Cromwell’s Irish wars. Still, it’s an elastic term, and includes the Gaelic nobility and descendants of Norman invaders who converted to Protestantism to retain land and status, as well as those who had done well enough in business or politics to gain entry to Dublin’s ballrooms.

In Brendan Behan’s 1958 play, The Hostage, an Anglo-Irishman is defined simply: “A Protestant with a horse.” But not just any Protestant. These, after all, are established Church of Ireland types rather than Methodists or Presbyterians. Work is important, too, or rather the lack of it. Their days, Behan wrote, are spent “riding horses, drinking whiskey and reading double-meaning books in Irish at Trinity College.” He evokes a leisured people, and by implication a landed people, whose only true passion has four muscular legs and an alluring whicker. Still, he was a clubbable sort. He’d mock the Anglo-Irish on stage and gladly accept their hospitality off it. At the height of his fame he was a regular guest at Luggala, the Guinness family pile in County Wicklow. Some say he was even asked to write a slogan for the brand. I can’t find any evidence for that claim one way or the other. The only certainty is that Behan’s reputed suggestion — “Guinness gets you drunk” — was never used.

The Guinness who took out a lease at St James’s Gate in 1759 wouldn’t qualify as Anglo-Irish according to Behan’s definition. This wasn’t just about English heritage, after all, but class. The first Arthur Guinness had little money and no status, and you’d need at least one of those to count. But in the era covered by House of Guinness, things were changing. Sir Benjamin was the first member of the family to receive a knighthood. His son, Edward, was created Baron Iveagh in 1891. The baronetcy was named for a certain Magennis of Iveagh, who was “re-granted” his 22,000 acres of Ulster in 1623, presumably after conversion from Catholicism. This connection is probably hogwash, as nothing is known about the Guinness family before 1690, but the attempt to anchor themselves within the ranks of the old Gaelic nobility is revealing. In part, this was a natural desire to present themselves as being of ancient stock. But searching for a fantastic origin in a long-ago Ireland also betrayed an Anglo-Irish anxiety about where, exactly, home was to be found.

It’s no accident that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, arguably the first Irish novel, is concerned with precisely these anxieties. Published in 1800, the satire charts the decline of an Anglo-Irish dynasty as seen through the eyes of the family retainer, Thady Quirk. Quirk — who is either loyal to a fault or completely full of shit, depending on your reading — watches four generations of Rackrents succumb to folly and distraction. Each exhibits the traditional, if exaggerated, maladies of their class: profligacy, litigiousness, absenteeism, cruelty, indebtedness. The Rackrents fail their tenants, who are left at the mercy of viperous middle-men, and who are often forced from their tenancies altogether. Yet they also fail their own flesh and blood. Wives are tortured, heirs are few and far between, and no thought is given to the security of the next generation. Edgeworth, herself of Anglo-Irish stock, turns the increasingly decrepit “Big House”, with its broken windows and leaking roof, into a tiny model of Ireland. Her unspoken question is: who would treat their true home in such a way?

In the end, the whole estate passes into the ownership of Thady’s son, Jason. Young Quirk, who works as the family’s land agent, uses his mastery of property law and accountancy to ease house and lands from Rackrent hands. Acre by acre, stable by lodge, he deploys the English weapons of lawbook and ledger to secure his own landowning dynasty. The scholar George Watson has described the novel as “an Anglo-Irish nightmare”, and whether by accident or design, the same dynamic appears in House of Guinness. While the children squabble, Mr Rafferty, their looming foreman, quietly extends his authority throughout the brewery and into the most private reaches of the family itself.

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Bad dreams needn’t have worried the Guinnesses. They had a great advantage over older Anglo-Irish families, who by the late 19th century relied on ever-diminishing rents to service ever-growing debts. Unlike the others, though, people always wanted to buy what the Guinnesses were selling, and there was always more to sell. You can’t brew up more land, but stout is a truly renewable resource, and the thirst for it is just as inexhaustible. House of Guinness contains some sharp scenes where the daughters of grand, penniless old dynasties deign to marry “a brewer”. The Guinnesses gain access to aristocratic bloodlines, and the aristocrat gains an orangery overlooking the sixpence-sweep of Dublin Bay.

The pedigree aristos got the best of the deal. The show never openly states that the age of Big Houses and huge estates was coming to an end, but the drama is heavy with the sense that time is being called for all but the wealthiest. The generous terms of the 1903 Land Act saw large numbers of the Anglo-Irish sell their estates, often for more than they were worth. Some downsized to Dublin townhouses; others left Ireland for good. Their last show of strength came in 1914, when Anglo-Irishmen made up a third of the British officer corps.

There are still a few of them about, of course, though they tend to live quietly. If the Anglo-Irish are spoken of at all in Ireland today, it is usually in the wry register that Behan employed. Perhaps their continued relevance to contemporary Irish culture lies, above all, in fiction. The Big House novel is now an established genre, presided over by the ghosts of its three greatest practitioners: Elizabeth Bowen, J. G. Farrell, and Molly Keane.

And then there are the houses themselves. Stripped and lonely, shivering on hills or choked by trees, most have been left to rot away. And while the Irish Georgian Society — founded in 1958 by none other than Sir Desmond Guinness — continues to campaign for the preservation of beautiful buildings, much has been lost forever. Few of the Anglo-Irish learned the lesson that the brewing Guinnesses knew so well: the best legacies are liquid.

Carnac is a longish poem named after the Breton coastal town where Guillevic spent his early years. Over 3,000 megaliths stud the surrounding countryside, arranged in lines and circles, the remnants of a thriving and adaptable stone-raising culture. The earliest signs of settled human habitation in the region may date to 5,700 BC, while the first stones seem to have been raised 1,000 years later. This was Guillevic’s inheritance as a small boy in the 1910s, a policeman’s son who stared out to sea and played among ancient stones. “One is amidst the unknown, surrounded by mystery,” he wrote later. “One is in the sacred.”

As a child, Guillevic noticed something strange. He was living in a country called France, yet hardly anyone spoke French. This was the language of school, where a sentence in Breton would earn you the same punishment as spitting on the floor. Nevertheless, one word of the region’s indigenous language would stick: menhir, literally a “long stone.” Menhirs were more than words for him, of course. His family lived on the second floor of a house, and there were no public parks nearby. So he played among the stones at Ménec — according to his mother, that was where he learned to walk. Though he moved to Alsace at the age of 12, where he was shocked by the soft landscape of forested hills, Guillevic never really left Carnac.

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He studied mathematics and took a job in the tax office in Paris. When the war came, he joined the resistance and became a communist. Montague described the mature Guillevic as “smallish, thick-set, raucous-voiced, with the craggy dome of an intelligent simian, and a sudden smile which lit the beard and large glinting glasses.” He seems to have been happy enough in the capital, but the menhirs followed him. They recur in his poetry like a first love. Sources of wonder, melancholy, and laughter. He gave them strange powers of movement and surprise. The stones of Carnac were not static monuments to be measured and studied. They were unruly, even horny. In his first collection, Terraqué (1942), we find megaliths up to no good when the sun goes down: “The menhirs come and go at night / And nibble one another.”

This isn’t a bad time to read about megaliths. Stone-fanciers seem to be enjoying a solstice moment. Social media accounts dedicated to henges, dolmens, passage tombs, geoglyphs and peculiar mounds are springing up everywhere. The excellent Weird Walk, a zine dedicated to “wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles,” is full of articles on old stones, cheese-lore, and instances of the uncanny in Midsomer Murders. More broadly, there seems to be a growing appetite for folk traditions and local legends, whether in the form of light-hearted BBC documentaries or the books of Francis Young.

Naturally, stone circles have always been objects of intense curiosity. John Aubrey showed an enthusiastic Charles II around Avebury in 1663. We can date written analysis of Britain’s ancient monuments from the publication of William Camden’s Britannia in 1586, but interest in the subject surely extends much further back; even the most incurious Wiltshire serfs must have glanced up at Stonehenge from time to time and wondered what the hell it was all about.

Guillevic was no Aubrey or Camden. He did not want to explain the stones of Brittany. He wanted to live among them. Carnac was published in 1961. Guillevic viewed it as a collection of 150 short poems, but all those little pebbles form a single cairn. It is a sea poem, a stone poem: “From the sea to the menhirs / From the menhirs to the sea / The same road, two contrary winds / With the one from the sea / Full of the other’s murder.” The sea, formless and jealous, is a sinister presence. It resents the old stones, perhaps for their solidity, perhaps for their suggestion of order, perhaps because they were erected by creatures who chose to walk rather than swim. For the sea, perhaps, there could be no greater insult.

The poem’s charm and power rest on such musings. Guillevic proudly claimed to be “a man from prehistory,” and Carnac is a tongue-in-cheek experiment in Stone Age thought. The same subjects are returned to over and over again. Menhirs, sun, sea, and rock pools are poked at and sniffed, sometimes even tasted. They are examined from every angle. What are they? What do they want? At one point Guillevic mocks up a mythological system, relating a daily battle between sun and surf. Elsewhere, he muses on the significance of moorland, the nature of seaweed.

“I believed in answers from stone,” he wrote. The stones are at the heart of it all. Guillevic never tackled their mystery head-on. He had no interest in reducing the menhirs of Carnac to mere archaeology. He offered up playful theories colored by his own eccentric, deeply felt understanding of the region. The sea threatened humans with madness; the stones were there to protect them. Or the circles and lines of shaped rock were a Neolithic Genesis, a record of Creation: “Something happened at Carnac / A long time ago. / Something which matters / And you say, light…”

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In his autobiography, Vivre en Poésie (1980), Guillevic compared the Carnac of his childhood to its modern incarnation. The results were not favorable. “Now,” he wrote, “Carnac is ruined by all the villas and tourism and petrol pumps. But there is something left of it…” That something was “Carnac-préhistoire”, which he regarded as his home. For Guillevic, this was not necessarily in the past. This was a place, after all, “Somehow far from everything / Which proceeds beneath time.” Holiday homes and petrol stations can’t compete with that.

This is the appeal of old stones. My own local dolmen, which crouches within an earthwork ring on the southern edge of Belfast, is no match for the alignments of Carnac in age or scale. But it too seems immune to passing indignities. Last summer there was talk of temporarily closing the place due to the prodigious amount of dog shit left by careless visitors. And I once saw a young man climb onto the stones, standing at the highest point of the sloping quoit in tracksuit and glaring white trainers, laughing down at his girlfriend. I was disgusted, but I also knew that it didn’t matter, not really. This dolmen had seen worse. Stripped of its earthen mound, excavated and robbed, its first name forgotten. The stones sat in shroomy indifference, just as they have since 2,700 BC, and will do long after those white trainers are regarded as an antique mode of dress.

If the number of stone-lovers is quietly on the rise, I suspect this is at the root of it. Lichen aside, not much sticks to a megalith. Philosophy and politics start to look like small, cramped things next to them. Their original function is largely lost, and this is a great part of their power. You can only use menhirs as Guillevic did, as dreaming machines. A lesser poet might have written about his own childhood in Carnac. But he knew that the stones gave him an opportunity to go deeper and wider. Carnac is not a record of little Eugène’s childhood — it is about the childhood of our whole species. From the old stones come touch, fear, form. As Guillevic wrote: “From the middle of the menhirs / the world appears.”

This is rough upland, yolky with whin and nearly silent. I hear breeze and birdsong, sheep exchanging peevish mehs, and the tick of the tractor’s cooling engine. Once I’ve assured the farmer that I have no connection to the mining industry, he opens up a little, talks about his fears. “All that toxic waste,” he says. “We want to keep it like it is: green fields. We’re thinking about the next generation.”

It’s a perfect soundbite, delivered with something approaching weariness. This is understandable. The affair has dragged on for years and years. Dalradian began exploratory work at Curraghinalt in 2009, and submitted their first planning application for a mine in 2017. When this was rejected by Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure, the firm submitted revised applications in 2019 and 2020. A long-awaited inquiry into the proposed mine by the Planning Appeals Commission was suspended last year, and put on hold again in January 2025. A final decision on the project, promised for early May, has yet to materialize.

Dalradian has already completed 190,000 meters of exploratory drilling. Significant deposits of gold, silver and copper have been identified, alongside minerals like cobalt and tellurium. The company estimates that the mine would produce 3.5 million ounces of gold, 1.7 million ounces of silver, and 15,000 tons of copper over its two-decade lifespan. In addition, Dalradian promises the creation of 1,000 jobs, and a £1 billion boost to the regional economy, together with £4 million worth of investment in local community groups. When the mining is complete, a comprehensive decommissioning process would return the site to something like its former glory. An exquisitely curated website envisions a “state-of-the-art modern underground mine”.

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Some welcome the prospect of employment and investment in a region where good jobs are hard to come by. A group called The Silent Majority says it’s “positive about the idea of a good well-paid, well-regulated industry like mining coming to our locality”. Yet this view doesn’t seem to be widely shared by people on the ground, whether it’s local farmers or the residents of the nearby village of Greencastle. There’s a seam of tension beneath the green fields, the kind of tension that leads a farmer to quiz a walker on a tranquil lane. As he starts his tractor and pulls away, he calls out to me: “You’ll likely be stopped again.”

A short stroll brings me to a barbed wire fence. This is as close as you can get to Curraghinalt’s southern boundary. There’s a sign on the fence, cleanly stenciled in arterial red. A skull and crossbones, universal symbol for poison, and a simple message: “DALRADIAN OUT OF IRELAND”. Then I turn around and see the valley beneath me. The little fields lock together, up and down they go, all the way to far mountains, purple as bruises on the horizon. This isn’t gentle countryside. It’s a shaggy, pubescent place. There’s brown sedge and the croziers of new bracken pushing up, cotton grass and heather and stunted trees just blurring into leaf.

This is what the farmer wants to protect. Dalradian states that their work would be ecologically sound, and has repeatedly and vigorously denied that the mine would produce toxic waste. Early plans to use cyanide at the mining site were withdrawn by the company after the failure of their first planning application, and they maintain that there is no danger of water pollution. Not everyone is convinced.

Just last week, An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland, published a report highlighting several areas of concern. They submit that the risk of a “toxic slurry” formed of sulfuric acid, mercury and arsenic leaching from mined rock has not been fully addressed. Furthermore, An Taisce argue that wastewater from the mine, due to be discharged into the Owenreagh and Owenkillew rivers, will contain heavy metals like cadmium and lead.

Even if these concerns were baseless, it seems obvious that a mine would irrevocably change the character of the region. The Sperrins are an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. While this doesn’t protect the region from large-scale development altogether, it does mean that the local authority has a duty to “preserve and enhance the beauty of the area”. Of course, this is a working landscape already; tractors and vans are part and parcel of rural life. But the thought of huge trucks coming and going from Curraghinalt on these narrow roads is a grim one. It’s difficult to imagine a similar proposal getting this far in the Cotswolds.

“Are you a stranger?” The woman pops around a bend in the track and starts talking. She offers to squire me around for a bit, as long as I don’t name her. “A local woman,” I say, and she laughs. “Yes, that’ll do well.” We dander along the path that traces Curraghinalt’s southern boundary and chat about the mine. “Oh, it’s been total division,” she tells me. “Nearly caused war.” Division between locals, one of whom is said to have sold some land to Dalradian, and division between the community and the big corporation. Both sides have accused each other of intimidatory behavior in the past. I tell the woman about the farmer’s suspicion of me, and she nods. Dalradian has seeded mistrust among otherwise warm and generous people here. Even before it’s been approved, the proposed mine has become “an unhealthy intrusion into people’s lives”.

My guide is horrified by the potential for pollution and the destruction of the region’s way of life. But what really gets her going is the money. “Some people are always looking for the next big money spin. You know: ‘I’m all in — who can get the biggest chip? It doesn’t matter who I trample over, or the land or the culture, let’s take it all.’ And then deciding, ‘I’ve not got enough, so I’ll go back for some more.’ It’s just infinite greed.”

We’re admiring some sheep when a car pulls up. A man jumps out and the questions start again. Who am I? What am I doing? He points at my notebook: “What are you writing?” Again, there’s tension and suspicion. Who do I write for? I consider answering “Mining Illustrated but decide this isn’t the time for levity. Again, I explain that I’m here to research an article about the project, nothing more. Again, the tension passes. His face loosens into a smile, and he becomes affable and welcoming. He’s happy to talk, but he too opts for anonymity: “Keep my name out of it.”

“You can see what we stand to lose here,” he says. He sweeps his arm over the fields, full of pride. “[Dalradian] are going to destroy everything. It’s common sense.” I ask about his hopes for the planning inquiry and he shrugs, clearly not expecting much. But he’s quietly confident that the local community will win the day. “We’ll fight it out,” he grins. “Too many people spent too long keeping [this land] to lose it over this.” As he drives off, the woman turns to me and says, “If that man thought you were with Dalradian, he’d have chased you.”

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I walk out to the edge of a small field, the site of many protests over the years. The focal point is a group of trailers draped in banners. The largest reads: “We are not afraid. This is our land. This is our home. We will die for it.” Someone has painted “GPO” onto the rocks here. The acronym stands for Greencastle People’s Office, but inevitably calls Dublin’s General Post Office to mind, the Easter Rising given new meaning on a hillside in County Tyrone. On a gate further down the track, a big sign offers an even clearer message: “OVER OUR DEAD BODIES”. Dabs of red paint around the words recall drops of blood.

Criticism of the proposed mine has focused on its potential impact on land and water. Less has been said about the impact it has already had on the people themselves. Many locals have endured years of strain and uncertainty, and can only continue to protest as the planning inquiry staggers around like a drunk looking for a dropped key. Still, if exhaustion was going to set in it would have done so by now. When we say goodbye, the local woman shakes my hand and says, “If they go ahead with the mine, I’ll be leaving.” But I don’t believe her.

“Normalcy bias is very powerful,” says David Betz. “It keeps people in their homes when they’re warned Category 5 hurricanes are coming at them.” Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. He’s pretty sure that civil war is coming. Not a civil war that we have been trained to recognize. There will be no ordered forces of uniformed troops, no Edgehill or Gettysburg. He foresees something messier, perhaps even more painful, like an abscessed tooth fragmenting in the mouth.

Betz speaks in calm, measured tones. There is very little umming or ahhhing. He quietly explains why what counts as normal in many Western countries today — the UK, the US, France, to name a few — has created ideal conditions for mass violence, dissolving government authority, and even social collapse. The factors at play are varied. The alarming thing is that they are all present at the same time. “To use the cliché,” Betz says, “it’s kind of a perfect storm.”

Anyone with eyes, no matter their political sympathies, knows that something is badly askew. Perhaps this is why Betz’s recent podcast appearance — 186,000 views, and climbing — received so much attention. So often, it is the little things. Visiting London last December, I noticed that the platform waiting room at Acton Town tube station had been locked. A sign on the door read: “THIS IS NOT A TOILET”. I passed that way again this week, to discover the door still locked and the sign still in place. The sign is wrong, of course. If a waiting room is consistently used as a toilet, then it’s no longer a waiting room. It is a toilet.

Everyone has their own examples of this granular decay. Think of the rats, so plump off Birmingham rubbish they’re now the size of cats; or the metal security tags protecting $4 fish fillets; or the depthless cringe of police officers who dress up as Batman and Robin to catch con artists within spitting distance of Parliament.

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Betz works with larger themes. Falling living standards and a dearth of well-paid jobs create an “expectation gap”, seeding resentment and apathy through whole generations. The creeping normalization of identitarian factionalism across British life, both daily and political, weakens our ability to function as a coherent nation. Unprecedented levels of immigration produce growing anxiety in the majority population, an anxiety that may metastasize into something darker. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Betz brings up a rising crisis of government legitimacy: “The primary thing to be tested is legitimacy. If you have legitimacy, you have no insurgent problem. If you don’t, you are very likely to have an insurgent problem. It’s as simple as that.”

In his academic work, Betz has described legitimacy as a kind of magic spell. If polls are anything to go by, it’s a spell that has now been well and truly broken: a record 45% of Brits “almost never” trust the government to put the nation first. As the academic says: “There has been a collapse in trust over the course of a generation.” The once awesome magus has been revealed as a syphilitic old soak, his robes stained sacking, his staff a rolled newspaper. Public trust in politicians, then, is at an all-time low (“Journalists aren’t much more trusted,” he adds in a wry aside), but Betz is deeply worried that faith in all kinds of institutions is diminishing rapidly.

There are often very good reasons for this trust deficit, especially in areas like crime and punishment. Take the recent furor over sentencing. “It’s ridiculous to deny that we have a two-tier justice system,” Betz says. “Just last week, the Justice Secretary said the sentencing guidelines are two-tier. Which begs the question of what a Justice Secretary is for… It’s outrageous.” Things are no better at the other end of the justice system. “Our police establishment is not neutral. It’s heavily politically biased,” he says, even as the Met fails to solve any neighborhood crime across swathes of the capital.

No trust means no legitimacy. And that’s when everything begins to unravel. Central government loses its gravitational pull on the populace, which proceeds to drift off into its constituent parts. If the state ceases to offer stability and justice, then people will do as the Romano-Britons did, and look to their own defense. There have been clues as to what this might mean in the coming years.

A recent video, purportedly from New Eltham, shows a street lined with Union flags. This is a perfectly normal sight in East Belfast, but comes as a surprise in South London. Perhaps it shouldn’t. The “Ulsterisation” of Britain in a purely visual sense — flags, murals, a repertoire of annual events designed to affirm and renew control over territory — might be welcomed by some as a simple acknowledgment of lived reality in many parts of the country. But the term means much more than a few flags snapping in the breeze. MacNeice called Ulster “the limbo lands”, a place unhappily webbed with competing claims and warring histories, never quite one thing and never quite the other. The danger is that this becomes Britain’s future too, with all that fate implies.

Betz thinks that conflict, widespread and devastating enough to qualify as a form of civil war, is now close to inevitable. “I don’t see an off-ramp from this,” he tells me. As MacNeice had it, “The bloody frontier converges on our beds / Like jungle beaters closing in on their destined / Trophy of pelts and heads.” Betz favors the work of another Irish poet. He quotes, as many have before him, W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”. The sickening vertigo of the falcon “turning and turning in the widening gyre”, beyond reason or recall, is a seven-word summary of Betz’s argument.

It is impossible to predict when this war will start, or what the inciting events might be. But Betz is pretty sure how it will be fought. Attacks on key infrastructure, most of it protected by no more than a locked door and a symbolic fence — gas compression stations, electricity substations, telecommunications cables, and the like — will be used to devastate cities and frustrate government attempts to restore order. Another Ulster parallel shows the effectiveness of these tactics. In March and April 1969, Loyalist paramilitaries bombed an electricity substation and a series of water installations, resulting in serious water shortages across Belfast. The Northern Irish prime minister of the time, Terence O’Neill, resigned on 1 May. O’Neill was beset by a great many problems, but he was in no doubt that those assaults on infrastructure dealt the final blow to his premiership. They were “explosions which quite literally blew me out of office”.

It doesn’t take a William Gibson to imagine the effect a similar, more prolonged campaign would have on London or Liverpool. “Cities will be dark, cold, rioting and unpoliced,” says Betz. The police barely managed to contain the 2011 London riots, a relatively small blister of disorder compared to the trouble he sees coming. “On any given night in 2011, there were maybe 200 really active rioters. Imagine that but 10 or 20 times worse, several thousand people rioting in a hardcore manner. And not just once, but every two weeks.” Any attempt to impose martial law would fail, given the military’s ever-shrinking manpower: “There’s no potential for the British army to respond to wide-scale civil disorder.”

Life would be desperate in those cold and lightless cities, returning us to earlier epochs but without the knowledge and materials that made such eras bearable. I think about the time I lost my glasses, and had replacements delivered within the week. Or about a friend with diabetes, who monitors her condition using a smartphone app and has an insulin pen in her handbag. All that would go, along with the cucumbers and the buses, the postmen and the bars of soap. The preppers would be all right for a time, until cold and hungry people discovered what they had, and took it from them. Betz observes that it wouldn’t be long before people start trying to heat their houses and apartments with whatever they have to hand — and once that starts, buildings will go up in flames. “Imagine,” he says, “half a dozen Grenfell Towers in a single winter.”

If Betz is correct in his analysis, then why aren’t preparations being made by the Government? The logical answer is that politicians lack both the ability and the desire to do their jobs. But there are some conscientious people in the British state. Betz has spoken to individuals within the security services who have reached similar conclusions to him, but “they’re embedded within a system that makes it practically impossible to address it openly… They’re very leery of thinking out loud, let alone planning for those contingencies, without a civil directive. It would take a very brave — morally brave — senior British police officer or military figure [to start planning], and it would probably be career-ending.”

Naturally, many in power simply don’t believe that prolonged mass violence is probable. The UK Government’s resilience website lists hazards ranging from severe weather to terrorism, but makes no mention of civil unrest, while Libération reports that a forthcoming French preparedness booklet will be primarily concerned with natural disasters. Perhaps politicians realize that any mention of civil war in an official publication would be a PR catastrophe. Or maybe they view Western citizens as simply too cosseted, too biddable. People raised amid relative plenty and security are simply not likely to erupt in significant numbers.

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Some might argue that this is especially true of Britain. The historian Robert Tombs writes that “as long as its present civilization lasts, England will not have a violent revolution, or a military coup, or a religious civil war”. The institutions and peoples of Britain, so the thinking goes, have profited from an English genius for innovation, adaptation, and compromise. In consequence, our island has been unusually stable for a thousand years. The key words, of course, are as long as its present civilization lasts. While it’s true that we have inherited a well of cool water, it’s not clear that we’ve continued to draw from it in recent times. It is also true, as Tombs himself points out, that the English are given to “a complacent and often apathetic assumption bred by a fortunate history that nothing seriously bad can happen”. This is one quintessentially Anglo characteristic that appears to be in rude health.

And if the prophets of eternal stability are proved wrong, there’s still room for hope. In How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, Professor Barbara F. Walter offers a number of strategies for pulling fragmented and unstable societies back from the brink. Leaders should seek compromise. Quality of governance should be improved, and be seen to be improving. Extremism should be combated, particularly where it has taken root in the state’s security apparatus. Efforts should be made to move towards “a truly multiethnic democracy”. Social media should be controlled in order to prevent pernicious factionalism: “Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls…” It all sounds very sensible. The problem, I suppose, is that countries on the brink of civil war don’t tend to be very sensible places.

Whether or not you find Betz’s arguments convincing, the chilling fact is that he doesn’t need to be wholly right. It seems to me that if even 20% of what he predicts does happen, then our lives will change, utterly and for the worse. For most of us, that would mean a smaller and more brutal world. There are so many variables that it’s a future almost impossible to plan for. Even so, Betz does have one piece of advice. “I’m a late middle-aged university professor, not a prepper,” he concedes. “I’m not sitting around planning my apocalyptic endgames… but for what it’s worth, I think anybody living in big cities — anybody in, say, London or Birmingham — should leave.”

It is difficult to consider a world so devoid of hope. Walking to Tesco’s in the spring sunshine, I feel my own normalcy bias bite. Do I really believe any of this? Surely things can’t be as bad as all that? Yet this uncritical faith in endless stability is precisely why we have arrived at a point where so many people are so angry, an anger that seems to be building by the month. I go home and open Autumn Journal again: “And so to my flat with the trees outside the window / And the dahlia shapes of the lights on Primrose Hill / Whose summit once was used for a gun emplacement / And very likely will / Be used that way again…”

“You know that film, The Titfield Thunderbolt? It’s an Ealing Comedy about a group of people who want to run their own railway line.” That’s what Parker’s readers want too. These layouts in back gardens across Britain range from tiny loops of track to colossal, intricate landscapes. Parker knows a guy whose line crosses Lilliputian bridges and snakes through mountains 10 feet tall. Layouts are much more than models, he says. They really are railways, albeit on a smaller scale than usual. A keen sense of ownership is important: “these are their railway lines.”

Ardent hobbyists are often viewed as eccentric. I think they might be the only normal people left. As a rule, they are active and engaged. They are more interested in making than consuming. They dream and they do. A passive appreciation for steam engines or military history or orchids isn’t enough. Hobbyists want to take part. “I grew up fascinated by history, and wargaming helps you make that interest interactive,” says Daniel Faulconbridge, editor of Wargames Illustrated. “It’s not good enough for me that I just read about the Battle of Hastings, I want to collect the figures that represent the troops that fought in the battle, and then paint them and play a game with them. So it’s taking your hobby to the Nth degree.”

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By Alexander Poots

Magazines like Garden Rail and Wargames Illustrated are at the heart of the hobby world. The variety is extraordinary. Hornby Magazine, Airfix Model World, The Orchid Review, Lute News. Monthly publications dedicated to remote control aircraft and koi keeping. Some hobbies have broader appeal than others — the UK has enough carp fishermen to support both Total Carp and CARPology. But even the more niche titles have a readership large enough to keep them viable in a brutal publishing environment.

“People often say, ‘wow you still produce a print magazine!’ Because obviously you see people on the train and most of them are looking at phones or screens, they’re not looking at newspapers and magazines,” says Faulconbridge. The physical hobby magazine has in fact proved surprisingly durable. Both Faulconbridge and Parker acknowledge that their readers tend to be older, and prefer print media because it’s what they grew up with. There’s also a practical aspect. If you’re following a guide to painting a model Landsknecht, it’s easier to have a paper copy open on the table than faff about with a phone or tablet. And there’s the love of magazines themselves. Many hobbyists will own collections going back decades. There are memories between those pages. Hobby memories, yes, but also recollections of long-ago bedrooms where the sunlight fell just like that across the carpet. Memories that can be unearthed with the flick of a finger. A digital archive can’t replicate that experience, especially since, as Parker points out, “the thing with a lot of digital media is you don’t really own it.” Paper and ink are there for as long as you want them. The same cannot be said for all of those zeros and ones.

Again and again when talking to Parker and Faulconbridge, I am struck by the emphasis on the physical. Hobbies are about doing things: planning, painting, building, contributing an article to your favorite magazine. “You come into a hobby and you’re not being encouraged to binge-watch something on the TV — which is a very, very passive activity — you’re being encouraged to have a go at something,” Parker observes. “We’re constantly saying to people, ‘Have a go!’”

Hanging out with like-minded people is the best way to have a go. Community is a word that comes up a lot in my chats with the editors. “Up and down the country, meeting in village halls and community centers, there are wargaming clubs that no one would ever know were there if they didn’t accidentally come across them,” says Faulconbridge. Parker emphasizes that railway modeling exhibitions are as much social gatherings as they are celebrations of the hobby. As anyone who has worked an allotment knows, shared enthusiasms have a way of collapsing social barriers. Parker remembers one exhibition where he sat around a pub table with “a physics professor, a guy who ran his own bus company, a Liberal Democrat councilor, a theatre manager, a bishop and two lawyers. Our common interest was model railways. You find yourself meeting a really wide variety of people.”

Still, it’s a mistake to think that these groups are purely focused on the hobby itself. Wargames and model railways are often the starting point for other things. Friendships are made, money is raised for charity, and support networks are formed. “Men are particularly bad at chatting,” says Parker. “But they will chat about steam engines and they will chat about garden railways, and that chat can then move on to more valuable topics. We run the largest model railway forum in the world, and tucked away on it is a prostate cancer discussion group.” The hobby becomes a conductor for the wider functions of any worthwhile community.

Hobby magazines survive because they are outgrowths of these communities. Most articles are written by hobbyists, in what Faulconbridge describes as “a fanzine approach”. Neither the editors nor the contributors are in it for the money. They just love it. In a recent thread on X, Stone Age Herbalist observed that the continued success of the hobby magazine can be attributed to a particularly British — and more broadly Northern European — genius for voluntary association. Whether centered around giant vegetables or antique fountain pens, little communities bubble up everywhere with no outside encouragement. I can’t help but wonder whether the British genius for immiseration also has a role to play. Lively minds will always find alternatives to decaying cities and nagging politicians.

Both Faulconbridge and Parker agree that there’s something in the water on our island. But neither are quite sure what that something is. Naturally, history plays a role. Although railway modeling is popular in other parts of the world — Germany, Belgium and Holland in particular — its spiritual home will always be the birthplace of the steam engine. And when it comes to fighting battles with armies of model soldiers, the US is the undisputed world leader. “Wargaming is bigger here than anywhere else. It started here. And throughout the Sixties and Seventies we had youngsters growing up reading magazines like Battle and Warlord, and building Airfix models as well. A lot of the early writers of wargames rules came from the US,” says Faulconbridge. He adds that the founding editor of Wargames Illustrated, Duncan Macfarlane, estimated that Britain contained 50% of the planet’s wargamers.

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That figure probably still stands up, doubtless bolstered by the growth of Games Workshop, whose range of tabletop games will be many people’s first taste of wargaming. It is no accident that Warhammer is one of contemporary Britain’s few home-grown success stories. When I mention this to Faulconbridge, who began his own working life in the Games Workshop mail order room, he laughs. “Games Workshop do help. You might think that there’d be no room whatsoever for lads playing with toy soldiers and rolling dice today, but they’ve managed to make a multi-million dollar industry out of it. As you say, one of England’s only exports is little men in packages.”

A link between hobbies and productive industry can also be found in the world of railway modeling. Parker tells me that, “I’ve just reviewed a loco from a company based in Doncaster, Roundhouse Engineering. You’d be amazed, we do still build steam locomotives in this country! It’s a proper Rolls Royce engine model, beautifully constructed. They do pretty much everything in-house.” This pride and attention to detail is at the root of what all hobbyists are up to. The sheer excitement of creation, of pouring your heart into something and sharing it with others, is its own healthy reward.

Hobby magazines are heartening advertisements for that reward. Planning, making, getting things wrong, having a laugh about it. Towards the end of our conversation, Parker muses on what his job really means. He starts a sentence and trails off. Hesitates, just for a moment. Perhaps he’s searching for the right word. Perhaps he’s worried about sounding pompous. Fortunately, his passionate nature wins out. He says what he wants to say: “We’re a little bit in the business of selling dreams.”

Around Christmastime, from mid-December on, there may be another sound. The mummers out doing their rounds. Cries in the lane and a knock at the door. The knocking is part of it. No one knocks normally: they come straight in. “Hello hello and how’s the form?” Knocking is strange, a sign that something out of the normal run will follow. A good knock sets the stage.

In comes a costumed man with a face of straw. He asks permission first. That’s important, too. He must be invited in, like a vampire or a tax official. No harm will come to a householder who refuses entry. Nothing will be broken, no hard words said. The straw man will simply go away and take his lurking friends with him. They will be disappointed, of course. But to take rebuffs well is part of the performance. Such courtliness distinguishes the mummer from other masked men abroad in the dark.

And if he is welcomed in? Then you get a good look at him in the lamplight. This is the Captain or Jester. In England they might call him Marshall or Tom Fool or Arthur Abland or Father Christmas or even Mother Christmas, depending where you are and when you are. But we are in Ulster, and so we’ll call him the Captain. He comes right into the kitchen with his head veiled by a cone of straw. This is the crucial time. He must take control of his audience and do it quick, before the strange and true can wither into the ridiculous. “Room room brave gallant boys, come give us room to Rhime…”

Now it starts in earnest. In comes the troupe. There could be five of them, there could be 15. It varies from place to place. The Captain introduces some boastful wag. In Ireland, this is usually Prince George. After going on about his triumphs for a while, he is challenged by a third man. This could be Saint Patrick in West Tyrone, or a Turkish Champion in Belfast. They draw swords and lay about one another until the loser lies bleeding. The outcome is cut to local taste. Prince George might triumph in Belfast, but get pancaked in West Tyrone.

The cry goes up for a doctor. One appears, outfitted in a broad hat and a black coat, the very image of a medical man. “I can cure the plague within, the plague without, the palsy and the gout…” Yes, there’s a cure to be had, but it will come dear. Money changes hands. Ten pounds, a wonderful sum. The doctor gets to work and up springs the fallen man, restored to brawn and vigour.

The drama enters its third and final act. The doctor’s insistence on a fee is an ominous portent. Out comes Beelzebub to pass among the audience and press them for a few coins: “All silver and no brass.” The money won’t be much, and will go towards a mummers’ ball in the New Year, or perhaps to  charity. Still, it is awkward to ask. There is a subtle genius to the appearance of the Devil. The rest of the company need not risk embarrassment by asking for money. Who better than the King of Hell to send out begging? Don’t the people already hate him? And wouldn’t they expect such vulgarity from one of his ilk? “Money I want and money I crave, if you don’t give me money I’ll sweep ‘ee all to the grave.”

So might run an evening with the mummers. We know so little about the history of those nights. Christmas mumming probably came over from Britain, though there is much debate about when. We know that some form of the tradition had reached Ireland by the late-17th century — a mummers’ play was seen in Cork City in 1685 — and that it took a particular hold in County Wexford, County Dublin and the North. Mummers joined a broader culture of costumed visitors in Ireland, like strawboys at weddings and wren boys at New Year.

Even the word “mummer” is a mystery. Origins have been suggested in Middle English, German, Latin and Pontic Greek. Did it mean to “perform silently” or “to mask” or something else entirely? Scholars have been merrily disagreeing for years.

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The plays are all different too. In the early 1900s, the Oxford don R.J.E. Tiddy collected 32 examples from England, and one from Belfast, later published in his posthumous book The Mummers’ Play. While all follow a core structure — a fight, a miraculous cure, a request for money — the names and numbers of characters vary widely, as do their lines. These plays were printed on the mind and read with the tongue. They changed from village to village and generation to generation. Tiddy caught a few before two world wars and the television turned them into antiquarian curiosities. “I got a Mummer’s Play absolutely at first shot,” he wrote in 1915. “I overtook a dear old shepherd-like man just as I was walking into the village, and after one minute on the weather found he used to act in one, and remembered it.”

It is strange to read Tiddy’s book. The plays look wrong on the page. They were never meant to be transcribed. Loose and mercurial in life, they cramp in print. No doubt they were written down by some performers at one time or another, but only in the way we might write “milk, mince, apples” before we visit the shops. An aid to memory, nothing more. Not a text to keep on a shelf. However much the plays changed over time and place, after all, rhymed lines and closely fitted narratives were there to help the mummers. Each drama, rarely exceeding three or four printed pages, has a vivid pull that encourages recollection.

Tiddy died on the Western Front in 1916. But he had done much to preserve fragments of an English tradition that extended back, in fits and starts, to the Middle Ages. Scholars working in Ireland have had a slightly easier time of it. In 1972, the American anthropologist Henry Glassie spoke to people who had seen the plays or acted in them. He walked about a patch of County Fermanagh and listened to stories, about the welcomes and the rebuffs, about the ribboned costumes and the hard journeys between houses in the black countryside: “You’d be coming up that lane and you’d go up to your knees. It really was mud up to your waist. And you’d have to travel on.”

Glassie must have felt he’d gathered these recollections in the nick of time. When he published his book on mummers, in 1975, the tradition’s future looked bleak, especially in the North. The Troubles had put an end to carefree jaunts about the country after dark. But this was not the only factor. “It must be due to the standard of livin’ raisin’ in Ireland, and they haven’t been out,” said Peter Flanagan, once a mummer himself. Another of Glassie’s interviewees, Hugh Nolan, agreed. He blamed the car. It allowed young men to take jobs in town and spend their evenings gadding about. For good or ill, it let them escape the local and all it meant.

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While Glassie was travelling around Fermanagh with his tape recorder, in 1972, Seamus Heaney wrote a poem called “The Last Mummer”. A spectral mummer arrives at a house to find the occupants insensible: “The luminous screen in the corner / has them charmed in a ring / so he stands a long time behind them.” Not only has Heaney’s mummer lost his audience; he is alone. The boisterous company of masked rhymers has been reduced to a solitary ghost, doomed to tramp between houses that are curtained against him, made inhospitable by their cosiness. Heaney was not the only Northern poet to feel the loss. John Montague and John Hewitt both wrote their own elegies for a tradition that must have seemed on the brink of extinction.

But the “ould custom” proved resilient. In 1998, an anthropologist encountered a lively mumming scene in West Tyrone. Ray Cashman even joined them as Beelzebub, on the condition that he swap his Texan twang for a local one. His vivid account offers a glimpse into the practicalities of mumming: drumming up a company; the delicate process of assigning parts; the sheer exhaustion of delivering up to twenty performances night after night. Cashman found that the troupe tended to perform in pubs rather than private homes, but other aspects of the tradition had stuck, including the willingness to perform for whoever was to hand.

Historically, mumming was never the preserve of either Ulster community. There were Protestant troupes and Catholic troupes and mixed troupes. They would visit anyone who would have them. The performance, with its choreographed procession of events from knock to donation, allowed for the suspension of any usual tension. Glassie found that Protestants in his largely Catholic region of study took as keen an interest in mumming as anyone else. He interviewed one Ellen Cutler, who emphasised how much she had looked forward to seeing the mummers each year. Cashman met “a wealthy Protestant farmer” and former agent for the Duke of Abercorn who praised them as the best company he’d ever seen.

Are there mummers still about today? In a sense. The Belfast Wren Boys continue to promote the tradition of indigenous mumming, while the Armagh Rhymers have folded mumming into other Irish traditions of music and storytelling. Mumming endures, if not necessarily as it once was. Like the words of the plays themselves, the tradition adapts to the kitchen. But the core remains unchanged. As the year sputters out, the doctor delivers his cure, and kindles new life in the dark and cold. The Christmas nights may be quieter than before, but they aren’t silent yet.

I observed the first clue in late August, when it emerged that Starmer had removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from his study. Accusations of puerile tribalism were denied with a smile. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, he said: “This is not actually about Margaret Thatcher at all. I don’t like images and pictures of people staring down at me. I’ve found it all my life; when I was a lawyer I used to have pictures of judges… I don’t like it. I like landscapes.” 

Some took this statement as artful evasion. I think it’s worthy of serious thought. Ghost stories tend to begin with similar moments of unease. People staring down at me. How easy it is to imagine. The comfortable sofa, the pool of lamplight, yet another document plumbing the alarming depths of Rachel Reeves’s black hole. But he cannot concentrate. His gaze creeps up to the portrait on the wall. He is disturbed by an uncanny feeling of… what? Invigilation? Judgment?

This will seem fanciful. Keir Starmer is a man who doesn’t dream. He’s a lawyer. An abacus man. Although he loves classical music, particularly Beethoven, his frank indifference to the other arts is well documented. There’s no favourite novel (unless it is expedient for him to have one), no poem that rattles around his skull. He just doesn’t care. And he isn’t going to pretend otherwise. Angela Rayner is equally unconcerned with such fripperies, declaring that “beautiful means nothing really”. This is who these people are, and I admire their honesty — there’s nothing more embarrassing than a barbarian in a toga. 

Is this the sort of man who would get the creeps in his own study? Well, yes. In fact, Starmer’s personality is Clue No. 2. Such stolid, clockwork men are exactly the sort of people that end up in good ghost stories. Robert Aickman’s hapless protagonists are earnest blanks clutching Blue Guides, while M. R. James specialised in the tweedier end of donnery. Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter, the best English ghost story written this century, is narrated by a physicist. The truth is that, with the notable exception of Hamlet, hopeless neurotics don’t make for decent haunting. No one is particularly impressed when an out-of-work actor sees Boudicca in the bathtub. The real pleasure is in watching a bluff empiricist having his certainties sanded away, night after misty night.

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What are Starmer’s certainties? Who haunts this lawyer? A possible answer to these questions arrived last week. It turns out that Thatcher is not the only notable to have been mothballed. Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, and William Gladstone have also vanished from Downing Street’s walls. A No. 10 spokesman has stated that “the change of artwork is long planned, since before the election, and is timed to mark 125 years of the government art collection”. 

This makes no sense, at least when it comes to the queen and the playwright. The picture of Elizabeth, one of the Ditchley pattern portraits, is among the most famous paintings in the collection. An anniversary celebration should foreground such a treasure, especially when so much of the government art collection consists of paunchy, periwigged men. Shakespeare’s value to such an endeavour seems pretty obvious to me. You’d think that a painting of the world’s most famous playwright — albeit an 18th-century copy of the original — would be something that the government art collection might want to show off.

Raleigh is more complex these days, at least in the prime minister’s circles, who would no doubt be horrified by the planter and pirate once they had skimmed his Wikipedia page. They’d be even more disturbed by his poem The Lie, which feels uncomfortably close to the bone: “Tell potentates, they live / Acting by others’ action; / Not loved unless they give; / Not strong but by a faction.” And Gladstone? Again, too enmeshed in his own age, too past. His portrait, a copy of an original by Millais, can’t help. Those black and liquid eyes were made for staring down.

This soft iconoclasm has attracted a fair amount of comment. A. N. Wilson led the charge, declaring that “it is becoming clearer by the day that the PM is determined to rewrite the nation’s history in his own joyless image”. I wonder if something stranger isn’t afoot. Wilson implies an active policy on Starmer’s part. If that were the case, I’d expect Sir Keir to hang a nice portrait of Oliver Cromwell, perhaps contrasting with some factory workers and Stakhanovite miners. Instead, Elizabeth and Raleigh have been replaced with two technically brilliant but slightly drab pictures by Paula Rego. This is hardly a grand statement of political intent. No, what I see are not the orders of a prime minister, but the panicked reactions of a haunted man. 

Clue No. 3 lies with the portraits themselves. Malign paintings form their own sub-genre of weird fiction. While not all ghost stories in the strictest sense, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Schalken the Painter, Nikolai Gogol’s Portrait, John Buchan’s Fullcircle, and Susan Hill’s The Man in the Picture build macabre tales around rectangles of pigment and linen. These stories work because they expand on what we already know: that good portraits are more than decoration. They are time, slowed and set. A master storyteller can quicken them again.

This is especially true of historical artworks. The portraits of Elizabeth, Raleigh, and Shakespeare are not particularly unnerving in themselves. But they preserve times that could not be further from Starmer’s orderly world. Times when Dr Dee spoke to angels in Mortlake, when Kind Kit “dyed swearing” in Deptford, when Giordano Bruno composed hermetic tracts and James I authored pamphlets on demonology and witchcraft. Such portraits provide disturbing reminders of a Britain that predates BBC Three. They haunted Starmer’s Downing Street, these English ghosts, and so they had to go.

The story will not end there. Ghost stories never do. The protagonist makes a mistake and makes it again. He digs too deep, looks too long. In creepy tales about portraits, the picture proves impossible to escape. It can be locked in an attic or sold to a dealer or even dismissed out of hand, but in the end a haunted portrait tends to get its way.  

This was certainly true last week. What should have been a quiet assertion of Starmerland has become yet another gaffe. It seems that portraits of queens, prime ministers, playwrights, and pirates become still more powerful when they are hidden away in vaults or back corridors. The old, unfashionable past just won’t die. It’s in the pictures that stare down at Sir Keir, in the stones of the city, in the pull of the river beyond. A Prime Minister haunted by England. Am I right? There’s only one way to find out — we’ll have to wait until the very end.

Although the Met had planned an elaborate exhibition around the coffin for later in the year, it took the power of modern celebrity to reveal the object’s true origins. The widely-publicised photograph led to a tip-off to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. A subsequent investigation proved that the museum had unwittingly spent $4 million on a looted artefact. Unearthed by grave robbers in Egypt’s Minya region during the 2011 revolution, the coffin had travelled to New York City by slow degrees, each stage of the process further obscuring its rotten provenance with forged export licences and faked histories of ownership. The coffin was returned to Egypt in February 2019.

Kardashian’s coffin made global news. The beautiful object, further burnished by its fleeting contact with television royalty, was a wonderful story. But not all stolen antiquities are so instantly arresting, so immediately recognisable, or so obviously priceless. Their value is measured not in beauty, but in what they can tell us about the ancient world, and they are just as vulnerable to trafficking as a gold coffin. Such objects are explored in a fascinating new book by Roberta Mazza, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts.

Mazza is a papyrologist: a specialist in the study of ancient papyri. She spends her days reading lines of Greek and Coptic on scraps of ancient reed. While some papyri are beautiful, most are rather prosaic objects. They are biscuit-brown or faded ochre, holed and tattered, the cast-off skin of an entire civilisation. The most extensive cache was excavated at Oxyrhynchus, near modern Al-Bahnasa, by the Oxford classicists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt between 1896 — 1907. The aridity of the Egyptian desert had preserved hundreds of thousands of fragments, many of them still legible to the naked eye.

Speaking to Mazza, she tells me what drew her to papyrology. “I was fascinated by two main things. The first was the materiality — this wasn’t philology or producing editions and translations — this was the real thing. The other was the idea that in order to be a good historian you had to get to the actual voices of the people.” For a papyrologist, these voices ring clear. A short browse through a tiny percentage of the finds from Oxyrhynchus reveals the city’s connective tissue. The sale of a two-year-old slave girl; receipts for wine, wheat, firewood, baskets, ropes, irrigation machinery, and military clothing; a wet nurse’s contract of employment; loan agreements; deeds of surety; a report of accidental death; a recipe for tooth powder; treatises on gangrene and haemorrhoids; and a cheery drawing of the god Bes. These are much more than desiccated fragments of reed. They are the inky shadows of the dead.

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Such texts, while hugely valuable to historians, don’t turn much of a profit on the black market. But literary and religious works were found at Oxyrhynchus too, and these are a different matter entirely. Although Mazza’s book takes in a broad range of depressing frauds, from forged Dead Sea Scrolls to aggressive eBay fences, her main subject is the strange case of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. The museum is a pet project of Steve Green, president of the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby, a business founded by his father. Green, an ardent evangelical, intended to fill the museum with biblical manuscripts. He wanted visitors to trace the immutable Bible of evangelical Christianity across as many papyri, vellum codices, and early printed books as he could buy.

And buy he did. Green went on extensive shopping trips to Turkey, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, where he hoovered up astonishing quantities of cuneiform tablets, medieval manuscripts and, of course, papyri. Anything even tangentially related to the Bible or early Christianity was fair game. His budget — purchases were paid for by Hobby Lobby, not Green himself — appeared almost limitless. But filling the Museum of the Bible’s galleries may not have been Green’s sole motivation. Once open, the museum would be an incorporated charity with 501(c)(3) status. Donations of cultural assets to such a charity receive tax relief of around 33% of the item’s fair market value. As Mazza writes, “In founding a museum dedicated to the Bible — that is to say, to the evangelical view of the Bible — the Green family could be instruments of God’s will, benefactors of humankind, and also see substantial tax savings.”

Naturally, these tax savings depended on whatever the fair market value might be. And this is where papyri differ from $4 million coffins. Any idiot can look at a gold-plated artefact and value it in the millions. But it takes a scholar to evaluate a papyrus. The range of skills involved is intimidating. A command of ancient languages is naturally vital, but so too is the art of recognising a potentially valuable document from a few fragmentary sentences. Given that there are often literal holes in the text, a papyrologist must make an educated guess as to the missing words. Finally, a knowledge of palaeography — the study of ancient handwriting — is essential, as changes in handwriting over time are one of the main clues to a text’s approximate date.

Buying a job lot of papyri, as Steve Green frequently did, is therefore a risky business from a financial standpoint. An appraising papyrologist might find that you’ve bought a bunch of 7th century copies of the Acts of the Apostles — all well and good, but not worth much. The dream is for a scholar to examine your purchases and declare that they have found something interesting, or better yet, extraordinary. The scholar then edits the papyrus in question and publishes their work in a prestigious academic journal. The fair market value of your papyrus rockets, and the 33% tax relief on donations potentially exceeds your initial investment many times over.

Any serious collector of papyri must therefore cultivate close relationships with individual scholars. The ever-growing Green collection, based in Oklahoma City, did so with gusto. Senior academics were invited to study the extensive holdings, and PhD funding was provided to train up future papyrologists. All very laudable, and as we have seen, potentially very profitable. Yet the atmosphere at the Green Collection was clearly rather different to that of other research environments. Mazza points out that “those who were offered the chance to study manuscripts and other objects were instructed to keep the material to themselves. They even had to sign nondisclosure agreements, typical of business but unknown in academia, especially in text-orientated fields like papyrology.”

This insistence on confidentiality may have been sparked by a growing realisation that much of the material acquired by Hobby Lobby was of dubious provenance. In August 2010, Green invited Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul College, to advise him on a purchase of cuneiform tablets and other artefacts from an Israeli dealer. Gerstenblith has stated that she “read them the riot act”. The items were obviously of Iraqi origin, and therefore potentially subject to a ban on cultural exports from Iraq that had been in place since 1990. Green bought them anyway, accepting the dealer’s convoluted account of the tablets’ history — which conveniently circumvented the ban.

Nevertheless, some of these artefacts were seized by Memphis customs officials in 2011. In the wake of a government investigation — and a $3 million settlement in 2017 — Hobby Lobby released a statement explaining that, “The Company was new to the world of acquiring these items, and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process. This resulted in some regrettable mistakes.”

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Unscrupulous dealers are adept at mocking up the elaborate fictions — and the elaborate paperwork — required to sell looted antiquities to prestige clients such as the Green collection or the Metropolitan Museum. Kim Kardashian’s gold coffin, for example, was sold to the Met with a forged export licence stating that the coffin was in Europe before the Unesco ban on cultural exports from Egypt came into effect in 1972. The looting of archaeological sites required to supply this illicit trade continues unabated. Mazza notes that “despite all the measures taken nationally and internationally, the truth is that in Egypt illegal excavations, looting, and smuggling are endemic”.

Yet the strangest story explored by Mazza involves not a grave robber or a dodgy antiquities dealer, but an Oxford don. Dirk Obbink was Professor of Papyrology at Oxford, the general editor of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He was also at the heart of the Green collection’s greatest coup: the supposed discovery of the earliest extant fragment of the Gospel of Mark.

In the autumn of 2011, Scott Carroll and Jerry Pattengale visited Obbink in his rooms at Christ Church. At that time, Carroll and Pattengale worked for the Green collection. Carroll in particular had a key role in sourcing papyri and other objects for potential purchase by Hobby Lobby. The two men have different recollections of that visit to Oxford (and of subsequent events), but agree on one key point: Obbink showed them papyri that day. Three were fragments of Matthew, Luke, and John. The 4th and smallest papyrus was the most interesting. It was a fragment of the Gospel of Mark, said Obbink, and he thought that it might date from the late 1st century. This would have made it the earliest known surviving manuscript of the New Testament. Pattengale has stated that Obbink, who claimed to be acting on behalf of a private collection, then offered the papyri for sale. In 2013, Hobby Lobby purchased all four fragments.

They never received them. As news of the Mark papyrus spread within the academic community, it gradually became apparent that it was not an unknown fragment after all. It was identifiable as P.Oxy. 83.5345, a catalogued, though unpublished, piece of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, owned by the Egypt Exploration Society and archived at Oxford. The same was true of the other three papyri. In December 2017, Obbink emailed Hobby Lobby. Mazza describes what happened next: “Obbink wrote in the email that the four papyri were in the ownership of the Egypt Exploration Society and he had sold them ‘by mistake’, an explanation obviously hard to believe.” The general editor of the Oxyrhynchus papyri agreed to refund Hobby Lobby the sum of $760,000.

This was just the beginning. Concerned by the gospels fiasco, representatives from the Museum of the Bible met with the Egypt Exploration Society to go over previous purchases from Obbink. Some of these fragments were found to be parts of the Oxyrhynchus archive, and were returned to Oxford by the museum. In 2021, Hobby Lobby took legal action against Obbink, listing seven separate sales of papyri between February 2010 and February 2013. The numbers involved were staggering. In November 2010, Hobby Lobby’s 4th purchase from Obbink saw the business pay $2,400,000 for “papyri fragments and other antiquities.” The following July, Hobby Lobby purchased another lot for $1,335,500. All payments were made to a bank account in Obbink’s own name. In March 2024, an Oklahoma court ordered Obbink to pay Hobby Lobby the sum of $7,085,100, and prejudgment interest from February 2013 at a rate of 6% per annum.

Mazza suspects that we will never know the whole truth about l’affaire Obbink. Not all of the papyri he sold came from the collection that he was supposed to safeguard. Others, such as new fragments from the poetry of Sappho which Obbink unveiled to much fanfare in 2014, have even murkier origins involving London auctioneers and Turkish eBay vendors. We are unlikely to know how a man of such intelligence thought he could get away with it all. Hubris seems to be the only explanation for the actions of this brilliant, greedy classicist. Mazza favours a less abstract answer. As she said to me, “There’s this strange idea that academics are different from other people. But you have the same amount of crooks [as in the wider world].” At least Obbink got one thing right. His bizarre actions illuminated the murkier corners of the antiquities trade, and may have prompted a review of the entire Green collection. In 2020, Steve Green returned 11,500 artefacts to Egypt and Iraq. Mazza notes dryly that just 43 papyri have made it into the Museum’s gallery.

Mazza’s book details the grubbiness — the smallness — of the black market in antiquities. Ancient objects, whether papyri or gold coffins, become assets to be bought and sold. Some scholars use their learning to transform artefacts from records of human lives to numbers on a balance sheet. Others don’t care much about where a new fragment of Sappho or Callimachus comes from, as long as they get to write articles about them. Even passionate collectors can lose sight of what they long to own. “The collectors of ancient manuscripts often become real experts. In the case of the Greens, there was a great attachment for faith reasons, but I think that was the main drive. They were completely uninterested in learning about these papyri,” says Mazza. For her, this ignorance was summed up by an appearance Steve Green made on CNN. He had brought one of his papyri into the studio, a fragment of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He did not notice that it was displayed upside down.

The flags are different on this side of the police line. An unlikely mixture of Irish tricolours and Union flags prevails. At the very front, men hold a large banner reading “Coolock Says No”, while others waft a large Israeli flag around. One guy holds a small cross hastily fashioned from cardboard. Masked young men zip about the place, but there are people of all ages here, including young children. Wandering through the throng, I pass two women and a girl of three or four, all identically attired in Barbie pink. “Get ‘em out, get ‘em out,” sings the girl in her soft southern accent, smiling a lovely smile.

An occasional missile is lobbed at the Unity Over Division crowd, mostly water balloons filled with god-knows-what. Twice, the flat reports of fireworks echo off surrounding buildings. “Get ‘em out” is the favoured chant, though as time passes and the crowd swells, the front ranks segue into “Oh Tommy Robinson”. From the other side of the police lines comes “Nazi scum off our streets” and a solitary, rather prim cry of “Degenerates!”

Eventually, the Unity protest disperses. The anti-immigration rally advances, hundreds of people heading across Donegall Square. Two men face off in front of City Hall, footing backwards and forwards on the neat lawn, until one is pulled back by friends. The crowd moves down onto Bradbury Place and walks south. The protest’s goal is the Islamic Centre on University Road. A woman in her 60s asks how far away it is. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes’ walk. “Awk shit,” she says, rolling her eyes.

Police have sealed off the approach to the Islamic Centre with a solid line of land rovers. The crowd rolls on down a parallel road. This is Botanic Avenue, a pleasant street of bookshops, bars, cafes, and restaurants. Word spreads that the Sahara shisha bar has been attacked. Soon afterwards, a group of young men start dragging large restaurant waste bins out into the middle of the road. The makeshift barricade is a decision born of pure instinct, like beavers building a dam. There’s nothing to barricade against just now — there are no police around — and the young men shrug and move on.

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The crowd pauses for 10 minutes. Without the Islamic Centre there is no goal. “Is this the way to the mosque?” asks one man plaintively. Then someone moves over to the door of Duke’s Hotel and gives it a kicking. A new plan becomes apparent. Hotels suspected of housing immigrants will do. Shortly afterwards, a young man is using a café table to hammer at the front doors of an Ibis hotel on University Street. The glass doors hold. A veteran in the crowd advises: “Get that hood up.”

The mood changes along with the plan. Numbers are dropping. Many of those who were just along for the ride have melted away. Some guy in a red tracksuit swaggers past. He gestures to my notebook and shouts: “See your book? You shove it up your hole you fucking balloon.” I turn a page and write: “Yng guy red trkst = C ur bk? U shv it up ur hole u fkn bln.” Then I slip it in my pocket.

The crowd moves on. We’re deep in the Holylands now. This locale is full of students during term time, but it’s pretty quiet on a muggy August afternoon. The area isn’t a natural choice for a march — it’s too cramped, too embarrassingly residential. It transpires that the man directing the crowd is from Dublin and has got a bit lost. His unorthodox route seems to have totally blindsided the police, who are nowhere to be seen.

I get chatting to a woman from Portsmouth. “I’ve lived in Belfast 14 years. But I’ve come along today for those three girls, really. The police should be protecting us.” For every hooded youngster there is someone like her, eager to share their sense that society’s machinery has failed at its deepest, most intricate level. Police arrive soon after. Young men stage a happy hardcore dance-off in front of the improvised wall of land rovers. One man gambols over and briefly plants his tricolour on an armoured bonnet before spinning away, delighted. It’s the last Irish flag I’ll see today.

The home stretch doesn’t last long. What remains of the crowd emerges blinking onto the Lower Ormeau Road. This is a broadly Nationalist area, and it doesn’t take long for a counter-protest to form up. Within minutes, men and women have confronted the marchers. The police, still playing catch-up, manage to establish a line between the two groups before the situation degenerates into a street brawl. The locals waste no time in giving the police line a piece of their mind. “How did they get so far up without youse stopping them?” asks one woman, incredulous. “I don’t know how you live with yourselves, protecting these racists,” says a man. At the street corner, an old lady asks for advice on how to get home. She looks so small in her blue anorak. A woman puts her arm around the old lady and they plan a route together.

Soon after that, it’s all over. The few remaining marchers — there can be barely 30 or 40 of them left by now — chant some Loyalist paramilitary acronyms before walking off into the afternoon. A line of riot police sweeps the road behind them. I follow along, wondering what to make of it all. I stop next to a Holiday Inn. Someone’s smashed the window, and a man is already sweeping fragments of glass from the floor.

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In search of Northern Ireland’s Tories

By Alexander Poots

On the bus home, I look at my phone. Apparently North and South, Nationalist and Unionist, have come together at last. Noted scholar of Irish affairs, Darren Grimes, is among the first to declare a new dawn of cooperation and unity. There are many more like him, convinced that one protest and a handful of TikToks are of great historical moment. Perhaps they’re right. It is certainly true that the crowd I witnessed on Donegall Place was an unusual one. I’ve never seen the Tricolour flown alongside the Union flag in that way. And it was interesting to move among the crowd and hear the accents flip from Northside Dublin to Belfast to Kildare to rural Antrim.

But it is also true that this variety fell away as the day progressed. The march’s final flourish on the Lower Ormeau Road, a mere three and a half hours from the demonstration’s start, saw a swift and instinctive reversion to sectarian business as usual. And the rioting on Sandy Row later that evening, where a man’s supermarket was immolated, was hardly a hands-across-the-border affair. If anything, it echoed the riots of 2021, which took place in exactly the same location, and which were caused in part by the behaviour of Nationalist politicians during Covid.

A local genius for symbolism — its creation, its transmission, and its redeployment to previously unimagined ends — should not be confused for life as it is actually lived. Nor should it be assumed that such symbols belong to one group or sub-group alone; nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t see a new Ireland on Saturday. I saw two crowds separated by a thin line of police, shouting at one another on an August afternoon.

Standing as a Tory in Northern Ireland is like riding a Gloucester Old Spot in the Grand National. It takes some pluck. The word “Tory” has its origins in the Irish language (possibly from toiraidh, meaning outlaw), but that’s about the extent of the Conservative Party’s connection to the place today. The Northern Irish Conservative is the local representative of an indifferent blue mass, over the sea and far away. Occasional visits from London do not tend to go well, as Rishi Sunak found out in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter last month, when what should have been a simple press conference became a fiasco freighted with dire symbolism as he was asked if his party was akin to a sinking ship.

The Northern Ireland Conservatives describe themselves as “the positive, centre-right, pro-union alternative to the parochial politics which has blighted Northern Ireland”. In 2019, they won a vote share of 0.7%. It’s not difficult to see why. Unionists here can vote for the DUP or TUV, parties far more committed to the union and far more conservative than the Tories will ever be, while voters wanting a less strident unionism can opt for the UUP. Naturally, all of these parties have healthy representation in local government and the NI Assembly, which isn’t something the NI Conservatives can claim. Ask people over here why the Tories run candidates in Northern Ireland and they will shrug — the Conservative and Unionist Party must be seen to contest seats in all four nations of the UK, so they do, and eat their losses. That’s it.

Still, I was interested in these eccentric Tories, so far from the shires. What sort of person would stand for the Conservatives in Northern Ireland? It goes so against the grain that it’s almost punk. Such people would have to be tough, to have a certain dash about them. I had hoped to speak to the candidates about the campaign, but received no response to my requests for an interview. The party political broadcast was no help, just a turgid breakdown of Labour’s manifesto costings. There wasn’t much information online, either: a slim website, a small Facebook group, and an X account that has been suspended for weeks now. So I went to Newtownards, 10 miles east of Belfast, to talk to voters like William. If I couldn’t get a birds-eye view of the Tory campaign in Northern Ireland, I’d explore the ground instead.

Newtownards should have been a good place to begin my hunt. It’s the largest town in the Strangford constituency and has a strong unionist base. The Tory candidate is Barry Hetherington, a Fermanagh man who is the Deputy Chair of the NI Conservatives. There’s little chance of winning more than a handful of votes here. But then there’s little chance of winning more than a handful of votes anywhere in Northern Ireland. Having taken the trouble to stand, you might as well campaign. And yet there’s nothing. 

Other parties — DUP, TUV, Alliance — have diligently festooned the lampposts with posters. The Conservatives haven’t bothered. It doesn’t look as if their canvassing game is up to much either. With the election in less than three weeks, the people of Newtownards seem unaware that a Tory is running at all. I ask Kathleen, 60s, if she knows that voting Conservative is an option. “No, I didn’t realise that. We’re usually pretty well-informed. And we’re getting close now, aren’t we? We got our [poll] cards through the post yesterday.”

The most common reaction to my questions is weary amusement. Everyone’s face does the same thing. Lips tighten, noses wrinkle, eyes shine. When I ask Hazel, a woman in her 40s, whether she’s aware that the Tories are running here, she smiles broadly. “I’m sure they are,” she says, hoisting an eyebrow. “But I’m not really interested in the Tories.” I wander down the street to Déjà Vu Hair, where I meet Leah, 18. Hetherington’s candidature is news to her, too. Would she vote Conservative? “No.”

A few days later, I hopped on to a bus to Downpatrick. Strangford had been a bust, but perhaps I’d have more luck in the adjoining constituency of South Down. This is a beautiful country. Drumlins rise and fall, boreens ferret away between tightly packed fields, and the Mourne Mountains are stamped indigo on the horizon. I might have gone to Newcastle, a fine town on the Irish Sea, or to Rostrevor on Carlingford Lough. But I chose Downpatrick, with its Georgian houses and hilly streets, for its relative size and status as the county town. 

South Down has been a Sinn Féin constituency since 2017, and a reliable nationalist win for decades before that. The Conservative running here is Hannah Westropp, whose rather coy candidate bio leaves it unclear whether she lives in Northern Ireland or has been Izzarded in from England. 

Downpatrick is a smaller, quieter place than Newtownards. The lampposts advertise Sinn Féin and Alliance. Most of the people I approach, quite sensibly, don’t want to talk about the election. The response of one friendly old gent at a bus stop on St Patrick’s Avenue was typical: “Sorry, mate. I’ve no interest in it. Fed up. No interest at all.” Eventually, I strike lucky. A woman on Market Street knows that a Tory is contesting South Down. I’m intrigued. Had she seen a poster, got a leaflet through the letterbox? “No, it was on Radio Ulster, they went through all the candidates.” This was the only person aware of a local Tory campaign. Otherwise, the situation in South Down was no different to Strangford: a ghost hunt. 

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Belfast is crumbling

By Alexander Poots

On the bus back to Belfast, rain spotting the windows, I admitted defeat. Granted, the Tories are standing in three other constituencies — East Londonderry, West Tyrone, and Newry and Armagh. Maybe Coleraine is a hotbed of Tory activism. Perhaps if I’d gone out to Tyrone I might have witnessed an electrifying rally on the streets of Strabane, blue rosettes winking in the sun. For all I know, the people of Newry can barely walk down Merchants Quay without being harangued by a Conservative canvasser. Somehow, though, I doubt it. 

The NI Conservatives march on paper alone. It’s a bizarre situation, and easy to make light of. But there’s a bleaker side to all this, too. Northern Ireland is creaking at the seams. Recent recommended cuts to the NHS were so extreme that the Health Minister has simply refused to make them. Infrastructure is failing, homelessness is rising, and Lough Neagh, once the UK’s largest freshwater lake, is now the world’s largest petri dish. In such times, a party that treats Northern Ireland as a political Wendy house ceases to be funny. 

If the NI Conservatives are good for anything, it’s as a warning to their own colleagues across the water. Friendless, decisively outnumbered, shuffling unremarked from election to election, Northern Ireland’s Tories may well offer a glimpse of the party’s future throughout the United Kingdom. Where they will go from there is anyone’s guess. William said it best, that day in front of Newtownards Town Hall. I don’t think they know themselves.

The conservationist who found Belfast so nightmarish was called Charles Brett. A lawyer by trade, he was invited to join the National Trust’s Northern Ireland committee in 1956. When Brett asked the committee chairman what books he should read on Belfast’s architectural history, he was told that no such books existed. So he decided to write one himself. After eight years of research, Brett’s Buildings of Belfast was published in 1967. The work was completed “only just in the nick of time”.

Brett was referring to more than the Troubles; in fact, he complained that “the demolition men rival the bombers in coarse heartlessness”. His real ire was reserved for developers who razed historic buildings that might have been repurposed for modern use. He nursed a particular dislike for the various concrete shoeboxes imposed on Belfast in the Sixties: “Happily, many office blocks of this period are already suffering from the defects of their shoddiness, and, it may reasonably be hoped, will fall down soon.”

A portrait of Brett hangs in the offices of Ulster Architectural Heritage (UAH). I’m here to meet Sebastian Graham, the society’s Heritage at Risk Officer, one of the tiny number of people working to save Northern Ireland’s historic buildings from oblivion. UAH is based in the Old Museum Building, a handsome Greek Revival edifice built in 1831, filled with winding staircases and galleried salons. The place was used as an arts centre in the Nineties and still has an intact dressing room, the walls covered with mirrors and posters for Joe Orton plays. Today, the Old Museum Building is tired but magnificent. It’s appropriate that UAH is quartered in something of a project. After all, as Graham tells me, “vacancy is the big killer”.

UAH and other organisations have been fighting to preserve Northern Ireland’s built heritage for decades. There have been many successes. Hearth Historic Buildings Trust has restored numerous derelict properties, and is currently engaged in renovating Riddel’s Warehouse in Belfast, a project that has been ongoing since 2014. But despite the occasional “save”, Graham says that the overall situation is dire: “In Northern Ireland there’s more than 800 listed buildings at risk. That’s about 9% of our listed building stock. The figure in Scotland and Wales varies from 2% to 4%. So we’re essentially double the rest of the UK as to the [poor] condition of our built heritage.”

The last decade has been devastating for Northern Ireland’s architectural inheritance. In 2014, the government budget for the maintenance of historic buildings was £4.17 million. That pot was reduced to £500,000 in 2015 and has continued to shrink — Graham estimates that last year’s budget was in the region of £200,000. Today, the owner of a listed building can apply to the Roof and Window Repair scheme. This offers a maximum grant of £6,000, although thatched properties can be awarded double that. These piddling sums won’t cover the cost of meaningful repairs, especially when many projects require the expertise of specialist craftsmen. As Graham observes: “It’s not even a sticking plaster… Given the cost of everything with inflation, you’d barely get one or two windows done for that.”

Money isn’t the only problem. Foot-dragging developers present a serious threat to Belfast’s built heritage. The issue is exemplified by the Tribeca project, an urban renewal scheme designed to regenerate one of the city centre’s most dilapidated areas, a site of nearly 12 acres that contains a number of handsome Victorian buildings. Tribeca’s promotional video, two minutes of cod-poetic corporate guff voiced by Jamie Dornan, is slick and dead. The same appears true of Tribeca itself. Belfast City Council signed off on the scheme in January 2020, but nothing has happened since. The developers behind Tribeca, Castlebrooke Investments, have said that they are still trying to deliver a “commercially viable development”, and recently applied for a renewal of their planning application.

Meanwhile, the area has decayed further. Large stretches are dominated by empty shops, crumbling buildings and blank oblongs of scrub. Such dereliction leads to a decline in footfall, which in turn makes it considerably more difficult for the businesses that have managed to cling on. Graham singles out Keats and Chapman, a legendary second-hand bookshop on North Street, as an example of a business that has survived against the odds: “It’s the most beautiful array of books. But [people think] North Street, oh, it’s vacant, it’s all empty. You wouldn’t go near the place. Those wee independent businesses have really suffered from that, they’ve been the victim of this land banking.”

What’s bad for business is worse for historic buildings. The Assembly Rooms, built in 1769 and expanded in 1776, is arguably Belfast’s oldest public building. Sitting at the corner of Waring Street and North Street, this stuccoed Georgian pile presides over the “Four Corners”, the place from which all milestones from Belfast were once measured. Henry Joy McCracken and other leaders of the United Irishmen were court-martialled here in 1798. In later years it was used as a bank, before falling into disuse in 2000. Tribeca’s plans to turn the Assembly Rooms into a boutique hotel have failed to materialise. Now it lies derelict, its stained and peeling frontage nothing more than a home for weeds. Campaigners have called on Belfast City Council to intervene.

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If such an intervention comes, it will be at odds with a prevailing culture of inertia. Graham is sympathetic to the challenges faced by Belfast City Council, who already have responsibility for a large number of important and vulnerable buildings. But something must be done to save unique places like the Assembly Rooms and the Crumlin Road Courthouse. The answer is certainly not more legislation. A proposed dilapidation bill doesn’t excite Graham: “We’ve already got the legislation but we’re not using it, so why bring in more legislation if no one’s going to enforce it?” He points out that compulsory purchase orders to preserve built heritage have been on the books for years. Yet these powers have only been used once — back in 2007.

The bill will be introduced by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA). This complicates matters. “DAERA have no say in historical built fabric, that’s Department for Communities. So we’ll have councils, we have the DfC, we’ll have DAERA… it’s a split responsibility and no one’s going to tackle the issue, no one’s going to grasp it. And you wait another 10 years and nothing has changed.” Graham likens the situation to an awkward dance, with boys on one side of the room and girls on the other, both groups refusing to take action.

But turning up to a dance is never enough; at some point you have to cross the floor. This is something that both Stormont and local government have consistently failed to do. Although Graham says that these issues are finally being discussed by politicians, it’s clear that the time for talk has passed. The collapse of the Executive between 2017-2020 and 2022-2024, combined with the disruption of Covid, has meant that built heritage has been all but ignored by Stormont for years. Many irreplaceable buildings in Belfast — and Northern Ireland — will not survive another sustained period of neglect. A case in point is Hilden Linen Mill, a large and beautiful building ripe for redevelopment, which was gutted by a suspected arson attack last week.

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Buildings such as the Crumlin Road Courthouse and the Assembly Rooms are physical expressions of the city’s history. To lose them through indifference is a confession of sorts; a depressing admission that cultural amnesia might not be so bad after all. If that seems a little abstract, then there are more pragmatic reasons to preserve Belfast’s historic fabric. At a time when local government, architects, and developers are consumed by questions of sustainability, it makes sense to repurpose existing structures rather than replace them with new buildings, some of which will be replaced in turn within a few short decades. This regeneration would benefit practitioners of traditional building skills, and provide a stimulus for more young people to learn these important crafts. Tourism is a consideration, too — few visitors to Northern Ireland come for the new-build apartment buildings and plate-glass office blocks.

As Graham says, “There needs to be greater impetus and greater incentives to make use of the historic built fabric because it’s here, it’s ready for use. It might be in bad shape but it’s the morally right thing to do and it’s the environmentally better thing to do. And that can then transform those areas that have been neglected over time.”

It is depressing that such pleas have to be made at all. Very little appears to have changed since Brett’s time. If anything, the state of Northern Ireland’s built heritage seems worse than ever before. There is little government money and no government action. A small number of passionate people do what they can against Stormont’s indifference; few believe next month’s election will change anything. As a parting shot, I ask what Brett would make of the current situation. Graham’s mouth tightens into a wry smile. “I don’t think he’d be too impressed.”

In 1986, a year before The Last of England was released, Jarman purchased a home by the sea. Prospect Cottage is a small wooden house clinging to the shingle ribbon at Dungeness. The walls are black, the door and window frames gorse yellow. An excerpt from John Donne’s “The Sun Rising” is picked out on one wall: “Sawcy Pedantique wretch, goe chide / late schoole boyes and sore prentices…” Today the cottage has become something of a meme. Its neat proportions and stark location do well on Instagram, and you can buy a Prospect Cottage model kit for the aspiring hermit in your life. Jarman, always suspicious of the heritage industry, would laugh.

Dungeness is a place for fishermen and ascetics. Stone, sky, sea. The place is bound by water, with the English Channel to one side and the flat weirdness of Romney Marsh to the other. Dungeness is England stripped naked. Everything is on show. The little cottages crouch in the lee of a defunct nuclear power station and the horizon is swagged with power lines. Migrants arrive in rubber dinghies every summer now. What do they make of it? Relics of industry, toy houses, the click and shift of shingle beneath their feet. Is this what they expected?

The Last of England was a response to the paint-by-numbers neoliberalism of Britain in the late Eighties. It was also the record of a personal apocalypse. Jarman was dying from Aids and so were most of his friends. He feared that England’s memory was being wiped, just as the collective memory of his own generation was erased by death. And what was left? Cold hearths and dead oaks. Some scenes, in which balaclava-clad men brutalise emaciated prisoners, could be spliced into a nuclear war film like Threads with ease. The departure of the household gods is not an end, but a chilling new start.

A different man might have retreated to postcard England. A Cotswolds bolthole, perhaps, all buttery stone and Britain in Bloom awards. Instead he chose Dungeness. The bleak landscape pulled at him, as did the austere charm of Prospect Cottage. Although he still spent time in London, the city had become a degraded husk. Hampstead Heath seems to have been the only place in London he enjoyed, largely for its Arcadian atmosphere after dark. The rest of the capital was a drab blend of drunks and traffic.

The southern countryside wasn’t much better: “Poor ruined Kent with its ugly commuter towns, there every field and hedgerow is under siege.” Dungeness was different. While the busy-bodies had arrived — Jarman mourned the appearance of unnecessary fences and the replacement of the red phone box with a modern glass version — the place retained its essential character. Like Hampstead Heath, Dungeness had texture. It was still England.

Dungeness seems to have fed his growing apocalypticism. It is a provisional place. Jarman would have been amused by the recent discovery of a Tudor ship’s hull 300 meters inland, evidence of the coastline’s shifting nature. Between 1989-1990, Jarman worked on the journal later published as Modern Nature. The book is full of change and decay. It’s a record of loss in real time. In one passage, he delivers an elegy that would have been familiar to any Anglo-Saxon: “Now throughout the world stand windblown halls, frost-covered ruined buildings; the wine-halls crumble, kings lie dead, deprived of pleasure, all the steadfast band dead by the wall.”

There’s something off about Dungeness. He learns that the drinking water is suffused with lead and aluminium. The death of a grass-snake is an omen. Military exercises wake him in the middle of the night. The nuclear power station is “a 20th century Babylon”, its interior a “shambles of rusting pipe and escaping steam, with little men running hither and thither with spanners and screwdrivers”. Jarman noted that rising sea levels would swamp Dungeness within 100 years. He pictured the power station being washed away in a Ballardian rush.

This strange place has much in common with the world depicted in The Last of England. The film is titled after a painting by Ford Madox Brown. It depicts an emigrating couple taking one last look at England from the deck of a ship. Their gaze is fixed on coastline that we cannot see; perhaps Jarman imagined them watching Dungeness sink into the haze.

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The Ness is blasted and surreal, a settlement cobbled together in the backwash of a great disaster, just as the film is cobbled together from images of despair and anarchy. In one sequence, Jarman filmed Tilda Swinton on the strand. She moans and twirls next to a pyre while the power station sits black behind her. This was the country that he wanted to capture. Not the hay wains and stately homes, but what would be left when England finally lost her memory. A land of cruelty, fire, and Little Chef franchises.

And yet things aren’t quite so neat. The film contradicts itself. In recording England’s mythological drain, it creates symbols that project great mythic force; the cadaver leaps up halfway through the autopsy. The final scene, where robed figures paddle a boat out into a torchlit sea, rocked by waves and the grain of Super 8 film, can be read as weary retreat or bold foundation myth. Even at his most despairing, Jarman was an accidental optimist.

The way he lived at Prospect Cottage also smacks of optimism. Pessimists plant nothing, and Jarman was a great plantsman. Gardens are ephemeral, and so the perfect medium for a place like Dungeness. This was no mean feat on dry shingle bleached by wind and salt. The plants were hardy and low: sempervivum, fennel, santolina, sea kale, rosemary, iris, some hopeful roses. Jarman constructed miniature stone circles and driftwood dolmens, turning the shingle desert into a 20th century Seahenge. These sculptures looked good ­— the shoreline is dominated by horizontals, you need some punchy verticals to frame the view — but there was far more to them than that. Jarman knelt on the ground and sculpted ancient forms as England withered behind him. Perhaps he was trying to tempt the household gods home.

Jarman died 30 years ago. Although his personal apocalypse came to pass, England staggers on for now. The Last of England is a powerful account of a nation’s spiritual decay, but the worst consequences are confined to celluloid — the men in balaclavas aren’t in charge just yet. Prospect Cottage and its garden were lovingly tended by Jarman’s partner, Keith Collins, until 2018. Their little scrap of shingle has been recorded in two handsome volumes and is well worth a visit, if only as a reminder that if you want England back, all you have to do is re-make it.

Partition and the Civil War would have devastated him. Even the present day would strike him as a grave disappointment. Pointless referenda, an ill-conceived immigration policy, and the surprise resignations of Leo Varadkar and Jeffrey Donaldson (for very different reasons, of course) would serve as a disappointing reminder that the political scene on the island of Ireland is no saner than Westminster’s parliament of damp towels. Still, as Ireland’s new Prime Minister is sworn in today, Casement’s ghost is more than a carping guest. There is a quiet sense of change in Ireland, and there can be no better guide to shifting winds than a man who spent his life riding them.

Who was Roger Casement? You can read his essays and diaries and the various biographical studies and be left none the wiser. There is a great deal of material to sift through, more than for many historical figures, and yet it never quite satisfies. The danger is that Casement becomes more liquid than man. His story can be poured into a vessel of any given shape. He was many things: a protestant Irish nationalist, a homosexual, a bad poet, a humanitarian campaigner, a Catholic convert, a beneficiary of the British Empire and, eventually, its enemy.

The bald facts are these. Casement was born in Dublin in 1864. Orphaned at 12, he grew up in England and Co. Antrim. At the age of 15, his uncle secured him a job as a shipping line clerk, a position that led to his first visit to Africa. He was soon working under Henry Morton Stanley in the Congo, and subsequently took a position in the British Consular Service. A lengthy investigation into the grotesque treatment of the Congolese peoples by Léopold II, who ran the Congo as a personal demesne, resulted in the transfer of the region to the Belgian government and global fame for Casement. He climbed the consular ladder: Santos, Pará, Rio de Janeiro. This period in South America led to a second investigation into cruelty and murder. The victims were the Putumayo Indians and the profiteering murderer was a Peruvian rubber baron, Julio César Arana. Casement was instrumental to the dissolution of Arana’s homicidal little kingdom.

Casement was knighted in 1911. His story up to this point had been extraordinary enough. The British Empire’s cursus honorum had allowed a young man of limited prospects to achieve fame, favour and a fat pension. More importantly, he had done a lot of good. But there was more to do. In the first years of the new century, Casement found a renewed interest in his birthplace. And then came the Great War, and Germany, and a noose in a London prison.

Casement’s first Ireland was born from books and yearning. In 1904, he joined the Gaelic League and set about learning Irish. He stayed at Ardrigh, the fine Belfast home of Francis Bigger, who hosted every nationalist worth knowing. He helped to organise a festival of traditional culture in the Glens of Antrim and ferried the Irish-speaking population of Rathlin Island across so that they could take part in the competitions of music and dance. He attempted to fill out his cheques in Irish and was outraged when the bank refused them. Casement needed a new cause, and Ireland rushed to meet him.

Casement’s Irish turn came in middle age. Although he had spent much of his childhood near Ballymena and showed a keen interest in Irish history as a boy, the enthusiasms and causes of the nationalist movement do not seem to have engaged him as a young man. Perhaps things would have been different if he had remained in Ireland rather than seeking his fortune in foreign climes. The Second Boer War is a case in point. Dublin was consumed by “pro-Boer fever” in the autumn of 1899. As Donal McCracken has observed, for a time the Vierkleur flag became “the emblem of the Irish nationalist movement”. Matters came to a head in December, when a full-blown riot broke out. James Connolly seized a horse-drawn carriage and raced it around Dublin crying “Up the Boers! Up the Republic!” The day only ended when mounted police charged the crowd with drawn swords.

Yet while the Mayor of Kilkenny proposed that two maxim guns (to be christened “Parnell” and “Wolfe Tone”) be sent to the Transvaal, Casement was in Africa, busy gathering intelligence on Boer arms shipments and concocting impractical schemes to disrupt their supply lines. Later, he had a rather different attitude to the war. In his 1913 essay “The Enemy of Peace”, he argued that England’s relations with Germany showed that “the policy of the Boer war is being tried on a vaster scale against Europe”. A deepening commitment to Ireland required all kinds of intellectual realignments.

An excellent new book charts Casement’s conversion to the nationalist cause. Roland Philipps’s Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement integrates its subject’s successive passions. Casement’s need for action emerges as the unifying factor. Without an all-consuming project on the grandest of scales, he withered. After Africa, Ireland was the natural next step. He distanced himself from the British Empire even as he continued to serve it. Such distancing ranged from the intense monologues for which he became known in nationalist circles to occasional bouts of adolescent peacocking. Philipps notes that Casement refused to wear the pith helmet and linen of the colonial apparatchik while investigating humanitarian outrages in Peru, instead sporting a suit of brown Irish homespun in the appalling heat.

Philipps takes Casement’s sexuality seriously. As recently as 2013, experts have argued that the journals which record various homosexual assignations — the so-called “Black Diaries” — were faked by British intelligence. The diaries were certainly used to discredit Casement after his death, but Philipps has no time for talk of forgery. The results are interesting precisely because the Black Diaries add little to our understanding of the man. Yes, he desired, and was often able to satisfy that desire. But did homosexuality influence his political activity?

Perhaps. He had no wife or children, and so was arguably willing to go further than other men might and to take risks that other men wouldn’t. In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald concluded that Casement’s sexuality gave him a unique insight into the suffering of others; the sand-worn trope of the homosexual as a hog snouting for injustice rather than truffles. Such connections are entirely speculative. Philipps, quite rightly, avoids using the Black Diaries to make grand assumptions. Instead, Broken Archangel stresses Casement’s kindness, generosity, and charisma. The people who knew him tended to love him.

Casement inhabited his first Ireland until war blocked the interminable, creeping road to Home Rule yet again. He was among those who felt that the time for waiting was over. Frustrated by political dithering and alarmed by the Ulster Volunteer Force’s competing insurrectionist movement, Casement travelled to Germany in late 1914. As Wolfe Tone had done over a century before, he sought the aid of a foreign nation to overpower Britain. Later he would write of “my contemplated Wolfe Tone descent on the coast of Ireland”.

Two years in Germany forced Casement to encounter another Ireland. If his first Ireland reflected his romantic nature, then this second Ireland threw his naivety into sharp relief. His plan to form a Brigade from Irish prisoners of war was frustrated when it became apparent that the POWs didn’t really care for talk of liberty and old Ireland: “Some of them insulted me — but all showed clearly the utter slothful indifference of that type of debauched Irishman to any appeal but to his greed… in a very despondent mood after the revelation of Irish depravity I had witnessed among these 2,200 so-called ‘Irishmen’.”

Only a tiny number ever enlisted, despite inducements of better food, more comfortable lodgings, and guaranteed passage to America should the venture fail. His bookish and abstract speeches, delivered in a cut-glass English accent, found little favour among tired young men who just wanted to get home in one piece. The Germans also let him down. It is bleakly comical to read of Casement’s shock that German interest in Ireland was of a purely military character, and that no one in Berlin gave a fig for Irish freedom one way or the other. His second Ireland was a barren moor, unpeopled and inanimate. It was a place where daylight rendered all of those impassioned midnight conversations ridiculous.

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Casement’s return to Ireland shortly before the Easter Rising is now the stuff of legend: the submarine, the lost rifles, the raw morning on Banna Strand. Capture came swiftly, and the subsequent trial for High Treason could have only one outcome. He used the dock to give a final defiant address, and was able to recapture his first Ireland now that he had left action behind and could rely on words once more: “Judicial assassination today is reserved only for one race of the king’s subjects — for Irishmen, for those who cannot forget their allegiance to the realm of Ireland.” He was executed in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916.

Who was Roger Casement? That surname is suggestive. A window, sometimes clouded, swinging on its hinge. He was a creature of change, in some ways well-suited to a world that was shaking off the certainties of the 19th century with alarming speed. Even in his last hours, he was adapting. His conversion to Catholicism the evening before his execution foreshadowed broader shifts in Ireland, where protestant nationalists were soon to become rare birds. He did not live to see that change, or the many others that followed in the decades after his death. He died at the height of the conflict that would lame the British Empire, and before the Civil War that would stain his first Ireland forever. If the records of his life never quite satisfy, it is because he was never still, always hurrying off to impose his awkward, admirable dreams elsewhere.

Two statues of Casement have been erected. The first is in Dún Laoghaire, a short stroll from his birthplace at Sandycove. Casement is perched above the sea baths, back turned to Britain, bronze eyes fixed on Dublin and all that lies beyond. The second is at Ballyheigue, Co. Kerry. This statue faces inland too, though Casement’s wrists are bound together, as if the man is trapped by his own memorial. There the two patriots stand, gazing back at one another across a strange new nation. This is Roger Casement’s third Ireland, a country that would strike him as far more foreign than the Congo ever did, a place of both disappointment and opportunity. Knock, knock, knock.

James Woodforde began his diary on 24 July 1759, the day that he was made a scholar of New College, Oxford. He kept it up until 17 October 1802. He was 19 when he started and 63 when he finally put down his pen. He filled more than 60 volumes with terse observations about his life and the small world around him. You can read selections from these volumes today in various editions, all published under the title The Diary of a Country Parson. Woodforde thought his diary “trifling”. We should be thankful for such trifles today. The Rector of Weston recorded the sights, sounds, tastes, hopes, fears, and irritations of a sunken England.

The diary is more than a historical document. It is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. This is odd, since Woodforde led a sedate life. Born in Somerset in 1740, he went to Winchester and Oxford. He was a curate in the West Country as a young man, before securing the plum living of Weston Longville in 1774, where he lived a bachelor’s life with his niece, Nancy. He died on New Year’s Day 1803. And that was it. The most common line in the diary is “We breakfasted, dined &c. again at home”. Nothing much happens, yet I couldn’t wait to find out what wasn’t going to happen next.

There was little incident, but much to write about. Weather was important. For Woodforde, weather was not something that happened outside. The Norfolk cold was especially given to waltzing in and making itself at home. February 1785 was bad: “the Frost severer than ever in the night as it even froze the Chamber Pots under the Beds” — though December 1798 was worse: “Frost last Night & this Morning & all the Day intense. It froze in every part of the House even in the Kitchen. Milk & Cream tho’ kept in the Kitchen all froze. Meat like blocks of Wood… So severe Weather I think I never felt before.”

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Woodforde’s religion was like the frost: an obvious and unexceptional part of life. If the parson had a rich spiritual existence, he did not record it in the diary. But he attended to his duties with vigour; the pages are full of burials, marriages and Christenings. When the Sunday congregation looked a little sparse, he was at pains to point out that poor weather had prevented many eager parishioners from attending. He made charitable donations and noted down prayers for the recently deceased. Other clergymen in the neighbourhood provided company, and entertained one another with a busy round of weekly dinners.

These dinners and suppers are the first thing a casual reader will notice. Woodforde took a Hobbitish pleasure in recording the fare, an endless procession of meats and desserts designed to honour guests as well as feed them. But it is the booze that makes the greatest impression. Port wine was the tipple of choice, and Woodforde brewed his own beer and mead. Helpful smugglers would augment the parsonage cellar with tubs of rum and gin. There is nothing to suggest that Woodforde drank any more than his contemporaries. His servants were often pissed, and drunken accidents were common. The parson was aware that it was possible to drink too much — he was constantly receiving news that his brother John had, yet again, fallen off his horse in the dead of night. In 1790 he mused that: “I drank but very little Wine Yesterday or to day only 2 or 3 glasses. I used myself before and all last Winter to near a Pint of Port Wine every Day and I now believe did me much harm.” Still, 40 pages later we find the entry: “Busy this morning in bottling off Moonshine.”

Weather, religion, food and wine. These run throughout the diary, and are interesting in themselves. But the real joy of the book comes from the accumulation of tiny details. The names: Tom Cushion, William Crotch, Lady Bacon, Bretingham Scurl, Garthon Spincks. The parson’s quest to dredge and stock the “great Pond” in his garden, and his worry that the turnips will freeze in the fields unless a good snowfall comes soon. The difficulties he had in managing his household, where pregnant maids and drunken boys caused frequent problems. His niece’s complaints about the dreariness of rural Norfolk and his nephew’s dreams of going to sea. The trauma of a botched tooth extraction, the use of a black cat’s tail to cure an inflamed eyelid, and the building torment of gout. A whole world is born from years of tight observation.

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Writers are fascinated by Woodforde. They always ask the same question: why did he bother? “What made him keep it?” asked Ronald Blythe. Virginia Woolf conceded that “for whom he wrote or why he wrote it is impossible to say”. Woodforde might well have agreed. It is clear that the diary began as a simple record of expenditure and, to a lesser degree, personal achievement. Then the channel burst its banks and widened into broad waters. Everything is written as if it were an accounting of the day’s expenditure. This may, in part, explain Woodforde’s quiet success in the 20th century. His private, laconic prose has come of age. Modern writers strain for effects that the parson conjured artlessly in his smoky study.

We are all accidental diarists now. Even if we do not post about the minutiae of our daily lives online, phones and bank cards record much of our activity on any given day. When I put Woodforde down last night, I felt a sense of unease. His life, a life that could be led fully and quietly, is increasingly remote. It is unnerving to be confronted by the loss of so many little things. Not that the parson’s life was perfect. He was often melancholy, especially in his last years, when his family and closest friends began to die and increasing sickness left him a near-invalid. The growing threat of a French invasion filled him with anxiety. Even when he was a young man, there was “a bad boil upon my Posteriors” for every delicious meal enjoyed. And yet I cannot help but wonder what we have given up in exchange for our current world. As Woodforde once wrote: “The present times seem to prognosticate e’er long very alarming circumstances.”

I always called the largest mound a hill fort, though I have no idea if it qualified for the title. This was no Maiden Castle. The ring’s centre can’t have held more than a family and a few pigs. Yet here it still was, thousands of years on. That modest earthwork was my first experience of Deep England — or Deep Britain, since the fort was constructed centuries before England was born.

Deep England is not a place. It is a shock. A sudden awareness of time freed from measurement and scale. Such a shock can be triggered by a hill fort, a shaped stone, a worn staircase. But you don’t need to tramp the Sussex countryside to find Deep England. It can be felt in the paintings of David Inshaw and Simon Palmer, the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, the work of Alan Garner. And at this time of year, it can easily be found in John Masefield’s 1935 Christmas tale The Box of Delights, one of those children’s books best enjoyed by adults.

A brush with Deep England might produce feelings of recognition and homecoming; equally, time’s long drop can inspire eeriness and threat. The best art devoted to England’s deep past is always a shuffling of the familiar and the strange. This makes Christmas the perfect time to reflect on the passage of centuries. There is a strained cosiness to modern Christmas, but beneath the lights and mulled wine lurks the black pause of the year’s end. It is a time for barred doors and ghost stories. John Masefield understood these things.

Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967. In 1953, Muriel Spark declared that “John Masefield is known to all of us… I do not think there is any need of a book to make him wider known.” My father can still recite Masefield’s poem “Cargoes”, drummed into him as a schoolboy in Sixties Belfast. And yet, a few short decades later, Masefield has joined the ranks of the unread. This is not an unusual fate for a Poet Laureate, but it is sad in Masefield’s case. He wrote good verse, and although some of his work has withered on the page, much still sings.

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If anyone under the age of 60 knows of Masefield today it is because of The Box of Delights. The story is simple enough. Kay Harker is going home for the Christmas holidays. He meets an old eccentric on the station platform, a Punch and Judy showman with a fondness for gnomic utterances: Cole Hawlings. But he is in trouble. He is being hunted across England by dark forces, and although he has powers of his own, they are waning. He asks for Kay’s help: “Now that the Wolves are Running, perhaps you would do something to stop their Bite?” Kay agrees to safeguard the Box of Delights, a magical object that serves as a doorway to the distant past.

Masefield was a great proponent of the old-fashioned yarn. In his autobiography So Long to Learn, he emphasised the importance of straightforward storytelling. The rarefied devices of celebrated writers did not interest him. He wanted the spare, salty narratives of earlier epochs: “The sagas with their simple power made the story-telling of most of our masters almost absurd. What was Flaubert, with his labour and richness of language; what was Pater, with his learning and instinct for felicity, to the tellers of the Laxdale or Njala sagas?” For Masefield, “literature” was an obstruction, an elaborate rood screen that hid a story from its audience.

The Box of Delights is a great story simply told. But it is not just the story of Kay Harker. It is the story of Britain. “A nation’s past is the poet’s pasture,” said Masefield, and Kay’s adventures bear this out. The winter landscape surrounding his village is a map of the past: the ruined Abbey, the Roman road, the hill fort known as Arthur’s Camp, even the trees that advance and retreat as Kay moves through time. He marches with legionaries, fights alongside ancient Britons, and gallops through the forest with Herne the Hunter. Always the Wolves are there, a sinister army that harries mankind. Cole Hawlings is himself a figure from the deep past, though fading now. Once the forces of good and evil were evenly matched, but his enemies have learnt new tricks. They employ the latest technology and prosper in plain sight amid respectable society, while Hawlings and his allies must live on the run.

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The tale’s Christmas setting serves as more than a cosy backdrop. The Box of Delights is a book about time, and the Winter Solstice is the appropriate moment to consider the passage of countless years. More specifically, the book is about deep time unfolding in one particular place. And so it is appropriate that in the final chapter, Kay attends the Christmas service at Tatchester cathedral, the thousandth such service to have been held there — the rhythms of worship are the only clock that can measure deep time. While Masefield’s reach extended back far beyond the arrival of Christianity in Britain, the novel is unambiguous in its religious message. Greed and aggression are punished, and the weak triumph at the close. Even Cole Hawlings, who has been knocking about “since Pagan times”, adheres to the new faith:

“In one place, the river ran through a wide cavern, the wall of which had been painted with a procession of men leading bulls and horses. ‘That was our old religion, Master Harker,’ Cole said, nodding towards it. ‘It was nothing like so good as the new, of course…’”

The Box of Delights remains in print. It was brilliantly adapted for the BBC in 1984, with a grizzled and twinkling Patrick Troughton starring as Hawlings, and a play based on the book is currently on at the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is no doubt that the novel has an enduring appeal.

While much of the dialogue is couched in Blytonisms (“splendiferous!”), and although its commitment to place and history could not be less fashionable, the story still delivers. It is perhaps more powerful now than when it was first published. Masefield’s world has joined the far-off epochs visited by Kay, just as ours soon will. Layers and layers of time and history will deepen Deep England further. As Cole Hawlings says, “Hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs it goes. And then all the way back again.”

Things are different now. Every TV show has a gay character of one kind or another. The days of scouring the Hollyoaks omnibus for the John Paul storyline are long gone. The world is brimming with “LGBTQ+ content”. So it is odd that the range of film and TV about gay men doesn’t feel much broader than it was when I was young. Higher volume does not seem to have led to greater variety. Instead, we find a careful curation of how gay men are presented on screen, even when such presentation flies in the face of reality. An example of this curation occurred last year. Netflix’s Dahmer caused a minor online fracas when it premiered. The issue was not only that yet another 10-part series about yet another brutal serial killer is a tasteless way for a streaming service to win eyeballs. No, the problem was that Netflix had categorised its gory new show as “LGBTQ”.

Dahmer is a long way from Will & Grace, but you can see why some hapless Netflix worker slapped the LGBTQ tag on the show. Jeffrey Dahmer haunted gay clubs and preyed on gay men. His particular sickness was bound up with young male bodies. And it can’t be denied that Dahmer highlights the risks inherent in the anonymous hook-up culture that many gay men will dabble in at some point. Such risks are perhaps even greater in today’s world of lengthening digital shadows, as illustrated by murders of gay men in Sligo and London, where the killers found their victims not in bars, but on Grindr. Dahmer makes for grim viewing, but it is of gay interest — if only as a reminder that evil doesn’t wear a sandwich board.

I don’t have a strong view on whether or not Netflix was right to classify Dahmer as “LGBTQ”. If anything, the fact that the debate happened at all struck me as faintly comic. The effort to police the content of one sub-category on one streaming service feels misplaced — if the image of gay men is so easily tarnished, then there are bigger problems to deal with. Today, Dahmer is categorised under “US TV Programmes”. Jeffrey Dahmer might not have been the right kind of gay man, but you can’t deny that he was American.

So what is the right kind of gay man? What sort of show does qualify for inclusion in the LGBTQ category? One popular offering on Netflix is Heartstopper, a series that focuses on a burgeoning romance between two teenage boys. If John Lewis made a LGBTQ television show, the result would look a lot like Heartstopper. Fluffy jumpers. Snow angels. Awkward smiles. It’s all very sweet. Characters endure some implausibly vanilla bullying, but spend most of their time exchanging emojis and shy little kisses.

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I am not the first to observe that Heartstopper is an oddly chaste affair given that the central protagonists are teenage boys, hardly a demographic famed for sexual restraint. But Heartstopper isn’t made for teenage boys. It’s not even for gay teenage boys, although I’m sure that many of them watch and enjoy it. This show unfolds in the rigidly ordered territory of the tweenage girl, a dreamscape in which young men are desirable precisely because they are unattainable, meaning that there is no risk of being desired in return. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean you have to look elsewhere for contemporary TV or film that is interested in gay men for their own sake.

This is surprisingly difficult at the moment. Young Royals is a Netflix drama based on one of Hollywood’s ropier elevator pitches: what if the heir to the Swedish throne was gay? Over on Amazon we find Red, White & Royal Blue, a film which asks the question: what if the heir to the British throne was gay? These are fun, silly productions, and are beloved by thousands. But again, they use male homosexuality to advance plot. They feature gay men, but they are not about them.

Naturally, there have been more serious attempts to capture gay male experiences in recent years. Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name have both entered the glitter canon; the former celebrated for its story of memory and survival, the latter for its tinted, self-absorbed charm. They are beautiful films, but neither made me laugh, and a gay film without humour isn’t very gay at all. To my mind, one of the better recent gay films is The Happy Prince, in which an extravagantly fat-suited Rupert Everett portrays Oscar Wilde’s last days in Parisian exile. Everett’s Wilde rolls down the boulevards, guzzles champagne, falls off tables and leaks brown bile. The film succeeds because it is bleak and because it is funny.

Bleak and funny. These are the qualities that I want from a film about gay men. Humour is especially important. If there’s one common thread to the films and TV in the Netflix LGBTQ category, it is an absence of laughter. Until recently, I had come to believe that this humourlessness was total. Gay men on screen would be forever trapped on a continuum with Call Me By Your Name at one end and Heartstopper at the other, doomed to be either a melancholy, piano-playing twink or an improbably earnest YA character. So when Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun premiered last summer, I was delighted. The film is a crime thriller and a wince-inducing critique of contemporary gay culture. Above all, it is extremely funny. Here was the cackling in the dark I had been craving.

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The film stars Silva and Jordan Firstman, both playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Sebastián is a gay man of the Von Aschenbach school. An artist — a filmmaker, in this case — who thinks about death a lot. He lazes around his Mexico City apartment and researches suicide methods while his maid does the dishes. Every so often he opens the fridge. There isn’t any food in there, just two bottles of amyl nitrate. Sebastián takes a deep huff and goes back to bed. Later, he’ll enjoy some plump lines of ketamine for dessert.

Sebastián goes to a gay beach for a change of scene. Naked men grunt and gargle in the dunes. Sebastián sits on the sand reading E. M. Cioran (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy). Tadzio never makes an appearance. Instead he meets Jordan, an American tourist and professional Instagram influencer. Things go downhill from there. It is difficult to describe what makes Jordan so irritating. There is an immediate presumption of total intimacy with Sebastián that is alarming, almost psychotic. There is the ceaseless chatter, countless words advancing like the Golden Horde across the steppe. There is the lack of content, let alone meaning, to anything that he says. Even his smile is annoying.

Silva does annoying very well. Rotting in the Sun is as much about irritation as anything else. The film opens on a public square in which rival buskers create a nightmarish mashup of “Jingle Bells” and “Zombie” by The Cranberries. A random woman accuses Sebastián of abusing his coprophage dog. His apartment complex is a chaotic building site. Work is a series of voice notes and juddering Zoom calls. Even his gay beach holiday is a source of vexation. Press about the film focused on the large number of male genitals on display, but there is nothing titillating about any of them. They are obtrusive and ridiculous. Far from evidence of liberation, all of those cocks feel like an imposition to Sebastián. It all begs the question of what he is doing there in the first place. This is a hell of his own devising.

Jordan is a social barnacle, and Sebastián is his chosen rock. “I love you,” he says, five minutes into their acquaintance. He wants Sebastián to work on a film with him — a film about him. When Sebastián finally lashes out, Jordan responds: “You can’t hurt me, because I’m happy.” He is almost convincing. Rotting in the Sun is a bleak, hilarious satire. Like all true satire, the film is resolutely focused on the world as it actually is. There are no snow angels, no golden Italian summers. Part of the film’s strength comes from its focus on men in their thirties. Illusions have departed. For Sebastián, this means a retreat into comfortable angst. Jordan is the true realist. Instagram for money, drugs and sex for fun.

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As Silva has been at pains to point out in interviews, this is not a portrayal of all gay men. Still, these are types — stunted wallower, fragile clown — that are instantly recognisable to many of us. To see them lampooned is a pleasure. But this is more than a piss-take. Both characters are vindicated by the end of the film. A Cioran-esque twist confirms Sebastián’s bleak worldview, while Jordan’s forcefulness becomes an endearing strength. These men are ridiculous, but that doesn’t make them wrong. Not entirely, anyway.

I enjoyed Rotting in the Sun for its comedy and its honesty. The two go together, I think. If the kind of gay men we see on screen are for the most part bland and humourless, it is because most filmmakers aren’t especially interested in gay lives as they are actually lived. Of course, there will always be a place for shows like Heartstopper and Young Royals. Cosy Teen Nonsense has been a recognisable genre since the days of Dawson’s Creek, and there is no reason why there shouldn’t be the occasional gay iteration.

But there needs to be room for honesty, too. At times I wonder if we have exchanged the predictability of Canal+ gay films for the predictability of a safe teen romance, eternally retold. I want more than that. I want annoying gay men in my gay films, and I want to be invited to laugh at them. And if there’s a bicycle ride followed by a beautifully lit sex scene in there too, well, I won’t complain.

I write an Edgar Allan Poe museum because there are three such institutions in the United States — four, if you count the small cottage in the Bronx where he spent the last years of his life. The Richmond museum boasts the largest collection of Poephemera in the country. There are manuscripts covered with his looping, butterfly script. Letters and a silk waistcoat. You can admire Poe’s soup ladle, gawp at his walking stick and boat hooks, even cast an eye over his socks. I bought his collected stories in the museum shop and flicked through them that evening, finally choosing one that was new to me. The Premature Burial (1844) is about a man who escapes pathological fear and returns to the state of humdrum discontent commonly known as sanity. I read it with interest, hoping to pick up some tips.

The man’s fear is particular. He is taphophobic — morbidly afraid of being buried alive. This is reasonable enough, as he’s given to cataleptic episodes that render him cold and lazy-pulsed for extended periods. He is haunted by the prospect that one of these fits will overcome him while he is away from those aware of his condition. It would only be a matter of time before some officious bystander had him boxed-up and buried. Then would come the macabre revival: “The unendurable oppression of the lungs — the stifling fumes of the damp earth — the clinging of the death garments — the rigid embrace of the narrow house…”

Our narrator prepares for the worst. He commissions the cosiest possible coffin, complete with a bell that can be pulled from within. He stipulates that the lid must not be screwed down and that a supply of food and drink should be left within the family crypt in case he wakes up peckish. And then one day he opens his eyes onto darkness and confinement and finds that he is not in his cosy coffin, that there is no bell-pull, that there is no way out. I won’t reveal the story’s conclusion here. But I was struck by the power of the tale, and by the realisation that it did not employ gibbering fiends or lonely castles. No, it derived its strength from the very real fears of the age.

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By Terry Eagleton

Forty years after The Premature Burial was published, a Welsh clergyman found that he had a corpse problem: one particular corpse was not doing what it was supposed to do. It was, quite literally, acting up.

Eleven years before, a 73-year-old woman had died in the village of Llanelly. The cause was recorded as “unknown” in the register of deaths. She was laid out for three days before burial in a brick tomb that had been designed to accommodate two coffins. Hers was the first. In 1884, the tomb was opened to allow the interment of a relative, only for the gravedigger to uncover a disturbing scene.

The coffin’s lid had been “forced upwards”, creating a gap of about eight inches between casket and lid. The corpse’s right arm and right leg protruded through the gap so that they hung over the edge of the coffin, with the right knee pressed against the tomb’s interior wall. It was as if the dead woman had attempted to climb out of her own resting place.

There seemed only one conceivable explanation — a terrible mistake had been made 11 years before. And so, in May 1884, the Revd. David Williams wrote to Britain’s foremost medical journal, The Lancet: “Will any of your readers give me the benefit of their opinion as to whether the following was a case of being buried alive?”

The Vicar of Llanelly did not have to wait long for an answer. On 7 June, The Lancet published two responses to his query. Somewhat unhelpfully, they took entirely opposing views on the matter. Charles Williams, District Medical Officer of the Bodmin Union, thought the question ridiculous and said that the events at Llanelly were due to an explosive build-up of the “gases generated during putrefaction”. Dr William O’Neill of Lincoln was less optimistic. He was so convinced that live burial was a real danger that he argued interment should not take place until a doctor had formally certified evidence of decomposition in the cadaver.

Not all the responses were of a scientific character. One in particular had more in common with Poe’s fiction than medical debate. On 14 June, The Lancet published the reminiscences of a traveller who claimed to have seen evidence of live burial in the cathedral crypt at Bordeaux. There some recently uncovered corpses in remarkable states of preservation were displayed on iron frames. He was shown two bodies that left him in no doubt as to the risks of over-hasty inhumation:

“I am unable to attribute the position in which they were found in their coffins, and the look of horror which their faces still displayed, to any action of rigor mortis or any other post-mortem change, but simply and solely to their having awakened to a full appreciation of their most awful position… In the year 1870 these two bodies were still on view; and the attendants used to dwell at some length upon the horrors of being interred alive.”

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In the end, the Revd Williams accepted the explosive gas theory, no doubt grateful that he would be able to calm his worried flock with a reassuringly scientific explanation. The fact that one letter provoked such a range of responses is telling. Dr Williams’s rational appraisal. Dr O’Neill’s cautious pessimism. The ghoulish rubbernecking of the tourist. It was a subject that intrigued and appalled, that fed Victorian passions for both science and the macabre.

Yet fear is a slave to fashion. As the physician Jan Bondeson has shown in his gripping book on the subject, concern about live burial among the general population seems to have declined rapidly after the First World War. The age of mechanised warfare had given people quite enough to worry about above ground.

You might think that live burial is now the sole preserve of horror fiction and Tarantino films; that the anxieties of the Revd Williams are nothing but a macabre footnote. After all, we are no longer reliant on the judgments of port-sodden sawbones. We have the full beeping arsenal of modern medicine to track our journey into the dark. What could go wrong?

Rather a lot, it seems. Examples of near misses in our own age are not difficult to find. A woman who woke up in a Polish morgue in 2009. An Australian man who tried to escape his body bag in 2022. A woman in Ecuador who started banging on the coffin during her own wake last June. Two weeks ago, on Friday 13 October, paramedics in County Durham declared a man deceased, only for staff at Darlington Memorial Hospital to discover that he was still alive.

Such incidents are rare enough to be newsworthy. But they do make you wonder. Bondeson ends his book with a chapter entitled “Are people still being buried alive?” The answer is: perhaps, in an extremely limited set of circumstances. Apparently, the main situation every taphophobe should avoid is a surfeit of drugs or alcohol in sub-zero temperatures ­— extreme intoxication and hypothermia form the combination most likely to fox an exhausted medic.

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Bondeson relates his own experience of treating a woman who had enjoyed several bottles of vodka while sitting on her freezing balcony. The police who brought her to hospital assumed that she had passed away. In fact her heart was still beating, though so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. Bondeson managed to revive the patient, noting that “her marked obesity, isolating the inner organs from the cold, was probably to be thanked for the fortunate outcome of this case”.

Bondeson’s anecdote fascinates because it underlines the role of chance. All tales of live burial do, whether they take the form of creepy fiction or learned debates in The Lancet. When Pliny the Elder wrote of men who had awoken on their own funeral pyres, he bemoaned fortune’s vicissitudes, “so much so, that we cannot be sure of any thing, no, not even that a person is dead”. The fear is greater than the horror of premature burial. It lies in the knowledge that such tragedies might have been averted had the funeral been delayed by a day, an hour. This is the dreadful if only that torments Poe’s taphophobe. He imagines the cruelty of the “memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed…”

Live burial remains the most awful fate imaginable. Not because it is especially likely. Not even because of the grisly details. But because it disrupts our fond dreaming of an ordered world, in which death and life are cleanly separated by six feet of earth.

Yet London’s density of people has led to a density of competing interests. Northumberland Estates, the duke’s development company, were refused planning permission for the flats in October 2021. A subsequent appeal is ongoing and has attracted media interest. All this because the proposed location is currently the site of Park Road Allotments.

Park Road Allotments have existed since 1917, when the 7th Duke leased a parcel of land to the local authority. The plots were primarily used by soldiers returning from the battlefields of the First World War. However, Hounslow Council did not refuse planning permission because of this evocative history. Their reasoning was far less romantic. The council’s main objection to the flats was due to the loss of what is known, in the comatose lingo of government, as “Local Open Space”, not the loss of the allotments. But there is no doubt that the attention lavished on the case by various media outlets is precisely because plots are at risk. They make for emotive copy, especially when a wealthy duke is involved.

When I first got wind of the story, my sympathies automatically aligned with the plotholders. My grandfather spent summers nurturing marrows on his plot. In early September, he would deliver a colossal green shell casing, which had the heft of a wet sandbag and tasted faintly of methane. Grandad would suggest stuffing it with mince (people who grow marrows always suggest stuffing them with mince). I used to wonder why such a practical and thoughtful man would raise a Herculean fruit only to put 90% of its mass straight on the compost heap. Now I understand that consumption was never his chief concern. The growing was all.

I briefly tended an allotment as a teenager, though I never bothered with marrows. Most of my time was spent digging up couch grass and then squatting to remove each fleshy white root from the heavy clay. “I’d spray that off if I were you,” the old gent on the neighbouring plot advised. “Never get on top of it otherwise.” He was right, I never did get on top of it. But I cleared enough earth to cultivate rows of garlic, broad beans and leeks. I ridged up the soil and planted potato sets (Pink Fir Apple, Charlotte). Best of all, I erected a tiny plastic greenhouse to shelter my tomatoes. The brawny, pubescent stink of leaping growth stays with me.

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Odours aside, my lasting impression of allotment life was the work required to bring even the smallest piece of neglected land into cultivation. Digging up weeds, digging in manure, removing stones and potsherds. And that’s before you plant anything. A plot must be visited every day in the growing season. There are always vegetables to be watered, pests to control, and yet more weeds to pull up. You spend so much time with your face in the muck that it becomes a kind of acquaintance. I suppose this feeling is the dimmest echo of what it must be like to spend a whole life on the same patch of ground. Humans imprint on the land they work. To take that land away from its custodians means the loss of much more than outdoor space. For many, it is the severing of a relationship.

As well as imprinting on that land, we inhabit it. Every allotment has its old shed. Mine was a slouching grandee of impossible antiquity. It was filled with — and possibly supported by — 50 years of detritus. Sticky tins of bitumen lurked behind rolls of rotting carpet, broken tool handles were packed into every crevice. There was a genuine stratigraphy to all that crap. I discovered cigarette cartons belonging to brands long deceased, and I dated some sodden lumps of newspaper to the early Eighties. There was a history in that shed, the small leavings of other lives.

Although allotments are not unique to the United Kingdom, they do seem to exert a special tug in this country. These scruffy, exciting parcels of land are among the most familiar markers of our landscape, and particularly of the awkward spaces where city broadens into countryside. Allotments glimpsed from a train window are a sign that you are on your way, or nearly home.

Their significance is brilliantly described in The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture by David Crouch and Colin Ward. First published in 1988 and recently reissued by Little Toller Books, the book describes how the freedom that comes with working your own ground allows us to “make our own geography” and, like the Diggers of 1649, to dream our own little Utopias in suburban Sheffield or Belfast. They are also levelling places, boasting an unforced diversity of class, race and sexuality that would make any corporate recruitment consultant weep with envy. As J.C. Niala writes in her afterword to the new edition: “Allotment sites are a typical example of English material cultural heritage, yet at the same time they are more diverse in people and plants than the cities that surround them, and have been for over three-quarters of a century.”

My own attachment to allotments is personal as well as cultural. So I was surprised, and a little discomfited, to find myself beginning to side with the developers as I learned more about the Isleworth scheme. The Northumberland Estate’s proposal would retain 38 plots, though at a reduced size of 60 square metres. Those who lose their allotments would be offered alternative sites elsewhere. This is far from ideal, of course. Allotments are not parking spaces; you cannot simply move from one to another without a sense of loss. For many, they have all the weight of meaning that is traditionally attached to a home. And yet homes are at the heart of this whole mess. A city with a desperate shortage of them would gain 80 more. My heart says Nimby, but my head screams Yimby.

There are two possible outcomes to the Northumberland Estate’s appeal. One, planning permission is granted, and the flats are built. Two, planning permission is denied. The second outcome will not maintain the status quo. It is unlikely that Park Road Allotments will be allowed to remain on the site. A spokesperson for Northumberland Estates has said that they would explore other uses for the land, “like using it for biodiversity credits”. This is a deplorable display of petulance, but it does follow the logic of modern Britain, a country in which “No” seems to be the watchword. In the end, only the lawyers get what they want.

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Dukes and allotments might feel like outposts of a vanishing Britain, as remote from our daily reality as the crenelated frontage of Syon House. But this small spat in Isleworth exemplifies a very contemporary problem: our density of competing interests leads to stalemate. No new flats, but no more allotments either. If the land is given over to the harvesting of biodiversity credits, an existing community of growers will not be replaced by a community of residents. There will simply be no community worthy of the name left on this little pocket of land.

It isn’t all doom and gloom in West London. A new allotment site has just opened in Ealing, providing 35 generous plots of 125 square metres. There are still 40,000 plots in the city, spread over more than 700 sites. Perhaps they will be chipped away over the coming decades. I hope not. We need houses, but we need other things too. Places where hard work is not measured in cash. Places that delight for the sake of delighting. Despite my treacherous inclinations toward the Park Road case, my money is still on the growers. After all, ingenuity has always been an essential quality for any plotholder — they go together like marrows and mince.

I had already wasted a few decades by the time I started drawing. No matter. I wanted a pastime that didn’t involve a screen. I was left with a choice between drawing and fishing. I chose the former because you need a car to reach most fishing spots, and I don’t have one. This was how I found myself boarding the bus to Dublin for a weekly evening class at the Drawing School. Classes take place in a roomy basement studio beneath Merrion Square, where serene plaster casts watch over rows of students as they work. The primary activity for a novice like me is deceptively simple. You are asked to copy a model drawing. The copy should be as exact as you can make it. The angle of every line, the internal proportions of the form, and the interplay of light and shadow must be faithfully reproduced.

This is incredibly difficult to do. The human eye is an awful cheat. You can be quite pleased with your copy until you put it next to the original and see what a mess you’ve made of everything. An ear too high, a shadow not half as dark as it needs to be. It’s a frustrating process, but compelling too. Students of all ages are genuinely absorbed in their work. The quiet is broken only by the occasional rasp of a pencil sharpener or the hushed advice of the instructors as they rove among the easels.

The model drawings are taken from the Cours de Dessin of Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme, a three-volume manual published between 1868 and 1873. The Cours offers a series of drawings of progressive difficulty. Plate 1 is devoted to the human eye, Plate 28 depicts a crouched female leg, Plate 52 is a bust of Brutus, and so on. Bargue drew all of the images himself, selecting examples from ancient statuary that would provide students with the best lessons in form, line and tonal value. This means that a student copies Bargue’s drawing of a cast made from a statue inspired (in most cases) by a human model. Such a daisy chain of reproduction might seem absurd. In fact, it places the student in a tradition of artistic training that stretches back to Antonio Mini and beyond.

Picasso is known to have used the Cours as a teenager, but the method’s most enthusiastic proponent was Vincent Van Gogh: “It invigorates my pencil,” he said. In September 1880, he wrote: “I work regularly on the Cours de Dessin Bargue, and intend to finish it before I undertake anything else, for each day it makes my hand as well as my mind more supple and strong.” Although copying was an arduous and frustrating process, Van Gogh described it as “nothing other than a labour of giving birth. First pain, then joy afterwards.” Ten years later, just weeks before his death, he was planning to work through the Cours again.

The point of all that copying is to charm the cheating eye into submission and learn to really see. But most art schools today do not seem particularly interested in teaching their students this foundational skill. Drawing remains a central component of the BA Fine Art at City & Guilds, Falmouth University offers a dedicated BA Drawing degree, and The Royal Drawing School has become famous for its postgraduate Drawing Year. But the majority of art schools now focus on other activities, and those who want to learn traditional skills must look elsewhere.

“Why have people stopped drawing?” as a perplexed David Hockney recently asked. Around 1920, art education in Britain began with observational drawing; first of prints and casts, then of the living human figure. You had to earn your way to the life model through practice and dedication. And there was an academic component, too: anatomy, geometry, art history. Only then could the serious work of painting and sculpting begin. Although a very different experience to Michelangelo’s workshop, it was a training that Antonio Mini would have recognised.

By the Eighties, however, this traditional education had largely disappeared from Britain’s art schools. Samuel Horler, who founded the Dublin Drawing School I attended in 2010, says his father witnessed the shift first-hand: “As a student he did life-modelling to get a bit of money. He would go out to all the art schools in London and he said it was the easiest work because no one would show up to class. So he would just sit there and wouldn’t have to do much posing because no one was coming, they were all into new media suddenly.”

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William Coldstream, whose eponymous committee recommended a series of sweeping reforms to art education between 1960 and 1970, usually gets the blame for the elevation of ideas over practice. But as painter and writer Jacob Willer has shown, the death of the old order was a complex and lengthy process that began long before the Coldstream Committee was first assembled. Heads were already being turned by French abstractionism in the Twenties, a movement that did not require its adherents to be able to draw a convincing human hand. Photography’s ever-increasing reach had an equally dampening effect on realism. And by the Thirties, a peculiarly British interpretation of the Bauhaus Movement was taking hold. Walter Gropius’s 1919 Manifesto is a short exhortation to return to the crafts, or Handwerk: “[Artists] must return to the workshop. This world of mere drawing and painting of draughtsmen and applied artists must at long last become a world that builds.” In its British incarnation, Bauhaus became a rallying cry for those who wished to banish “mere drawing” from the art schools — the only problem was that most forgot to return to the workshop after they had done so.

Jacob Willer has argued that the true break from the past came when art education opened its doors to fashion’s unceasing churn and found that it could not close them again. Bauhaus Modernism was swept away by Pop Art, and the modish tide has continued to go in and out ever since. We’re all supposed to be artists now, isn’t that right? I am not so sure. Nouns tend to lose their meaning when universally applied. That is certainly Horler’s view on the matter. His grandmother is the celebrated sculptor Imogen Stuart, a member of both the Royal Hibernian Academy and Aosdána. In 2015, Stuart was elected Saoi, Ireland’s highest cultural honour. Despite these accolades, Stuart knows that there is always more to learn: “She’s hesitant about calling herself an artist,” says Horler, “And that is quite a traditional view. It shows how misunderstood art is today, that people can just call themselves artists… From the Renaissance right up until at least the Twenties, you had to qualify. And that’s missing now.”

Horler’s Drawing School is one of an increasing number of institutions trying to bridge the artistic skills gap. These range from the glossy Florence Academy of Art and New York City’s Grand Central Atelier to boutique outfits such as the Glasgow Academy of Fine Art. Teaching approaches vary, but all these academies and ateliers are united by a conviction that learning to draw accurately and beautifully is an essential starting point for any artist. Naturally, not everyone has the time and money to attend these schools. But teaching yourself to draw has probably never been easier. Books on the subject are legion and thriving drawing communities exist online. YouTube channels such as ProkoTV pull in millions of subscribers, while digitised museum collections make it possible to learn from the work of supremely gifted and classically trained artists like Käthe Kollwitz and Thomas Anschutz. (Still, I suspect there’s no real substitute for a teacher looming up behind you and murmuring “what’s going on with that nose, Alex?”)

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The growth of atelier education has not been universally welcomed. Despite being a critic of the contemporary art world, Willer has little time for the revival of 19th-century teaching methods either. Of both approaches he writes “they do not know what they do not know”. So, while many art schools are now little more than community theatre for the upper-middle classes, ateliers that offer a supposed recreation of a Parisian studio circa 1880 risk becoming a stultifying dead-end. Clearly, a curriculum that marries hard-won skill with creative expression is the ideal to strive for. Some argue that the only solution is to resume the Renaissance practice of seeking out a master willing to impart his or her wisdom in a private setting, away from the institutions and their various diktats.

Art schools and ateliers have their respective ultras, but Horler is not among them. For him, observational drawing is a useful tool for beginners and a handy refresher for the experienced, not an article of faith. Copying provides a solid technical grounding and a set of objective criteria through which a student’s work can be evaluated. A student working through the Cours de Dessin is not making art, he says: “I always tell students that I’m not an art school, I’m not teaching art. But you learn certain skills and techniques that will help you as an artist.”

I still draw most days. Nothing special. Household clutter, mostly. I attempted the dozing figure in Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” a few weeks ago and was pleased with the result, until I noticed that my copy’s legs were much too small. In my case, the sleep of reason produces shrunken tibia. So I drew it again. And again. There is a compulsive element to drawing that I had not anticipated. I think it is a result of trying to see, really see. After three hours, I would walk out into Merrion Square to find that it had been rolled up and replaced with ink-damp forms and strange prospects. A busy garden square in central Dublin was now a question, the same question that Antonio Mini must have asked himself 500 years ago — how would I draw that?

There are, of course, regional variations. The British, tied by geography to Europe’s fortunes, tend to favour the definitive fall of the Western empire in AD 476. The Americans, ever fearful of an over-mighty executive, linger on the collapse of senatorial authority in 49 BC. And it is also more than a journalistic trope, with the unacknowledged legislators of our world also playing the same game. Elon Musk recently suggested that today’s baby drought is analogous to the low birth rates of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Marc Andreessen has compared California to Rome circa AD 250. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, is beginning to suspect that all this gender business might have a worrying ancient precedent.

Such appeals to the past are only human. The fourth word in Virgil’s Aeneid is Troiam. This is the first fact that we learn about Aeneas: he is from Troy. Virgil does not even bother to tell us his hero’s name until the 92nd line. Doubtless, the poets of Ur and Hattusha had their own Troys. And perhaps the first men who placed one mud brick upon another sang of flooded valleys, choked caves and herds that no longer ran. But Rome has been our common loss since the early Middle Ages. As Virgil looked back to Priam, so we look back to Virgil. In 1951, it was perfectly natural for W. H. Auden to compare a dying Britain with a dead Rome: “Caesar’s double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form…”

But journalists and billionaires do not work in a poetic register. They deal in facts and lucre. When they say that Britain or America is following imperium Romanum down the dusty track to oblivion, they seem to be speaking literally. This is not a mistake that Virgil would have made. It is all very well to evoke Rome as an elegiac warning. But if we believe that there are concrete lessons to learn from the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, then we will have to examine the mother of cities as she really was. The results are surprising.

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In AD 384, 400 years after Virgil composed his Aeneid, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus had a bridge problem. Symmachus was Urban Prefect of Rome, a role of huge responsibility. By the fourth century, the city of Rome was no longer the imperial capital of the western empire; it had been replaced in 286 by Mediolanum (modern Milan), which was a good deal closer to the empire’s febrile northern borders. But Rome remained the nation’s hearthstone. Her good governance was of the highest priority. The Urban Prefect dispensed justice, organised games, fed the mob and looked after the material fabric of the city. It was not an enviable position. One man had to keep the vast, turbulent metropolis ticking over with the minimum of rioting. Symmachus was well aware of the touchiness of the Roman pleb. His own father had been burned out of his house and chased from the city after making a catty remark of the “let them eat cake” variety during the wine shortage of 375.

The bridge problem went like this. Around 382, the emperor Gratian ordered that a new bridge be built across the Tiber. It soon became clear that construction was taking too long and costing too much. Two years later, as the project neared completion, one span collapsed. Such waste of public funds could not be ignored, and so an inquiry was launched. A specialist diver was engaged to examine the structure; he discovered that the job had been bodged. The engineers responsible for the project, Cyriades and Auxentius, were summoned to account for their failure. Each blamed the other, before Auxentius, who had been caught backfilling sections of the bridge with bales of hay, fled the city — pockets doubtless jingling with public gold.

On the face of it, this sounds like a very late Roman story: a nation once famous for its engineering prowess could no longer build a bridge across the Tiber without everything going horribly wrong. But I’m not sure that’s true. Problems arise all the time, and in themselves tell us very little about a society. What matters is the response to those problems. And Symmachus’s dispatches to the imperial court make it clear that his response was considered and comprehensive. The bridge was completed in the end, and stood for over 1,000 years until its demolition in 1484. Now think of 21st-century London: remember what happened the last time we tried to build a bridge across the Thames?

Peter Brown, in his excellent new autobiography Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, identifies the kind of dogged, even cheerful resourcefulness exhibited by Symmachus as one of the hallmarks of the later Roman elite. Brown’s long historical education, which has taken him from Oxford to Berkeley to Princeton, began as a child in Forties Dublin. Born into a Protestant society unmoored by Irish independence, he observed “what it was like to face the end of empire on the ground — in the small world of the little big men of the provinces — and to do so with dignity and good nature”. Embattled but not embittered, Brown’s family taught him that “a lively and imaginative culture could coexist with constrained political and economic circumstances. It was, perhaps, a good start with which to approach the world of late antiquity…”

This is the lesson of Symmachus, who dealt uncomplainingly with his own constrained political circumstances. The governing class of his generation was under extraordinary pressure, and yet it managed to keep the show on the road, to hand its civilisation on to the next generation despite the dramatic changes wrought by increasing barbarian incursions and the transformations brought about by an insurgent Christianity. Gratian had ordered a bridge to be built and Symmachus was going to damn well see it done.

Indeed, spend a few hours reading his dispatches and you would agree that asking whether Britain is “declining like Rome” is nothing less than an insult to the Roman Empire. The city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, by the Vandals in 455, and finally swallowed up by a new Gothic regime in 476. But while the legions held on the borders and the lawyers argued in the forum, while the tax revenues rolled into the treasury and the grain shipments cruised into Ostia, Symmachus and his friends do their duty to the patria. There had been crises before, after all, and Rome had always muddled through. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that men like Symmachus acquire the glamour of an endangered species.

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Even after the disaster of 476, there were still men around to keep the cogs turning. Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus held multiple public offices during the early sixth century. His masters were Ostrogothic kings, not emperors, and the capital was no longer at Mediolanum, but at Ravenna. None could doubt that the western Roman Empire was at an end, especially when compared to the eastern empire centred on Constantinople, which was about to flourish anew under the reign of Justinian. And yet, what do we find Cassiodorus doing? He did not waste his time on elegies for a lost world. He was far too busy for that sort of thing. Many of the city’s great buildings were falling into disrepair, so he decreed that Rome’s main brick depot be refitted with a view to manufacturing 25,000 new roof tiles every year. He chased the Governor of Lucania for his region’s taxes. He ensured that teachers of Rhetoric were properly paid. When a Goth settler seized the land of two Italians and reduced them to slavery, Cassiodorus was there to intervene.

This is not to minimise the impact of Rome’s collapse. As Bryan Ward-Perkins has shown, the post-Roman West was a bit of a dump. Timber supplanted dressed stone, flagged floors gave way to beaten earth. Coinage vanished. Cows shrank. Honorific statuary disappeared, as did indoor plumbing. The Roman ceramics industry, which had pumped out vast numbers of high-quality, wheel-thrown vessels for centuries, ground to a halt. Britain’s decline was among the most dramatic. In one moving passage, Ward-Perkins draws attention to a small object excavated at the Sutton Hoo ship burial. This famous site, which yielded intricate gold jewellery and elaborate ceremonial armour, also contained a small pottery bottle. Even the humblest Roman family would have regarded such an item as an unremarkable piece of household clutter. In seventh-century Britain, that small bottle sat naturally among the exquisite grave goods of a celebrated man.

And this is revealing. When our journalists and billionaires ask whether Britain or America is “declining like Rome”, they are really thinking about the grim realities of the early Middle Ages — a time of deprivation rather than plenty. And perhaps they are right to do so. However terrible life was in the post-Roman West, it was nothing like as bad as a similar rupture would be today. Most of us lack both the land and the knowledge to grow our own food. The support structures provided by extended family networks and stable local communities — the mortar of the pre-industrial world — have been fatally weakened. Many people rely upon regular medical intervention simply to stay alive. Our most basic goods are imported from the other side of the planet, as is the fuel required to power the machines that make contemporary life possible. Above all, centuries of peace have left us ill-equipped for the return of a society in which war is commonplace and might makes right. A fourth-century Roman would regard modern Britons as laughably weak, ignorant and dependent.

If Rome’s fall still resonates today, it is only because we know so little about the subject. Popular images of Roman decadence — Caligula drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar; Nero’s Golden House — are largely drawn from the first century, when the empire was at its height. Later emperors had no time for such diversions. They were an overworked and harassed bunch who often died violent deaths, but they often got the job done. In a sense, to ask whether the modern West is “declining like Rome” is to ask whether we are governed by people with the grit of Symmachus and the tenacity of Cassiodorus. One might as well compare a woollen toga to a polyester T-shirt.