While Blur may be doing better in their home country — they sold out Wembley last year — to most of my generation, they are essentially a sad nostalgia act. Rarely have a band’s glory days been so inseparably tied to such a derided historical moment: the “Britpop” movement and its demographic derivative “Britpopper” now represent an abyss of cringe. 

For Britpop was co-opted by that generation of British late-boomers who parlayed the end of history, their demographic glut and unique economic fortune into a series of foolhardy political conceits. Long before he invited Noel Gallagher to Downing Street, Tony Blair was having meetings with Damon Albarn in the Palace of Westminster. Soon enough the former lead singer of Ugly Rumours was saying things like: “Rock’n’roll is not just an important part of our culture, it’s an important part of our way of life”. Unfortunately, the heady cultural and intellectual optimism of that period can’t be seen as anything but complacency now.

As we see it, this lot valorised the liberalism that bore fruits for them, and sat on their hands as it rotted away. They fashioned a social-democratic aesthetic, and then forgot to build the social democracy. And they are consequently held responsible for a grab-bag of important and trivial mis-steps: New Labour, the Iraq War, the Olympic opening ceremony, the People’s Vote campaign and The Rest is Politics. This folk history of the Nineties does have a seductive simplicity, useful for young gadflies on Left and Right to caricature the decade, a way of chronologically tethering their competing attacks on Blairism. And it’s helped along by the fact that politics and culture did seem to align in that moment.

And yet, while Britpop certainly was gleeful at the prospect of political change, it also knew full well the problems it was running away from. Blur’s Parklife in particular, which celebrates its 30th birthday today and which was inescapable in that summer of 1994, is striking for how much of the Nineties mood it managed to get right at the time. Rather than a straightforward celebration, it sounds, now, like a melancholic critique of the period to which it also served as soundtrack, a record of the atomisation and anxiety that had already begun to seep into society. 

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Its reputation for care-free Cockney smugness is a product of the popularity of its title track — and Blur did occasionally over-indulge the musical style which Gallagher brothers called “Chas & Dave chimney sweep music”. But the rest of the tracks conjure a completely different mood: “Badhead”, “To the End”, “This is a Low” and “End of a Century”… So much of Albarn’s song-writing was drawing from a well of existential despair, his lonely characters drinking too much and cycling through American TV channels, stuck in apathetic or crumbling relationships. Already he was diagnosing the boredom and stasis we sometimes think particular to 21st-century life. And it is telling that he suffered from crippling panic attacks in the weeks immediately after Parklife’s release, bowled over by the force of getting everything he’d always wanted.

But these tracks are overshadowed by a grander project: Parklife’s nauseous portrait of modern life, a social diagnosis that Albarn and his cheerleaders went as far as to label a “manifesto” for modern England. Interviews from the time reveal his narrative of the recent past to be full of decline and decay. Post-Thatcher, “a whole new culture developed and old England died away… The American shopping malls landed in England, first in Essex. It was just awful to look at, like a spreading cancer…” And his songs are the stories of “​​characters living in this environment” and yearning to escape it — like Tracy Jacks, the civil servant who dreams of streaking on Walton Beach. Albarn called it “music for whistling in the dark”.  

The influence of Martin Amis’s London Fields has often been noted — not least by Albarn himself, who at the time painted himself as something of a Lad-lit troubadour. And he certainly inherits Amis’s scathing condescension, and his propensity for turning flesh and blood into a comedy cartoon. The album’s biggest hit, “Girls & Boys”, was written after a holiday to Magaluf, during which Albarn witnessed the emergence of Houellebecqian sexual scene, which clearly perturbed even if it did not offend. “There’s a very strong sexuality about it. I just love the whole idea of it, to be honest. I love herds. All these blokes and all these girls meeting at the watering hole and then just… copulating. There’s no morality involved, I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t happen. My mind’s just getting more dirty.”

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Albarn’s exact class relationship to this milieu was fiercely contested, especially by more true-born working-class peers. Initially, he had talked up Parklife as a concept album — “the travels of the mystical lager-eater”, a spin on Amis’s cast of low-life flaneurs. And at various stages the album was to be titled London, Sport or Soft Porn. But, soon after release, Albarn seemed determined to actually become such a figure. He held the album’s launch party at Walthamstow Dog Track (“you get the ooze of life there”, he said). And he was soon saying things like, “I started out reading Nabokov and now I’m into football, dog-racing and Essex girls,” as comfortable in an East End boozer as he was in the student union. The reality was that Albarn was always a lower-middle bohemian, not a working-class hero. He was accompanied on his fact-finding trips to Magaluf by his St Paul’s alumna girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. And his life in Essex was characterised not by dog-racing but by art school and the kind of cultured, post-Sixties homestead where he called his parents by their first names.

These contradictions of Albarn’s perspective — that of the mordant satirist-voyeur and the enthusiastic participant — do work in his favour. They lend his songs a scope that allow him to capture both ends of the Nineties. This reaches a climax on Parklife’s masterpiece, “This is a Low”. Framed through a cycle of lyrics based around Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast, the song is something of a mournful state-of-the-nation ballad. But its background account of a forgotten traveller on some twilit homeward journey (“Hit traffic on the Dogger bank/Up the Thames to find a taxi rank”) lend it a more wretched and introspective mood.

This isn’t triumphant Cool Britannia. It’s about as far from “Things Can Only Get Better”, or indeed Coachella bubble-gum, as you’re going to get, not least because it predates Britpop’s co-option by an expedient Labour Party and greedy A&R. But if we can accept that Albarn was capable of seeing behind the Nineties’ veil, perhaps we can also begin to reinterpret my generation’s received narrative of the decade. 

Rather than a last party busted by Columbine or September 11, for some the Nineties was the decade that parts of popular culture became aware of the sheer flatness of life after the great political battles of the Eighties. Part of this related to globalisation — and the music hall carry-on of Blur’s aesthetic universe was a conscious rebuttal of the creeping Americanisation they observed around them. But it also related to a distinct historical moment in Britain itself. 

Like Blair, Britpop had an ambiguous relationship with the Thatcher era that preceded it. Its subject matter — its commodity — was Thatcherism’s devastation. From their own corner of the wasteland, Blur, Pulp and Suede wrote about what they saw: lonely suburbs, remorseless yuppies and small-town drug abuse. Oasis, the most musically populist of the Britpop elite, admittedly traded in the headless euphoria of escape and renewal. But this only resonated because it was a dream, a dole-queue fantasy, that so many others could recognise. And yet, Britpop was ultimately to be consumed by the very forces that set it in motion. The first truly commercialised indie scene, they pursued popularity and market share without shame, allowing punk-ish taboos about “selling out” slide. “We were all Thatcher’s children, who got off our arses and did it for ourselves,” says Noel Gallagher, sounding every inch the barrow boy who “got on his bike”. 

Perhaps that’s why the Nineties generation is so easy to resent. They bore witness to the arrival of the society that we still live in, but were either powerless to change it, or more than happy to swim with the tide. The music, though, stands as testament to the fact that the contradictions of the decade were being registered on some level. The Britpoppers may have quickly become consumed by illusions of the new millennium, some of them embarrassingly to this day. But that doesn’t change the fact that some of them also gave voice to a world that had lost something — something which is still missing now. 

Lifelong sufferers report dysphoric levels of internal torment. Christopher, now 62, started shedding when he was 28. “I was so proud of my thick hair, but it just got thinner and thinner,” he says. “It changes your image of yourself fundamentally, at least it did for me. Because my hair was so thick I never thought it would, and then I just thought, ‘Oh fucking hell. I’m going to be one of those bald guys.’ I’m not exaggerating — it robbed life of any pleasure. Just looking in the mirror became a torture. And I already drank a lot, and I started drinking really heavily after that. My drinking took on a really dark turn after the hair loss — it just poisoned everything.”

Christopher had five hair transplants over a couple of decades, and the final one “took” completely, leaving him with a full head of hair. But he tells me about a friend who started losing his as a teenager. “I know that it destroyed his self-confidence,” Christopher says. The friend, now 70, neither treated nor shaved it, persisting with “combovers and things like that”. “He would say, ‘Once you go bald, your looks are gone and you’re always going to have to accept second-best in terms of a wife’… I know it ruined his life.”

In an age of technologically compelled self-obsession, a version of this fear is already filtering down to my own age group. Having barely achieved the quarter-century, friends are inspecting their family trees for evolutionary disadvantage, peeling back fringes to reveal widow’s peaks and Eiger foreheads. It is now more than common for my social reunions to begin with an update on the loosened thatch — stories of smoothing back your rug only to find yourself with furry fingers, and of showers that seem uncomfortably akin to shaves. These anecdotes find plenty of statistical company. A quarter of men who develop hereditary male baldness (“androgenic alopecia”) see symptoms before the age of 21; by 35, two-thirds of men have lost at least some of their hair. 

Such is the potency of this fear that young men try to palliatively anticipate what’s to come. Ben is 29, and has been using medicinal treatments for hair loss for two years. “It was like a preventative thing,” he says. “I don’t like to think of myself as someone who is vain. But I don’t really exercise, and if I were to lose my hair, I’d basically just become my dad… It’s almost like a psychological thing where, if I take this pill, I’ll keep my hair. It’s like an anxiety deferred.” But he’s sure this is more prevalent among young men than it used to be. “If I was a 30-year-old man in the Seventies, and I was going bald, no one would care. Something has happened in the last 40 years.” And he’s right. For most of human history, however miserable it made them, men could do nothing about their condition. But now an entire male baldness industry has arisen to simultaneously nurture and service their fears. 

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The gold standard is, of course, the transplant, a treatment which sprouted onto the British male psyche in 2011 when Wayne Rooney explained: “I was going bald at 25 — why not?” In response, millions of men must have thought: if a guy who’s been turned into a Shrek doll by his own fans can have a decent head of hair, why not me? Other celebrities followed suit (“Rio Ferdinand shows off his new hair and beard transplant,” as the sidebar of shame had it last month) and now a £1.5 billion transplant economy has now opened up, headquartered in Istanbul. Nor is the trip necessarily a fool’s errand. For the scale of change possible, observe the stunning transformation of Arsenal defender Rob Holding from tonsured no-hoper to barbershop pin-up.

Though increasingly popular, this is still the expensive option, costing thousands in Turkey, and tens thereof in England. For those of leaner means, or whose condition is not yet so severe, there are alternatives. An entire fleet of companies has surfaced: Keeps, Rogaine, Happy Head, Scandinavian Biolabs, Sons UK, Numan, Unthin, Manual and Hims. If you haven’t heard of them, check the social media feed of any man you know. You’ll find their before-and-after adverts squatting there, admonishing and inviting. 

For around £20 a month, you’ll receive a mixture of topical and oral treatments (pills, shampoos, serums and sprays) which make use of two main chemicals, minoxidil and finasteride. The first came about by happy accident. Minoxidil is a vasodilator (a drug used to treat high blood pressure) originally developed in the Seventies. But when it was tested, doctors noticed that it also stimulated hair growth (exactly why is still somewhat unclear) and it was directed towards hair-loss treatment in 1986. Finasteride, meanwhile, is a “preventer”. The drug stops testosterone from turning into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a male development hormone, and was first developed to treat enlarged prostates in 1992. But, since DHT also stops hair growing, reducing its presence in the body can slow hair loss, including after it has already begun. The product joined minoxidil in a different section of the pharmacy in 1997. As cosmetic treatments, neither is available on the NHS for hair loss, though they have been available from private pharmacies for years. 

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In this way, these companies are effectively pulling off a marketing trick more than a medical miracle: they offer the slickness of a “telehealth” service, employing online physicians to validate prescription-subscriptions which are then sent out in the mail. And in this digital setting, a distinctive, millennial tech start-up aesthetic emerges: gorgeous websites, pastel colours, and stylish, sans-serif fonts. Hims is most typical, and like any modern company worth its screentime, offers a philosophy as well as a product. “Hims is about personal wellness,” its website boasts. “You should look and feel your best all the time. Our job is to make that easy and affordable… We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted. Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves [we’re too often told]. What a load of bollocks.”

This is the language of wellness, of looksmaxxing and personal optimisation, turned into breathy corporate advertising copy. The packaging of Hims’s bottles and pouches is of a piece — beige, clean and minimalist. Manual, which Ben uses, does the same: “You get a little box, and it’s very cute, and it’s like you’re opening a present… It’s almost like they’ve managed to remove all stigma around what is essentially a pharmaceutical product, and it just becomes another thing that you take alongside your vitamin D and vitamin C tablets.” Much like the supplement industry, they are marketing hair regrowth as a route to the giddy state of “self-care”. And not just hair regrowth — several (but not all) of these companies offer other optimising pathways to spot-free skin and top-notch sexual performance. In this context, hair regrowth becomes just one waypoint of many along the road to total masculine performance. 

But obviously there is a catch. For a start, none of these treatments is guaranteed to work — and certainly not to levels of reforestation depicted in the adverts — while the hair that grows can be thin, and disappointingly downy (“peach fuzz”, Christopher calls it). The drugs can also take months to have any effect, which, for all the many happy customers, will see many men paying for weeks’ worth of ultimately useless brew, while (unlike transplants) any improvements will disappear the moment you stop taking them. And, frequently noted in manosphere-adjacent corners of the internet, finasteride especially can have some worrisome side-effects: depression, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. Which makes you wonder if Hims were onto something with the specific combination of treatments they offer.

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Nevertheless, men are flocking to these companies. While there’s little evidence that hair loss is statistically more prevalent today, the psychologists’ verdict is that social media has made millennials and Gen Z more “hair aware”. Popular Reddit threads such as r/tressless and r/HaircareScience provide a platform for tens of thousands of young men to trade tips on courses of “min” and “fin”, and share their own progress, uploading dozens images of their gradually thickening scalps. Even those who suffer the side-effects shrug them off: “Had a couple of days of ball ache and I don’t get morning wood anymore,” one user told me. “But fine. Satisfied with the results.”

Another man in his 40s making use of finasteride explained it “has had some psychological effects such as moderate depression that I have recently mitigated via antidepressants”. But, not to be deterred, he’s just starting using minoxidil too. Ben, meanwhile, used finasteride before minoxidil, and reported a plunging period of depression. “I was taking actually a very small dose, like half the dose I was recommended, and I just felt dead inside… It’s actually really disturbing that you can send off for something on the internet which can put you in such a dark place.” (Manual lists “low mood, depression or thoughts of self-harm” as very rare side-effects on its website.)

This is not exactly the relationship one might expect between a health supplement and its consumer, and it’s quite self-evident what all this really adds up to. In his 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to clarify the phase of late capitalism that had established itself in the post-war United States, based around the marketing of luxury and consumer goods. Many had been retailed through what he called “the dependence effect”, by which consumers’ “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied”. Frequently, producers may go as far as to “actively create wants through advertising and salesmanship”. In the Fifties, this meant white goods and General Motors. But now individual happiness is found in the mirror, much as it was once found in things. 

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Since then, with nowhere else left to colonise, capitalism has begun to cultivate the interior self, as it once did the fields and forests. And, it should be noted, this follows a strategy that has already been tried and tested to tremendous effect on at least 50% of the population. Women, for whom the scale of personal refurbishment demanded by society was always greater, have long been sold the language of optimisation and tweakments. It is part-and-parcel of existence as a female citizen-consumer, but also of a feminist discourse that has been critiquing the relationship of the cosmetic to the political for decades. 

The old stereotype of male insouciance when it comes to appearance is equally now long dead. A brave new world has crept up to replace it: of hair regrowth, breaking your femurs to gain a few inches in height, chin implants to achieve a squarer bone structure, and penis-enlargement surgery. But this is all about as liberating as the first appearance of Botox, another very 21st-century promise of cash-for-youth, cash-for-looks. It is another patch of the private realm swept into the orbit of commerce and checkout, a demand that may be exploited, but is ultimately unsatisfied.

This one lasted barely 21 minutes. A group of 50 centipeded past Nelson’s Column, some in Berghaus fleeces, some in moth-eaten donkey jackets, and all in hi-viz orange vests. Fewer than half of them, the “arrestables”, took to the road at the speed of a hearse; the rest remained on the pavement shouting support. And the moment they hit Whitehall, the police began to pick them off. The entire column was kettled onto the pavement, each orange beset by four or five yellows: wrestled, handcuffed and scooped into the waiting vans. The police worked from back-to-front, leaving the dwindling vanguard of the column to pace resolutely on, like captured admirals walking the plank. One woman on the pavement was crying, cursing the police, cursing the burning planet. But those under arrest were placid, serene, unblinking. They lay there quietly as the police took their details and unbuckled their watches into evidence bags. 

Eventually, the only person left was a tiny old woman, still clutching her banner, and shuffling down the street. “Is there anything we can do to make you leave the road?” the police asked. She didn’t reply. “Gentle,” someone shouted as they swarmed her too. “She’s 80 years old!” “There’s plenty more people to be arrested,” one of the organisers called from the touchline. “This is not going to stop.” The combination of farce, dauntlessness and misallocated courage was unmistakable. After months of background hibernation — occasional snooker stunt aside — Just Stop Oil are back. Today, tomorrow, and the day after, they are repeating the above process, churning phalanx after phalanx into the rough embrace of the Metropolitan Police.

This is the radical fringe of the climate movement, which will come to define the coming decade of politics, if not the century. It’s aiming at a political revolution. But for now, it still sits somewhere in a Venn diagram of risible-meets-despised in the collective mind. First there was Extinction Rebellion (XR), which briefly captured the public mood before squandering it in a symbolic clash between working-class commuters and middle-class activists at Canning Town Tube. Then Insulate Britain emerged as an extreme splinter, dissatisfied with the slow progress of XR. Finally, defeated on the motorways of Britain, it morphed again. Just Stop Oil is the latest phase of evolution: its nimblest, most creative and worthiest form yet. 

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There is overlap between the groups — one woman in Trafalgar Square confides that she’s there in breach of contempt of court charges dating from the Insulate Britain protests two years ago. But each name-change has been accompanied by a detectable lurch in timbre. XR’s 2019 protests were comparably joyful, colourful, carnivalesque. Their successors strike a more militant mood. You can read the difference in the logos. XR’s: a jagged hourglass; a stop sign. “Time is running out.” Just Stop Oil’s: a weeping, staring, chop-fallen skull. “This is humanity’s deathly future.” 

Between them these groups have made the threat of interrupted football fixtures, Heinz-splattered artwork and choked highways a new part of daily life. But they remain outside of politics, at best a parasitical feature of public debate. And, like any other radical movement of our time, they are an eccentric receptacle for wayward political anger.

This round of marches has been in the works for months, and JSO recruited hard in anticipation. On a dark and blustery October night, I went along to a welcome meeting, held in a cinderblock discussion space just off Brick Lane called Newspeak House. There were about 100 perched on secondary-school chairs, ready, or at the very least willing, to join JSO’s merry men. 

Here such climate fears are mobilised; here they are put in uniform. The star speaker was Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion co-founder and Just Stop Oil’s in-house eschatalogue. He was there to tell us how bad it all is — in fact how it’s much worse than we can possibly believe — all delivered in his distinctive rambling, potty-mouthed, and wilfully apocalyptic rhetorical style. “It’s not gonna be a choice between it being ok and it being shit; it’s a choice between it being shit and it being so fucking shit you can’t possibly imagine!” The scroll of doom he unfurls is essential to understanding this movement. In 1968, radicals were told to take their desires for reality. Now, they take their nightmares for prophecy. 

Hallam leans heavily on the 20th-century horror imaginary for his figurative conjurings. The Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, atrocities in the Congo — they’re as nothing compared with the moral crime and mass slaughter our political elites are carrying out right now. This religious imagery — Hallam’s mother was a Methodist preacher — is now the lingua franca of the movement. They too talk of “genocide”, even of “reckoning”. We have sinned against our planet, and now we must be punished. Perhaps, as the Christian climate scholar Catherine Keller has written, only “theology… articulates what unconditionally matters”.

Hallam’s showstopper claim is that if we breach two degrees of warming above pre-industrial averages this century, “one thousand million” people will die. This is the end for everyone, everywhere, and animals too. The “sixth extinction” is already underway. 

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But, Hallam told us with a wild grin, “once you find yourself in that police cell, you know you’re doing the right thing”. I looked around Newspeak House and saw nodding heads, and flashing, inspired eyes. A young activist then outlined the strategy. The plan was to “slow march” on roads until the government caved to our demands. The target for each of us was to get arrested five times. And, he yelped excitedly at the end, “When you’re in court, say ‘fuck you’ to the judge!”

How do you turn a muddled mob into a militia? With “nonviolence training”, held in a cosy Quakers’ reading-room in central London. Not since I crept the boards of youth theatre have I faced such a punishing gauntlet of breathing exercises, “chairs to one side”, and choreographed morality tales. But this is how the campaigns that have immobilised our cities for the last year and a half are war-gamed and strategised. Arranged in a circle of chairs was a medley of Just Stop Oil regulars. Veteran Greenpeace-niks, lifelong RSPB-donor twitcher-types, dyed-haired student-radicals, school-leavers stranded on a domestic gap year. And — still overwhelmingly the spine of this movement it seems — the white middle-class middle-aged. Well: who else is free for this sort of thing on a Wednesday afternoon?

This crowd was very much the newly converted. They explain how they’ve learned to feel climate guilt at having had their children, or, discussing road accidents caused by JSO marches, exclaim that such incidents are the fault of those who continue to choose to drive. These feelings are here to be diverted into the studied dispassion of “nonviolence”. The protest philosophy attempts to plot a third way between violent action and apathy, resisting and disrupting in such a way that avoids causing harm. Blocking roads is thought to be a method of causing disruption without utterly alienating Just Stop Oil from the wider population. 

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On our feet, we marshalled for the battles we’d face on the road. What do you do if a driver agitates that they’re losing work because of the protest? Calmly apologise and explain that you’re here to protest the climate crisis. And if someone claims they’re driving someone to hospital with an injury? Groups must use their discretion. The level of anticipated confrontation was uncomfortable for most of the people there. And this is where that eerie stupor of detachment that seems to possess JSO activists on marches comes from. It’s a form of withdrawal from chaotic surroundings, submerged beneath the moral demands of the movement.

“I don’t understand why we’re marching on the roads at all,” one women said. Why don’t we challenge the supply-side of the fossil-fuel industry instead? The trainer explained that in April last year, JSO activists blocked the 10 largest oil terminals in Britain with hundreds of activists and forced ExxonMobil to suspend operations at the sites. The demonstration generated little media coverage, and was quickly forgotten. It was deemed a failure.

Just Stop Oil claims that its arrest tactics are meant to place pressure on the judiciary and police, compelling the state to concede its demands. But the new powers given to the police in the Public Order Act have made arrest a formality, as it was this week on Whitehall. It’s clear that the strategy really is to convey a form of scandal-symbolism — which is also why artworks and now church services have become fair game. And this places the group in an uneasily dependent relationship with the motorists it disrupts and the “Right-wing” media it so resents. It needs the rage and the coverage to make its protests worthwhile. Shock can only carry you so far though. This round of arrests has been reported, but generated nothing like the commotion of XR’s 2019 campaign, let alone JSO’s earlier efforts.

But they’re not after everyone. Just Stop Oil has inherited XR’s aim of converting 3.5% of the population to the cause, a numinous figure drawn from a study of protest movements that showed inexorable social change flowing after that point. But many of the social movements they take their cue from (including JSO’s own hall of fame: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela) took place in pre-democratic or semi-democratic societies. Resorting to civil disobedience is a more obviously moral option when the ballot box is sealed. But to stage an occupation of something as quotidian as a B-road, justified or not, comes across as a statement of political superiority, arrogance even.

The climate writer Richard Seymour has argued that Extinction Rebellion represented one variation of “technopopulist” politics — a genuinely grassroots campaign which nonetheless advocates for solutions located above and beyond usual party politics. Just Stop Oil is another example of this scrappy phenomenon, which emerged as a symptom of the very social failures it seeks to redress. Speaking to tearful activists on pavements of Whitehall, they gnash and rage: “We’ve tried protests, we’ve tried petitions, we’ve tried everything…” But as the road is quickly cleared and the cars start moving again, you have to ask the obvious question: is this changing anyone’s minds either?

However, as Anthony Barnett observed of the War’s second son after Suez, the Falklands, history doesn’t just repeat as tragedy and farce, but also as spectacle, as media event. And if the War (it is still just about a definite “the”) is our national creation myth, it only became so once we started broadcasting it on repeat, sublimating violence and trauma into a televisual parade of trumpets and valour.

The mythologising started straightaway. Churchill’s words urged us into new conceptions of national prowess, his classical inflections designed to flatter us into thinking we were the Athenians and he our Thucydides. Soon his personal sense of moral destiny became a collective triumph, a pageant to be inspiringly viewed from the cheap seats of austerity Britain. And nowhere was the spectacle more spectacular than in the British war film. Enlisting Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Richard Burton, we turned our parents into hero-warriors — better, into Hollywood stars. For the children of the Fifties and Sixties, Daddy’s war could become theirs too. The testament of a previous generation turned entertainment for the next.

However, to judge from the fate and Zimmer frame of Michael Caine in his new (and possibly last) film The Great Escaper, the war film is dying on its feet. And the Second World War is now very much a grandaddy issue, possibly even just an issue for executors, morticians and undertakers. Caine plays Bernie Jordan, a D-Day veteran who absconds from his care home to attend the 70th anniversary of the landings. If it sounds too twee to make up, it is — the real Bernie became an overnight celebrity after his trip in 2014, before his death six months later. Genuinely unbelievable, though, is the fact that this is one of two films that will retell his story to be released this year, with the second inadequately substituting Sir Michael for Pierce Brosnan. The snout of the British culture industry has evidently sniffed out a winner.

The Great Escaper sparely retells Bernie Jordan’s weekend Odyssey, every detail designed to pull delicately on the heartstrings of the national psyche. There’s Bernie’s wartime romance with Irene (the late Glenda Jackson), consummated in flashback after a shuffle at the local swing night, and still strong after 70 years. There’s Bernie’s reconciliation with some pacified Germans in a café overlooking Sword beach. “What a waste,” he will cry, in a foreign field lined with white graves. But the film need only prod its audience with clichés. We are prepped from early-learning to receive them. The wash of waves and Michael Caine, flat-capped, staring out to sea beneath a commemorative D-Day banner, his glassy eyes blinking, his aged mind remembering. This is what a war hero looks like.

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But Caine’s presence, as well as the film’s title, places The Great Escaper at odds with a very different lineage of war films, one of pluck and daring. Despite all the redcoats and pith helmets, Caine’s first picture Zulu leant directly on the beleaguered British underdog myth of 1940. And he went on to form part of the Shakespearean ensemble behind Battle of Britain, that epic Airfix commercial of 1969. For the other, still vaguely watchable productions from the time, see The Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex, The Great Escape itself and obviously Where Eagles Dare. (For a refresher, turn on ITV4 at 4pm this Sunday afternoon, or in fact any Sunday afternoon.)

All memoirs of the Sixties recall the intensity of this saturation. “I saw a film today, oh boy,” John Lennon sang in 1967. “The English Army had just won the war.” Geoff Dyer, born 1959, claims that before he was 15 he had only seen Disney cartoons, Alastair Maclean adaptations and a few other war and action movies. “I didn’t know films were made out of anything else,” remembered Christopher Hitchens. And this was part of a more general mania of cultural reproduction that gripped the supposedly Swinging nation, particularly among the young. Just as the war economy wound down, as actual conscription was coming to an end, culture was rearming. Kids read War Picture Library comics, the national equivalent to Marvel. Every boy was accompanied by a portable, idealised Unknown Soldier — at their peak there were four Action Men for every three boys in the country.

While the stories were not always uncomplicated, you never forget who the villains are, and who will and should eventually triumph. This was a Technicolor Second World War, gun-slinging and cocksure. It was what Britain needed. “We won the war… or did we?” went the cynical grumble as imperial pink faded from the map and the Union Jack was lowered East of Suez. But only the most reactionary portions of the British Right actually regretted fighting it. We’d lost our status — but we’d gained a cinematic universe to play heroes in, made all the more believable by being roughly justified. Few of these films mentioned the Holocaust or Nuremberg, but they didn’t have to. You knew the German characters were evil before you knew why — and you knew that your country had done something towards stopping them.

But, much like a child growing to see its father in a different light, our perspective on this past has altered. The war-film industry isn’t dead, but it is changed and chastened from those swashbuckling days. The self-confident silliness we once gorged on is gone. Instead, we’re drawn to the conflict’s murkier corners, background actors such as Turing and Oppenheimer who were as much victims of the War as they were its victors. The best war film of the last two decades, Dunkirk, turned the battle into an aesthetic masterpiece, a ticking set-piece of cold realism, with only a petit four of Churchilliana at the end to sweeten the horror. And, when we return to our wartime leader, the best we can do is turn Churchill into Gary Oldman’s pot-bellied pastiche, just at the very moment that his historical reputation needed intelligent defence, not sentimental reinforcement.

The real Bernie Jordan endured the same sentimentalisation, becoming advertising copy for P&O Ferries and a grinning, geriatric front-page sensation (a dehumanising process that The Great Escaper creditably critiques). The ultimate embarrassment, however, history repeating itself as spectacle and farce, was to come in 2020, when a cabin-feverish media seized upon Captain Tom Moore, a veteran of Burma’s “Forgotten Army” who had started walking across his garden to raise money for NHS charities. Tom became the face of a terrifying convulsion of Second World War parodism in British society, proving beyond doubt that it is still our only serviceable memory of national unity.

But how long until that memory fades? Harry Patch, “the last Fighting Tommy” from the war before, died only five years before Jordan’s great escape — and the death of the last D-Day witness, if not the last Second World War veteran, cannot be far off. Tribute to the obsessive qualities of internet historians everywhere, a Wikipedia page lists dozens of “notable” survivors in various states of decay, many in their second century. Jordan may not be the last to be immortalised in film (a Captain Tom biopic is in production), but the sense of leave-taking in The Great Escaper — bittersweetly conveyed by Caine and Jackson — gestures towards the War’s uncertain legacy as it moves irretrievably beyond living memory.

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No doubt those generic Churchillian emphases — “tears and sweat”, “the beaches” — will kick about the English language for another century, like those moth-eaten scraps of Tennyson that still retain some anonymous poetic charge. Perhaps they will even be reworked into a khaki Henriad by some distant Shakespeare. But the magic of those grand metonyms — “Overlord”, “Alamein” — is already gone for most people. Soon they will seem as antique as Wellington’s rearguards in the Peninsular Campaign.

Clearly, popular feeling is still swayed by memories of the finest hour, by a faith that we’re capable collectively of doing the right thing. But we see it ever more cynically. When Boris Johnson bustled off to Ukraine to tour bomb sites and inspect sandbags, we all knew whose silhouette he was shrouding himself in. Yet at some point in the future, we won’t recognise it at all. We will see only the transparent present, unmoored from the epic past it once aspired to.

All have lofty ideas of station and status and all have these ideas disappointed. All are repulsed by a hostile, progressive world. And all are shown in the process to be (to varying degrees) trapped, spiteful, grasping, status-obsessed and self-deluding. It’s a comic instinct that speaks to something masochistic in the British spirit. Some sense that human dignity really is only as thick as a sticking plaster, but that tearing it back to expose our wounds and prejudices is in fact cathartic — cringe-making yet somehow soothing. It is through these embarrassments of men that we strangely choose to represent and interpret our culture.

Much psycho-historical ink has been spilt on the roots of this national quirk. Is it the bad British weather? Perhaps it’s a sublimation of glories lost, of needing to find a personification for superpower contraction. It’s a seductive theory — while other countries (France) tried to physically cling on to empire, we channelled the loss of ours into making people laugh. Whatever the cause, it has generated a streak of vicious, self-lacerating humour, which always works best when targeted at flawed cases of masculine psychology. It’s a tradition that has a culminating triumph in Peep Show, which marks its 20th birthday tomorrow, and despite its age, is increasingly emerging as the defining British sitcom of the early 21st century.

At first glance, Peep Show doesn’t represent any great advance in subject matter. Mark and Jez, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, are two mid-ult everymen fated by their creators to have a difficult time in work, play, and everything in between — middle-class men behaving slightly badly. Instead, its innovation is chiefly formal. Peep Show is filmed entirely from the perspective of its characters — quite literally in the cheap and crude first series, the actors wearing bicycle helmets with camera-antennae. The viewer is trapped deep in the cockpit of the characters’ minds, following them everywhere, from bedroom to bathroom.

This is accompanied by a script of wonderful linguistic aggression — but only around half of which is dialogue. The other half is delivered as voiceover, the thoughts and thoughtcrimes of Mark and Jez fed straight into your ear. At times, it is like a neurotic ghost train: the show has been described as “an intrusive thought in physical form”. Watching it is to experience consciousness with clunky but near-novelistic intensity. For some it’s unwatchable. For the rest of us it’s addictive.

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Peep Show originally ran from 2003 to 2015, inadvertently forming a Balzacian chronicle of that charmless, formless, nameless era of British life after Blair and before Brexit. It is full of the stuff of that age: iPods, chavs and coffee chains; Bez, Bush and oil wars on TV. It runs the full alphabet of chronological references from Ali G to Zoella, capturing all the anesthetising affluence of the Noughties just before the snap of tumult and hyper-politicisation that followed. A low, dishonest time if ever there was one, characterised by little more culturally than a tabloid-carnival of endless frivolity. And all the while, society’s atoms continued to drift ever further apart and a low of hum of bitterness set in.

Mark and Jez are two such atoms who have collided and glued together, though bound not by attraction but necessity, two university friends who have wound up living together in Croydon. Their friendship is formed of mutual love and loathing, each regarding the other as the worst-case scenario, a motivating example of how bad things could get. But they’re both outcasts and they know it. In a line that Robert Webb regards as the show’s thesis statement, Jez imagines a more “normal” existence, thinking he could abandon Mark and “be in the mainstream of the culture instead of lying like a freak in our weird puddle”. Of course, he doesn’t leave, and neither of them get anywhere, trying and failing to scale the ladders of success they’ve misguidedly selected.

For Mark, this looks like a Blairite update of the dad-on-the-Meccano-box family man. He wants a house in Surrey (and ultimately a “cottage in the Ardennes”), children who learn the viola and ancient Greek, a mid-level executive job, a Mensa membership and a Sunday Times subscription. He is too anxious and self-sabotaging to achieve nearly any of these things. And for much of the series, he projects these expectations onto Sophie (Olivia Colman), a colleague he imagines holds the key to this lifestyle, even though, as he admits, they have “very little basic compatibility”.

This creates the show’s greatest and most agonising plotline: Sophie and Mark’s relationship, accidental engagement (a twin product of “embarrassment” and “fear”), and Mark’s attempts to extricate himself (respectably) from the arrangement, up to and including on their wedding day. This leaves him at the altar saying “I do”, even his attempted jilting a failure, with his bride-to-be weeping beside him. He thinks to himself (and to us): “That’s it. I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined my life. You only get one life, and I’ve ruined mine.” It’s a disastrous tilt at 21st-century bourgeois-dom, later to be further disappointed by menial, manual jobs, further failed (though initially more promising) relationships, and a child born out of wedlock.

Whereas Jez is an altogether more contemporary creature. He’s desperate above all to be celebrity-famous, even, if necessary, just for being famous. Craig Phillips or The Chemical Brothers will do fine (an outtake from the first series even shows Jez’s audition tape for Big Brother). This initially takes the form of trying to make it as a talentless DJ-musician alongside “Super Hans”, his erratic and “crack-addled maniac” bandmate, just one of the pack of eccentrics and one-offs that orbit Jez and Mark’s lives, there to perplex and bedevil them further. When music and the dole give out, he pursues the even more fashionable, undemanding and unpromising career of a “life coach”, delivering catastrophic and unethical advice to his clients, who are marginally more damaged than him.

If Mark is buttoned-up and emotionally barren, a superhuman super-ego of English repression, Jez is his exact double, the “work-shy freeloader” to Mark’s “tight-fisted cockmuncher”. He’s a bohemian with none of the art and all of the mess. At one point, he’s living in a bathtub; at another, he agrees to pimp out his girlfriend to Mark’s boss (after haggling to the exact price of £530). He’s feckless and thoughtless, driven by a pathological adolescence summed-up by his motto of “sucky-fucky” and his “higher law” of “if it feels good, do it”. To which Mark responds, with full David Mitchell panel-show condescension, “Oh, that’s a great law, isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law?” At Peep Show’s best, entire episodes can pass like this, the minutiae of life chewed up in perfectly weighted and acted exchanges between its leads. And the quality of the comedy is what sustains such a bleak format, the viewer caught in the bitter-sweet spot of laugh or cry, wince or snort, smile or groan.

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It’s not a classic recipe for a large audience, and while it was on TV, Peep Show only ever enjoyed the dubious honour of “cult” status. Beloved by a few, heralded by critics, and commercially unfortunate. It was threatened with cancellation annually. Remarkable, then, that, in the past half-decade, it has achieved a cultural significance and pop-cultural ubiquity that is rare for any modern sitcom, celebrated at the very top of “best-of” lists. These days there are only two sitcoms one can, in need of auxiliary humour at a forbidding social gathering, quote to some agreeable recognition: The Inbetweeners and Peep Show. The “four naan?” exchange in particular has become so commonplace as to have slipped from reference to irritating catchphrase.

And that’s because the mood of Peep Show has moved from cult to collective. Its cackling cynicism, its unchanging protagonists and its anxious interiority were all original at the time of release, improvements and innovations on the cringe comedy trend. The Office may be the more singular, sculpted achievement, and The Thick of It a greater satire, while Fleabag achieves a level of genuine artistic beauty neither can compete with. But — sprawling, baggy, inconsistent but never far from brilliant — in its totality, Peep Show offers some of the pleasures previously reserved for the English comic novel.

The final frame of Peep Show sees our protagonists slumped at angles to the TV in their flat, both rejected by respective love interests, discussing exactly how they’d murder each other (if the situation arose). For all of its comedy, there’s something existential, something of an English Godot about the scene. And, for better or worse, they sit as our representatives: their schemes for improvement defeated and humiliated. Even if Britain has always found solace in abjection, it’s quite a terminal pair for us to have taken up. Ricky Gervais found the heart to relent on David Brent at the end, granting him that laugh from his colleagues that he always wanted. But, in a world that feels ever more joyless and farcical, manic and dejected, perhaps laughter in the dark is only the natural accompaniment.

Which is an odd regression, because we used to know him so well. Long before we delegated mediating this crisis to Caitlin Moran, the wretched young man had his own literary genre: the late-20th century young man’s novel. It was born, loud and cocky, in the Sexual Revolution decades. Spurred on by the general loosening of mores and laws around the depiction of sex on the page, male writers started to compete with each other over who could depict the arrival of sexual maturity in the most appalling, hilarious detail. They would write about themselves at school, themselves in the bedroom and, most perversely, themselves in the bathroom.

As Kingsley Amis later reflected, in the Fifties “to utter or write a swear-word, as they were called, counted as a small act of revolt, the breaking-out of a miniature Jolly Roger”. And at the start of that decade, we had The Catcher in the Rye, a novel which set the thematic tramlines for what was to come (angst, alienation, youngsters vs oldsters). But Holden was a good kid really, his deepest moral sin nothing more than a brief and ultimately chaste parlay with a prostitute. He was overtaken by far meaner younger brothers and, by the end of the Sixties, Philip Roth had produced Portnoy’s Complaint, an unsparing exposé on the dangers of rabid self-abuse. But the greatest and most summative achievement of the lot, arguably retiring the genre in its unstinting imposition of the nastiness, arrogance, misogyny and truth of male adolescence, is Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, published 50 years ago. 

When Amis died in May, there was much handwringing over exactly what order of talent was being commemorated. A virtuoso stylist, certainly. But a serious novelist? A mere literary comedian? James Wood leant towards the latter, bafflingly labelling Amis our latter-day P.G. Wodehouse. And some dedicated fans simply threw out the fiction in frustration, trusting that the true talent had found its way into the memoir, the essays, the journalism. Quite an insult to the author of 15 novels, and quite misguided, too. Obviously, Amis’s true métier was as one of our great novelists of masculinity — specifically, its most resentful, female-fearing and insecure aspects, exactly those which trouble us about our young men today.

It’s there from the opening lines of The Rachel Papers — “My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me” — that special brew of what, on the next page, Charles calls “all the self-consciousness and self-disgust and self-infatuation and self-…you name it” that is essential to this species of male adolescence. It is the eve of Charles’s 20th birthday, an occasion which is vital for the novel’s plot: a moment of metamorphosis, a simultaneously elevating and enervating release of “teenage” anarchy, to be replaced with “that noisome Brobdingnagian world the child sees as adulthood”. Charles spies an opportunity for self-inspection, even amid the self-absorption. And what follows is his account of the love affair that he believes has marked the last months of his youth, his relationship with Rachel.

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What follows is a triumph of stylised solipsism. Charles has kept detailed notes on Rachel (as he does on everything else, from his reading for Oxford entrance to the no less scholarly Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis). He has analysed seduction like a lepidopterist and places Rachel under a romantic siege-surveillance, pursuing her with all the sleuth and sociopathy of a lusty Sherlock. She is run through a gauntlet of on-the-cuff speeches, calculatedly accidental meetings and pre-prepared gallery visits (Charles goes the day before, to pick out and make notes upon the most aphrodisiac paintings). And this doesn’t let up at the bedroom door. Amis’s sex scenes are pure adolescence: choreographed accounts of first-person pornography, studies of athleticism and repertoire. 

“I threw back the top sheet, my head a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scribblings,” Charles tells us. “Foreplay included ear-jobs, bronchitic sweet-nuthins, armpit-play (surprisingly good value in this respect), and a high-jinks of arse and thigh work.” Charles (and obviously Amis) recognises that this is something new, an attempt to establish a new kind of sexual frankness that will drain any romance from the act. Post-Chatterley, post-Portnoy, no chastity belt may remain locked and no modesty curtain undrawn. Charles, as Amis himself noted, is scholarly about sex and sexual about scholarship. Intimacy is reduced to: “Thus, I maintained a tripartite sexual application in contrapuntal patterns.”

But even more gleefully described is what Charles calls his “adolescentiana”. Asthmatic and scrawny, Charles suffers from a debilitating physical and mental self-consciousness, and regards his body with outright disgust. The Rachel Papers is among other things the great novel of catarrh and phlegm, a tribute to hawking, yacking and barking, of lungs filled with “liquefying gook” and needing to sleep “on a pillow of tissues”. But this doesn’t stop at the bronchials: we hear all about Charles’s “marathon craps”, we see him “peeing lava” after contracting an STI. He shows us his spots in the mirror, cataloguing his “Big Boys” and one “fine double-yolker” frying between his eyes. We even witness him lie “immobile in the bath, like a dirty old alligator — not washing, just steaming and planning”. “Nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny. The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets,” Charles and Amis declare around halfway through — a literary self-justification. In the quest for comedy, Amis would shamelessly throw all his poetic might at the most shameful, revealing scene.

It is this aggressive frankness that immediately and irrevocably landed the novel with the charge of misogyny. A fair accusation — an older Amis would archly claim that his early novels were written in his “pre-feminist” period. This is Charles on his mother: “What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes…” On it goes. And it is difficult for the reconstructed reader to know what to do with passages like this, so articulate and so unfunny. Especially since Amis gives Rachel the same attitude towards women over 35: “Scaly faces. Figures go, hair gets matty and dry… it’s good that they can have families.”

Amazing to think that 50 years ago, this was Amis’s ticket to glittering prizes and public acclaim (of a punk-ish, countercultural sort). If this writing is going on now, it’s utterly marginal to publishing, taking place on dubious Substacks, in the far-off terra incognita of the literary manosphere. There is one possible defence here, hanging implicitly and obviously in the air, which is that Charles has to be misogynistic because nasty young men so frequently are, too. And Charles is a monster born of that caste, cranked by his creator into a Hogarthian triumph of high-art cartoonery.

But Charles is vulnerable, too. He’s revolting, and he knows it. And he’s more than capable of devolving into an anxious wreck, crying down the phone when Rachel briefly gets back together with an American love rival, and plagued by “cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager’s religion”. The Rachel Papers is too often remembered as a freewheeling carry-on, a snide pamphlet stuffed with lit bro in-jokes. But if Amis grants Charles some of teenagehood’s fleeting highs, he forces him through some of its most punishing lows (one section of vegetative, alcoholic despair is simply referred to as “The Low”).  

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The disappearance of short-arsed priapics from fiction has not disappeared the aspects of male adolescence they used to satirise. If anything, it has forced them underground, and allowed them to become the blazons of a far darker masculinity. Part of the reason that the manosphere claims its initial sway over young men is by affirming their instinctive (and misogynistic) priors, seizing upon their sensitivities to matters of physical hierarchy and female conquest. These are gendered instincts that our political age is rightly hostile to. But we haven’t examined and disposed of them, only thrown them onto the furnace of the Online Right wherein they are actively stoked and vulcanised. 

One of the tragedies of our masculinity crisis conversation is that it is currently brokered only by cold-blooded sociologists (whose books no young man will ever read) and raving internet gurus, whimpering over their wounded pride. One can look over jealously at the sophisticated conversation the girls have on offer — their platter of dislikeable protagonists, dirtbag Fleabags and sad-girl lit. The boys could do with some of their own bad-boy lit. Not delivered with the insouciance of The Rachel Papers — a fresh and chastened perspective is certainly required. But with its daring determination to plumb the grubby lower consciousness of young men, parsing exactly what about it is noxious and what is pitiful (and what is funny) within the uniquely ambiguous field of fiction. And once that is done, perhaps we can trace our way out of this gender animosity, not with a map we have redrawn but one we have reminded ourselves how to read.

It’s the opening rally of Marxism 2023, the “festival of socialist ideas” organised by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). We are tightly gathered into the Quakers’ central hall at Friends House. But, unlike your traditional Quaker meeting (austere, silent, confessional), the mood is one of daring, colour, braggadocio. Speeches are interrupted by whooping applause, if not by collective chanting. Not a great deal of laughter though — in this place enthusiasm goes hand-in-hand with militancy. Side-lined from the Labour Party since the catastrophe of the 2019 election, the hard Left is no longer satisfied with the lucid registration of historical defeat. I’m told this is the biggest Marxism festival for a decade, since the crest of the post-Occupy and anti-austerity movements. But now the final disintegration of capitalism is nigh. They believe this is their time.

Never mind the old joke about socialism taking up too many evenings with dingy “meetings”. Marxism 2023 isn’t shy. Settling in for a long weekend of proselytising, it has booked out the blocks and quads of the entire SOAS campus. And aside from a brief scuffle with some far-Right counter-protesters, all goes smoothly. The Art Deco halls of Senate House are bedecked in posters. On the grass and patios a fleet of trestle tables has docked, groaning under the weight of revolutionary literature. An intergenerational crowd moves between them. The grizzled remnants of the old labour movement are here, “the warriors for the working-day” with their buckets for donated change. But I also meet students attending for the first time. There’s one thing they all agree on. There’s a fresh energy here. “It’s younger.” “More enthusiastic.” “More open.”

But, like Milton’s rebel angels, the radical Left has been exiled from frontline influence to that bottomless hell of irrelevant perdition: the university campus. Do they have answers for our historical moment? Here to narrate the theoretical underlay over video link is Adam Tooze, who has probably done the most to repopularise a Marxian worldview in recent years. In conversation with SWP vanguardist Alex Callinicos, he trades names and abstractions. Lukács and Horkheimer; “complex totalities” and “conjunctural analysis”. But they capture the mood best when they returned to plain Anglo-Saxon. We are living through an “oh shit” moment, says Tooze. A polycrisis of pandemic, climate change, war and neoliberal collapse not seen since the Seventies. The rough end of capitalism (or, as they say around here, its copious “internal contradictions”) has never felt more real. There’s talk of Hobsbawm’s “age of catastrophe” — the years 1914-1945.

So far, so inarguable. It’s a language that’s trickled into the mainstream commentariat, words such as “structural” and “systematic” polished off and redeployed. And labour (not the party) has organised itself in response. The recent record of Britain’s trade unions is a point of pride at Marxism 2023. Fighting for wage increases ahead of inflation, they’ve had their busiest year for a generation. The number of days lost to strikes in 2022 (2.47 million) was the highest since 1989, and the 2023 figure will exceed even that. Picket lines are a daily constant, whether at railway stations or primary schools. And Marxism 2023 was themed around collective action. Tucked away in the smaller rooms, of course, there were still events such as “Family affair: does capitalism want you to have kids?” But the headliners were far more grimly dialectical. “System crash.” “The New Age of Catastrophe.” Not for them the woolly identity politics of the 2010s: here is a harder, sharper project.

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The challenge for the radical Left has always been how to convince workers to connect their experiences with the politics of revolution. But Darren Westwood, an Amazon warehouse worker from Coventry who addressed the opening rally alongside Smalls, has already done this. He mobilised the first British strike action against Amazon in January after he was offered a 50p per hour pay rise (to £10.50, a fraction over minimum wage) — when he questioned it, he was told he “should’ve bought shares”. It started as a wildcat strike with a few mates, but now, with hundreds of colleagues signed up and the support of the GMB union, he says it’s “all-out war”.

But until that Damascene moment, he had little politics beyond alienation. He didn’t really bother voting; he doesn’t see the parties as red or blue, but “a dirty purple”. The only choice was “which one is less shit”. But: “I consider myself now as a Marxist. My eyes have been opened and I see it as an alternative. And people point to Venezuela — ‘inflation’s through the roof’. That’s Great Britain now under capitalism … Everyone in this country is angry with what’s going on. Everyone. And all the voices are saying the same thing: there’s got to be a change.” That final clause is a clarion that any voter on Right or Left could have sounded in the past decade.

One of the stories of that decade has been the Left’s failure to successfully interpret this rage. A brief flowering of populist-socialists around Europe has wilted. In Britain, the populist Right has been the principle beneficiary of our turbulence and alienation, turning apathetics into activists and offering the promise of social transformation through projects such as Brexit. As the economic situation worsens, particularly at the crummy extremes of the gig economy, some of that energy is being diverted Left — to its most traditional institution, the trade union — and it can be detected throughout the Festival. Ben, a student from Bradford, is here because he’s “bored as fuck”. Back home, he says, “all you end up doing is going out, getting pissed — the so-called student lifestyle. And it’s just boring. I want to see something change, so I’ll come down here and see it.”

There’s a tentative path forward for the Left if they can capture this, translate that visceral grumble into a politics of inspiration. But the path backwards is here too. Just after lunch on Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn speaks at the culture tent. He’s been asked to discuss his three books that changed the world. There are cheers as he arrives and he looks happy. A reverential hush comes over the crowd. It doesn’t matter what he’s going to say. It’s him that’s saying it. But there’s an immediate air of disappointment as he starts boring away about An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. By the time he’s onto his visit to the Texas agricultural museum, and certainly by the time he starts actually reading from the book, even this captive audience begins to trickle away. He’s a grandfather reading stories, not a leader.

But Keir Starmer’s not their leader either. Whenever I mention his name people look revolted. Some look as though they’re going to spit. I ask Ben to describe him in a word and he laughs: “You wouldn’t be able to say it.” (“Tosser”, he later clarifies.) “I don’t have enough swear words,” an otherwise kindly 77-year-old woman tells me, shaking her head. The hard Left had an accord with the Labour Party so long as Corbyn was in charge, perhaps even as long as Starmer pledged to imitate his policy platform. But the purges, the obsessive ideological discipline, have forced them elsewhere. Lewis Nielsen (joint national secretary of the SWP and an organiser of Marxism 2023) tells me their strength and their success lie outside Parliament, “in protests, with strikes… Real change comes from below”.

They say they’ve sold 4,000 tickets; Lenin seized the Winter Palace with fewer. But are these people plotting a revolution or waiting for one? And what follows — a centrally-planned economy run by the SWP? Marxism 2023 has been tastefully marketed in Barbie pink (“Did Marx ever wear pink?”), with the party name excised from the posters. But through the gates, you hit a blizzard of joining-forms and evangelical cadres — who look at you very strangely when you stand them up. Socialist ideas aside, it’s clear this Festival is substantially a membership drive. And there are historic questions about the SWP’s own toxicity. Some 700 members disowned the party after it allegedly covered up a rape case in 2013, including prominent Marxist writers like Richard Seymour and China Miéville (the SWP later admitted it “failed the two women who made the complaints”). It may be a harder, sharper world than the soft Left, but it can also be a nastier one.

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After 2008, the Occupy movement also believed they were bearing witness to the final irresolvable crisis of capitalism. And they were wrong. Different people have come to Marxism 2023 seeking alternatives, seeking answers to their sense of political rage. But how much do university lecturers and Amazon warehouse workers really have in common, other than the fact that they’re both on strike? When, at the closing rally, Amy Leather from the SWP leadership declares, “we’re against all immigration controls and we say, ‘open the borders, all refugees welcome’”, how many people does she expect to win over?

If we read Marxism 2023 as a symptom rather than a cause though, it clearly reflects political energy searching for an outlet. Anton Jager has described our age as one of “hyperpolitics”: politics is everywhere again, on the streets and in our lives. But it is not being practised through the parties or associative structures which traditionally generate change. Instead we see the scattered, the lost and the angry — everywhere from the gilets-jaunes to the BLM protesters and the Brexit vote. The question of state failure and democratic deficit is repeatedly posed and never resolved. However fervent its leadership, this isn’t a vehicle for revolutionary socialism. Its reach is too narrow. Its heraldry — the clenched fist, the Internationale — looks back, not forwards.

But then, at one point through our winter in this toxic swill, our bathroom ceiling caved in. The cause was wonderfully disgusting. The upstairs toilet’s “out” pipe (that’s the one bearing the shit) had been leaking into our ceiling for some interminable length of time. The waste (the shit) had then slowly seeped into the plaster and terracotta above until it became structurally unsound. One day in January, a great yawning gash opened up, and the next it fell in. It then took our landlord around two weeks to clean and repair this mess, which meant washing and bathing surrounded by the debris: shit-saturated shards of plaster and terracotta. We gave our notice in those soiled days and moved out about a month later.

It was a dispiriting exit. But even in the moment, being shat upon from a great height spoke more effectively than any mountainous graph to what is unjust about the current housing crisis. People (especially young people) live in very poor conditions, kept there by private landlords who suffer from near-criminal levels of apathy, for which we are expected to pay handsomely (my annual rent in the shit-flat was around 40% of the London Living Wage at the time — just under £10k). But the problem is, since everyone has a similar story, you’ve probably already heard it, if not lived it.

The political gravity of this situation lies not in its specifics, though, but in its generalities. Over the past week, in its house journals and attendant think tanks, the Conservative Party’s leading intellectuals have been puzzling over the fact that young people hate them. And they intimate that this has something to do with housing. They have finally listened to the housing scientists, with their heavy dossiers of facts and figures. A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive. This is far too late to redress or ameliorate — the best it can become is a historical lesson. The question that the Tories should be asking is a deeper and more threatening one. What is housing inequality doing to the political psychology of those living through it? What has it already done to us?

My answer is look to the language; look at the language we use for those we blame. Landlords — parasitic, indolent, unscrupulous landlords. In our oaths and curses, we reduce property owners to an existence of pure economic extractionism. Even landlords don’t want to be called landlords anymore. At the National Landlord Investment Show, a kind of bizarre lettings TUC, they threw around some alternatives — “Property investor”? “Accommodation provider”? — designed to help them slip back into anodyne anonymity. This cultural slander, found at all levels of output, from TikTok to acclaimed non-fiction, is the linguistic wing of something more profound. It is the first, experimental stirring of something rather anachronistic in our hyper-political age: social, tribal solidarity. Something a bit like class consciousness.

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This isn’t class understood in the cod-Marxist sense, with society sliced like a layer cake between worker, owner and aristocrat. Such arbitrary categories have long been discarded. Instead, as E.P Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class, class is something that “happens”. And it happens when “some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”. Class does not pre-exist, but is spun in the language people live and create.

Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young. A third of those aged between 35 and 45 rent privately, as opposed to a tenth in 1997, a proportion which rises the younger you are. And many of those not renting are living with parents, which would make private renting their direct alternative. In other words, across income levels, private renting has become as near to an economic universality as one can find in our atomised society. But most important: under present trends, this is never going to change. High marginal tax rates, low wages and rising house prices mean that those who do not receive a large windfall from generous or dead family members will never buy a house. They will retire with a landlord, paying the bulk of their salary and perhaps their pension to a people they have spent their adult life despising. They who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.

So much writing about our housing situation is self-pityingly childish, whinging over intrusive mezzanines and landlords’ disastrous DIY. It curries little favour with the older generation it is directed towards. But, left unchecked, the weight of sentiment is symptomatic of a more powerful force — the sense of existing in an unfair productive relationship. Like all great political vibes, it has the benefit of being both felt and true. And most transformative processes in British history have been the product of such a concoction, a wrong that can be mathematically proven and then communicably sketched.

Because the popular timeline of our past is one of political nightmares, stalked by political ghouls and monsters who provide a horror mask for our deeper concerns. Recently, our darkest dreams have been peopled by crooked Luxembourgian Eurocrats. Before that, we relocked our doors and windows, woken by the march of donkey-jacketed trade unionists. But reach back into the distant interwar period and a dynamic more like our own emerges. Between the pause of one world war and resumption of the next, Britain was learning to think of itself as a “democracy” for the first time. And in this age of new and nervous egalitarianism, two of the most repellent economic caricatures in popular culture were socially-useless mountebanks: the profiteer and the rentier. Like landlords in our housing crisis, both were linked to moments of social distress which they had somehow turned to their advantage.

John Maynard Keynes was obsessed with this plutocratic individual who in his conception lived off the national debt, furnishing his Depression with public money. And the cheater, the social swindler, was the constant villain of the era’s more politicised fiction. He crops up in the otherwise sunny books of J.B Priestley, but particularly in the works of A.J. Cronin, the novelist who was most representative of the Thirties mood. (His 1937 novel The Citadel is credited by some with establishing the emotional need for an NHS.) But in his earlier book The Stars Look Down, a contest is established between an autodidactic Labour MP and his double, a profiteer-chancer who avoids war service and cheats his way into arms-trading and factory-ownership through underhand business dealings.

It was not long before such evocations reached the lips of politicians themselves. In Clement Atlee’s 1945 election broadcast, he established his opposition to those who benefitted from “private enterprise, private profit and private interests”, and who demanded “more rent, interest and profit”. The dichotomy was clearly intended to appeal to a public already aware of the difference between its productive many and its exploitative few. That Labour government was the most ambitious reforming government of the century, and brought about the greatest programme of house-building and home-improvement the country had ever seen. The Conservative government that followed only imitated and expanded upon it.

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Language tracks the governing ideology of its day. After Thatcherism brought a halt to anything like the forward march of labour, Britain developed converse cultural neuroses. We gnashed at scroungers and skivers; we valorised the entrepreneur. As William Davies recently described, the working-class hero devolved from the punk, the disruptor or the organiser (Arthur Scargill), towards something more like the tamed yob, the capitalist-enthusiast (Chris Evans, Keith Allen). Britain, though, is more than capable of producing a culture that punches up. Think how harshly the word “banker” was hissed in the immediate post-2008 reconciliation. But despite the best efforts of the Occupy movement, bankers were fortified in their City towers, too lofty to organise against. Landlords, by contrast, inhabit a space much closer to home — our homes.

Today, millennials are approaching a sort of maturity. But in an arc that frustrates analysts of such matters, they stubbornly refuse to mature politically and shift Right-wards. Not only this — they are leaning markedly to the Left, especially on economic issues. Reared on a lifetime of economic vulnerability, of course they find redistribution appealing and resent the predatory potential of private ownership. Over the grim interwar, it took decades for this yearning to consummate itself. At the next election, millennials will predominate in the majority of constituencies. All those years of removal vans and disconcerting stains, of lost deposits and scratching mice, may finally find their voice.

We young people do not do this anymore (television? sitting room?). The sodality of these collective experiences is lost to us, streaming alone in our bedroom-cells. But atomised as we are, generational mood is not completely lost to us. And over the past year, I realised we were all watching Seinfeld. It came around on the Netflix churn in late 2021, arriving like a fresh breeze across the plain of contemporary streaming. Its comic furniture was clearly old — the canned audience laughter, the answerphone messages, those airy flannel shirts tucked into belted jeans. But, in its essential pulse of irony and irreverence, it felt so fresh, so crisp. And, at a time of stultifying, hand-wringing sincerity, something as small as a nasty joke can feel like a punkish, even revolutionary act.

Seinfeld is a faulty sitcom. It doesn’t move properly; it’s missing key parts. It’s “about nothing”, goes the trite assertion. Its triumph is, therefore, one of absence, of refusal. Too incapable to act, Jerry Seinfeld plays himself: stand-up comedian, New Yorker, neat freak and mid-afternoon cereal-eater. But even as a lead he is not the wisecracking protagonist of too many American sitcoms. Instead, he and his apartment often just serve as a planetary centre for his three friends, George, Elaine and Kramer, to orbit. Between them, they exhibit all the vices of man: deceit, spite, narcissism, self-pity, sloth. “No hugging, no learning,” was the mission statement behind the show.

The emotional tenor is therefore pre-Darwinian, any possibility of human mutation, development or evolution flatly rejected. Characters only circle each other, pursued by a supporting cast of cranks, eccentrics and misfits. All motives are low; all manners undignified. Sex is a relentless yet elusive necessity to be pursued through any means, but romantic relationships are too complicated or just embarrassing to maintain. “Sex, that’s meaningless,” says Jerry. “But dinner — that’s heavy. That’s like an hour.” Girlfriends are always new; breakups always imminent. When George does get engaged, he spends the bulk of a season regretting it and trying to break it off.

Such paraphernalia of the predictable sitcom are aggressively boiled away to leave only the relentless imposition of irony: that crushing recognition of the gap between our perspective on things and their bald reality. Consequently, the world can be faced with a shrug or a cackle, too absurd and pointless to take seriously. Jerry can’t even take it seriously — often his mouth simply corpses into a leery smirk halfway through scenes.

The eyeroll, the irreverence, the irony, the stasis, the self-reference — all of this made Seinfeld into the great saga of popular postmodernism. But by the time of its finale, this was a cultural movement many lived in fear of. David Foster Wallace articulated a particularly terrified critique: television, he believed, had bred perilous levels of self-awareness into its viewing public, puncturing our sentimentality and leaving only “flatness, numbness and cynicism”. The critic James Wood agreed, identifying a literary fashion for long absurd novels full of irony, two-dimensional characters and conceptual play. He called it “hysterical realism”, and Seinfeld can be slotted into this genre, a “systems sitcom” in the vein of a Don DeLillo novel.

Between them, Wallace and Wood pointed the way toward the elevated, moralising path that culture has taken ever since. On television came Friends, immediately displacing Seinfeld as the popular chronicle of young America, and later becoming the great millennial sitcom. And, while imitating Seinfeld’s New York, group-of-mates setting, Friends is its irritating, naïve younger sibling, never escaping the frothy fountain of its opening credits. Its Manhattan is a brownstone dreamscape, where you live across the hall from your best friends, renting (where possible) from a monied family member.

And, like a particularly protracted and simplistic Austen novel, it submits tamely to the demands of romantic teleology. Essentially: hang around with your university mates for 10 seasons, and chances are you’ll end up marrying or having kids with at least one of them. Seinfeld’s singletons are achingly self-aware; the Friends friends don’t even know they’re in a TV show. They have shapely, winning flaws, not sordid neuroses. Optimistic, improving, they do silly things to cheer each other up like put turkeys on their head. They move to the suburbs to start families. There’s a lot of hugging.

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Friends was symptomatic of the mood of sincerity which has since overcast much of the culture. For the past two decades, the cultural stock exchange has been led by a boom in conveyed emotion and self-conscious virtue. We listen to heart-baring, confessional-romantic anthems. We read novels about toxic love quadrilaterals. We watch Ted Lasso conquer English football by baking biscuits. But in more recent years, even this has calcified, slipping from the pure emotional sincerity of Friends to a more overbearing preoccupation with moral sincerity.

Irony has come to be seen as a dereliction of our human and political responsibilities. In fiction, the critic Becca Rothfeld gives a name to this millennial middlebrow: “sanctimony literature”. In these books and outside them, writers and their characters exhibit an inquisitorial obsession with “goodness”. They stress over structural racism and their carbon emissions. They mull over the power imbalances of BDSM. And they are attracted by wholesome, generous, unbelievable people, whose complications come in the form of redeemable scars and wounds, not profanities or sins.

Thanks to the politicisation of everyday life, which accelerated in the late 2010s, this is now representative of an entire sanctimony culture. It demands the iterative performance of goodness across everyday life. We do it on social media, striving to display virtues personal (wealth, sociability, romantic success) and political. We willingly upload and surrender our personal lives, commodifying the very emotions that we seek to display. We buy self-care and wellness, a new marketplace which serves this desire for authentic fulfilment. We inspect artists and writers for actionable wrongdoing.

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When art and entertainment are run at such a hysterical temper, irony, detachment and withdrawal are an escape. And, therefore, so is Seinfeld, which makes no such gestures towards value or judgement. Its priorities are visible even at a structural level: for most of its run, each episode began and ended with a stand-up set by Jerry. All narrative momentum, any dramatic peril, dissolves and is then transformed into a framing device of pure humour. In this, Seinfeld is arguably the most straightforwardly comic comedy ever made. Morality is no consideration; politics are only ever an opportunity for social embarrassment. “You don’t have any black friends,” Jerry chides George, “Outside of us, you don’t have any white friends either.”

In this world of ethical grandstanding, where every word and gesture is freighted with political significance, a show about “nothing” is a little revelation. And there are other signs of this backlash. The one truly original form of digital-cultural expression, meme culture, is savagely ironic and two-dimensional, populated by wretched caricatures and vicious stereotypes designed to satirise and undermine the self-righteousness of society. Seinfeld has already become an integrated part of this universe, thoroughly pastiched through clipping and quotation, and it’s no surprise it fits so well. The style of online humour is pithy and generally dark, even existential. And there are a dozen such George lines per episode: “I’m depressed. I’m inadequate. I’ve got it all!”

If irony is back, it is a tool as well as a condition. Seinfeld came at the end of a long tail of postmodern art, which was interested in capturing and critiquing mass media. Our own transactional information age — far more intrusive and involving than even David Foster Wallace could pretend television is — has made a mockery of a generation which sought to use it sincerely, treating their personal lives with the cruelty of a reality TV show producer. The clarity of irony is its strength, burning through pretensions and leaving a behind a reality which is sometimes cold but always honest. This is the mood that is starting to circulate among Gen Z, a vibe shift still in inchoate infancy. And at the generationally-regenerative distance of 25 years, Seinfeld is part of our voice — and our rebellion.

For the minority of a more severe, moralistic, and joyless disposition, this made him a national-psychological defect to be suppressed, or ideally exposed and exorcised. Before Piers Morgan, Nigel Farage or Donald Trump provided such stern competition, it was a small badge of honour on the Left to publicly hate Clarkson. But for many of us (probably a majority at his peak) he was a vulgar treat to indulge. For the length of a Sunday column or an episode of Top Gear, we could wallow harmlessly in the swamp of arrogant prejudice and self-gratification which sits at the bottom of the brain. At a time of minimal collective loyalty, the nation could reliably divide into those two tribes. Clarkson the monster, or Clarkson the geezer. Wokery vs blokery. A version of the same split is fuelling the current Clarkson row, but with the weight of opinion reversed.

Amazon, Clarkson’s primary current employer, now seems to have picked its side. His contract to make TV programmes about cars, farms and larks will reportedly not be renewed. There are rumours ITV may let him go too. We can suppose this is at least partly thanks to the nearly month-long storm over his astonishingly tasteless joke in The Sun about the Duchess of Sussex. For that, Clarkson has been granted no quarter by Harry, Meghan or their supporters. His first “rather put my foot in it” bumble was rejected. The Sun’s own “regret[ful]” memory-holing of the article was rejected. Even Clarkson’s last-gasp, hands-clasped grovel has been rejected, such is his history (they say) of “hate rhetoric”.

But his spiritual and popular appointment to the English is a far tougher thing to dismiss. He is, like it or not, quite a lot of us writ ludicrously, satirically large. Like a 21st-century John Bull: to paraphrase Auden, a self-confident, swaggering bully of meaty neck and clumsy jest. Whatever Clarkson’s professional fate, the question of whether our society can tolerate him has implications for the stomach and sensibility of the national character, of which he is a significant avatar and champion. And his rise and fall reads as a history of a changing English firmament, one in which public morality has come to supersede mere entertainment.

Plenty of time and work went into the germination of such a figure. Clarkson’s early life is a whistle-stop tour of the English class system. He was born rural, lower-middle class, Yorkshire. But, in a wonderful twist of fate, the Clarkson family came into money after his parents won the exclusive rights to sell Paddington Bear dolls, based on the ones they had made for him and his sister. With aspirational intent, Clarkson was sent to Repton, one of the North’s oldest private schools. There, he smoked, pranked and failed his way to expulsion, developing the likeable loutishness which is his career mainstay. And then he jumped social tracks again, entering the lowest rungs of the Fourth Estate at the Rotherham Advertiser.

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A public schoolboy who can still boast that he crashed out of education with a C and two Us at A Level. The ingredients were in place for a broad, classless appeal. But Clarkson really came of professional age in the new meritocracy of Thatcher and Murdoch, a place where common touch came to supersede common background (something also exploited by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage). It was an England of quick, coarse wit, and quicker, coarser money; of the triumphant red-top, and the unrepentant “lad”. It suited Clarkson perfectly. Flush with entrepreneurial spirit, in Eighties London he had the wheeze of syndicating car news and reviews from his own company to the regional press. It was a money-maker which introduced him to motoring journalism and eventually to the producers of Top Gear.

The programme was a staid, genuinely factual affair in those days. And Clarkson’s irreverence and wayward metaphors (a Porsche Boxster “couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s bottom”) set him apart. So cars led only further into showbiz, with a chat show, documentaries, newspaper columns and pop culture ubiquity to follow. By the time he reformatted Top Gear 20 years ago (and made it the BBC’s biggest global brand), he already had the privilege of being recognisable by silhouette alone. The stance: arms-crossed, in male-barbecuing or under-the-bonnet-inspecting mode. And the hair: the curly remnants of the kind of Englishman’s ‘fro which peaked in the Seventies.

England at the turn of the millennium was Clarkson’s home. It wanted entertainment, and it got it from the Victorian circus of Big Brother and X Factor, and from the sneers and stereotypes of Little Britain. Clarkson’s Top Gear, launched in 2002, was almost edifying by comparison. Its open secret was that it was not really about cars. Instead, Top Gear seemed to scoop the ersatz appeal of reality TV and gave you the life you wished you and your mates could live. All the rudeness, ribaldry and exotic travel you could want. And while clearly a masculine offering, 40% of viewers were women. English people weren’t just seeing their grainy selves mirrored back — in Clarkson and his lieutenants they saw a dream life.

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Do they still? After multiple warnings — including for homophobia, xenophobia and the n-word — the BBC reached the end of its tether with the assault and abuse of a producer in 2015. Clarkson was initially undiminished. He was snapped up by a rich and ambitious streaming giant and instructed to make the same programme with more money. He took over Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and his collected journalism continued to be published (standing at eight volumes, the bestselling World According to Clarkson series must make its author the Proust of the pub bores). But the England that Clarkson once charmed was changing. Where once he was propelled by the forces of the contemporary, now he is encircled by them.

The principal feature of England in Clarkson’s imperial period was how apolitical it was. Electoral turnout fell; party memberships were tiny. Referendums proceeded according to plan. And the stability of New Labour’s long summer lent itself to a sense of consequence-free triviality. Under its aegis existed a crude cultural free-play. It was nasty, brutal and ephemeral, but in its own way quite funny, and even forgiving. So when, for example, he compared driving some svelte supercar to “smearing honey on Keira Knightley”, it was just good old Clarkson. Even when he said that striking workers should be “executed in front of their families” (a remark which yielded as many complaints as his Meghan column), it was, eventually and by enough people, forgotten.

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But there has come a point when such lines aren’t provocative catnip anymore, but an embarrassing commercial risk. Once Clarkson could stomp on to any old landmine — from speed limits to lorry drivers murdering prostitutes — and walk away with his popular constituency intact. Now he’d find himself blown into the no man’s land of an interminable culture war. And his nose and instinct for provocation means he can’t keep clear of it. Even his bucolic “Farmer Clarkson” period landed him in the soup. Before this latest fracas, his farm restaurant was making headlines for irritating the Nimbys and planning laws of Oxfordshire, a foretaste of the coming clash over the ownership and purpose of the British countryside.

The rowdy, TV-tabloid moment Clarkson enjoyed is gone. The lives and affairs of the lowest celebrity, from footballer to stand-up, are no longer sub-political fun. And the subterranean Englishness Clarkson personified is on trial, its burly, vinegary instincts held responsible for Brexit and the politics of reaction it supposedly represents. Much of Clarkson’s constituency will dislike both Meghan and the gleeful violence of the column he wrote. But, in his apology to Meghan, Clarkson wrote that it is “hard to be interesting and vigilant at the same time”. It won’t wash with Harry or Meghan, but it will have spoken to his fans’ sense of alienation from the new set of rules that turned their hero into an ethical criminal.

Beneath this claim and this film lies the issue that it has been done. Personal-sexual liberation has constituted the Lady Chatterley myth ever since Lawrence’s novel was first freed from state censorship in 1960. And, like previous adaptations, to produce this myth the film engages in a voluntary form of taste expurgation. Sanitising Lawrence’s eroticism for modern consumption involves numerous redactions — his apocalyptic obsessions, reactionary politics, and snarling hostility to modernity — and leaning on him to refresh our myths of the contemporary has always been an unstable exercise. But here the effort looks particularly wishful and distorting. Not only are those same myths less secure than ever, but returning to the infernal visions which lie deeper in Lawrence’s book shows its distance from this soapy, weary parable of hyper-individualist passion.

The story this film has reforged is therefore an achingly fashionable, Gen-Z update of the received tale, all Burberry catalogues and first-person escapism (even its intimacy co-ordinator has been drafted from Normal People). Emma Corrin is our protagonist and narrative vantage. Her Lady “Call me Connie” Chatterley is a member of the socially-conscious intelligentsia, sub-Bloomsbury, but thereabouts. But after her khaki marriage to Sir Clifford during the Great War is blighted by an injury which leaves him paralysed and impotent, her free and bohemian soul is locked away in the misty Midlands, with little to do but potter hornily about his family seat. As Clifford becomes increasingly wretched and her sense of individual waste grows, she ultimately elopes to the land of field and stream to find love under the tractor with Mellors (Jack O’Connell), their unsmiling, rough, but infinitely “tender” gamekeeper. Though Clifford and Connie’s more class-conscious relatives are appalled, their strength of feeling ultimately wins out. “This is a love story,” a minor character softly intones.

Connie’s journey from drudgery to ecstasy is the most successful portion of Lawrence’s novel — and by far its most politically palatable. But if this alone made Lawrence’s story, it wouldn’t be by him. Try to read it as erotica, and you’ll be distracted by the persistent snore from the next room that is Lawrence’s raging, intrusive personal philosophy. It punctuates his narration throughout, and his characters frequently become just mouthpieces for his broader thesis: democracy, mechanisation, and war have made the world hell, and modern masculinity is unequipped to fix it.

His writing becomes most rhapsodic when speaking of the industrial apocalypse and how it has turned the industrial masses into “half corpses”, corrupted the nominal aristocracy with commercial greed, and drained the English landscape of its natural vitality. Even Mellors and Connie’s post-coital sweet nothings have a similar flavour. In rants that echo Lawrence’s essays of the time, Mellors is always rolling over afterwards for a quick diatribe on how “if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling… then ta-tah! to the human species!”

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The chasm between these two worlds — the film’s fairy tale and the novel’s medieval “Doom painting” — can be explained by the fact that they effectively have two different authors. The film replicates not Lawrence’s novel, but the popular mythopoeia around it born in the Sixties. For it was only after the farcical prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for “obscenity” was overturned and the book’s juiciest scenes were unsealed that Lawrence entered that rare rank of writers who influence people who have never read their work — a kind of hippy Rushdie.

Lady Chatterley’s trial set considerable legal precedents around censorship, a watershed for the “permissive society” and the free publication of “pornography”. But — for it was the Sixties after all — Lawrence was also ordained as a guru figure and invested with prophetic power. The atmosphere was captured some years earlier when, on a visit to Lawrence’s house in New Mexico, W.H. Auden recorded: “Cars of women pilgrims go up every day to stand reverently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him.” Suitably, Lady Chatterley outsold the Bible in the year after the trial.

He has long since shed that status, convicted of misogyny in the early Seventies. But we can still detect the Chatterley generation in the iterative adaptations of his final novel, including this one — its hostility to over-restrictive marriage, its insouciant egalitarianism, and its belief that self-actualisation lies in a sufficiently inventive sexual repertoire (“the coarse treatment, milady?”). But all this has little to do with Lawrence’s own wildly iconoclastic worldview. Lawrence was born with a deeply Romantic sensibility, thinking (and writing) from the abdomen, in pulses and throbs, and believed that he had an instinctively metaphysical understanding of people and nature. He summarised this elemental perspective as the notion of “the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect”. The irony of this faith in the body was that Lawrence’s own was so rotten, scarred each winter by the tuberculosis which eventually killed him. The disease was particularly virulent by the late Twenties, just as Lawrence was finishing Lady Chatterley, a partial explanation for the novel’s obsessive focus upon physicality, potency and male vitality.

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But in 1908 when he first encountered Nietzsche in Croydon Public Library, and, a few years later, when he married the German psychoanalytic-mystic Frieda von Richthofen, these psychological quirks grew to inhabit a philosophical and political dimension. And, like dozens of intellectual contemporaries, he was taken up in the whirlwind of ignorant ideologies which swept interwar Europe. Their neo-pagan faith in natural aristocracy and hatred of the democratic mass became his own, as did a reactionary Romanticism which worshipped the pure natural landscape of the past, and lamented its corruption by human industry — and humans themselves.

Some critics have detected in this a proto-fascism, excessive given that the mercurial Lawrence was as capable of gentleness and empathy as he was fits of wild, unyielding violence — literary and physical. His overall corpus is by no means as singular or programmatic. But it is fair to say that in Lady Chatterley, anger is given a long leash. And the only salvation to Lawrence and his characters’ rage and despair is the superhuman sensuality Mellors and Connie achieve together. In Mellors, she finds an undimmed force of nature, and in the wood where they meet, they exist as an Edenic remnant, the last couple in Europe, besieged by the noise and filth beyond. The frankness of the sex in the book, though also part of Lawrence’s mission to restate the centrality of the body, plays an instrumental and metaphorical function, showing that they alone are truly alive to beauty and pleasure in this dying world.

This anti-modern Lawrence was supremely out of place in the self-confidently progressive Sixties, which extracted the transcendence of Mellors and Connie’s coupling as an end in itself, not as a comment on a broader anomie. The difference is encapsulated by the contrasting closing scenes of this film and the novel. Netflix leaves the pair reunited in remote bliss, free from the influence of Clifford and the crusty Edwardian control freaks. But Lawrence strands them in a far more ambiguous isolation: Connie, pregnant and uncertain of her future after Clifford viciously promises never to divorce her; and Mellors, angry and disgusted with England’s failing society, though hopeful that the “little flame” of their relationship might survive it.

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However, much as Lawrence’s portentousness was unwelcome in the Sixties, and was excised from the Chatterley myth, the same might be argued of this adaptation and the tropes it so assuredly revives. The Sexual Revolution which drove Lawrence’s story to prominence is now under considerable attack, not only from jaded male novelists, but from within the feminist movement it helped to shape. Nor is this sex-scepticism confined to the extremes: the most interesting and popular contemporary writing about sex comes from those, like Mary Gaitskill, who explore its lingering awkwardness, and the irrevocable political complexities that were never ironed out by liberation alone. Far from living in a world of “puritanism” where sexuality needs to be released and celebrated, the pervading mood today is anxiety about the scale of the freedom on offer.

Lady Chatterley is that rare story which has survived through multiple reading generations while still remaining notorious and provocative. But it was the product of a shape-shifting, volatile, uncategorisable writer. And, as the inventions and elisions of this film demonstrate, the original fantasy was that such an uneven and unstable novel could serve as a sturdy prop for the sexual maxims of modernity. The revolutionary charge our grandparents invested in the book has faded, and, despite the bold claims of its stars, this film can’t revive it.

***

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But everyone else in Britain must have. He’s now sold five million copies of them, and at moments has enjoyed an almost Beatles-esque literary ubiquity, topping the hardback and paperback bestseller charts simultaneously. And like the early Beatles’ albums, he’s cranked them out at a prolific (and commercially auspicious) rate. The first of The Thursday Murder Club mysteries came out in September 2020, and the second almost a year later to the day. Right on cue, the third, The Bullet that Missed is out this week. And like its predecessors, it is set to be one of the bestselling books in British history.

The famous novelist who is famous for being something else — a newscaster, cook, or dress-designer — is no great novelty. And though he’s clear that he didn’t want to be seen as having “dashed out a celebrity novel”, Osman is clearly not in the writing game for the garret and the overdraft: his first two books went for a seven-figure advance. But while Graham Norton, Jeremy Vine and Richard Coles bashed it out, took the cheque, and returned to the loftier heights of their primary career, Osman has refused to stop writing.

If you’ve been entertained in Britain over the last 25 years, you’ll be familiar with Osman, whether you realise it or not. If, in the Noughties, you saw a deal-broking, sombre-talking Noel Edmonds conjuring numbers out of red boxes — Osman was behind the camera, as a producer. Or, if you only caught the aquatic soft-play of Total Wipeout or the “anarchic” nastiness of 8 Out of 10 Cats, go back and check the credits. Executive producer: Richard Osman.

But this was all mere preludial before Osman’s imperial, front-of-house period. First, still behind a desk if not behind the scenes, as Pointless’s toothy sage of arcane trivia, before spinning off solo with Richard Osman’s House of Games. And in the past few years, the written word has also become an integrated province of Greater Osmania. If you can clamber past the cardboard Osman display set in the Waterstones window, the life-size Osman cut-out in the doorway, you’ll find only pyramids of Osman hardbacks, themselves overshadowed by the broader Teotihuacans of shiny Osman paperbacks.

He was already on television every single day. The face and the name, every night of the week just around teatime — flick on the old crystal bucket and there he is, in the slot of warm, cuddly, wisecracking nerd. Like Stephen Fry, a camera-loving Cantab whose intelligence is attractive rather than intimidating — indeed, Osman is seriously fanciable according to various samples of “which celebrity d’you wanna shag” psephology.

Heat magazine’s weirdest crush (2011) has also been aided by a campaign of epic salesmanship. First the Tube posters, the chat show slots, the free books given away to NHS workers, and the personal “brand manager” appointed to Osman by his publisher. And then the blurbing splurge and the endorsements from Britain’s popular intelligentsia which gush across the covers of Osman’s books. Adam Kay (“achingly British”), Marian Keyes (“VERY funny”) and this slightly scary recommendation from Philippa Perry: “I didn’t ever want to finish this book!” It would be too easy to envy such a spectacle, and several reviewers have given into the temptation. But Osman’s success has rippled overseas (number two in Japan). He can’t be written off as some self-inflating industry balloon.

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So what of the books? Like the rest of Osman’s oeuvre, they’re very entertaining, and make smart use of the winning ingredients of British popular fiction. The setting, Osman’s Hogwarts or Malory Towers, is one of Britain’s few remaining growth industries: an old-age home in Kent called Coopers Chase. Living there are Osman’s Famous Five — Ron, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ibrahim — who set up the Thursday Murder Club, an extra-curricular group dedicated to solving cold murder cases. They have help from local bobbies Chris and Donna, and shadowy figures from their own pasts. The result is something like a cross between The Archers and Spooks, with Elizabeth, a kind of female James Bond in retirement, lending proceedings a touch of Cold War, gun-in-the-handbag glamour.

Osman isn’t a multifaceted or complex writer. His villains stalk the night-terrors of the middle-class imagination: a drug baroness, teenage hoodlums, tax-avoiders and, most horrifying of all, a gauche property developer. And in the background lurk the clichés of broader thrillerdom: Colombian drug smugglers, the New York mafia, dodgy Albanians. This is all smoothed under a tone of relentless comic bathos, raising the stakes of a murder before dropping you back down to quaint, twee, pensioner earth. So, meet this fearsome former Russian spy, sometime head of the Leningrad KGB, who is on the phone to a call centre trying to get Virgin Media to show this week’s Bake Off. Or: on the road, racing after our perp — but can’t we please stop for the loo, my bladder’s really not what it used to be.

These deflationary gags, honed on the panel show, are good for a half-hour, not for 400 pages. It has been labelled “cosy crime”, godless and largely un-romantic. When sex rears its head, it keeps its hat on (all of Osman’s oldsters are rather horny, but only in the manner of a wistful dotage). Even his criminals hardly swear. In place of such grandiosity or indelicacy are jokes, daytime telly references, warmth, and a steady, mellow banality.

You can’t attain such heights of popularity without trouble. And while Osman would always face aesthetic attack (most crime novelists do), some suppose his popularity comes with political responsibilities. One notable attack from the Left accused him of a kind of bourgeois sentimentality, projecting a too-tranquil provincial England where the police aren’t corrupt or violent enough and which neglects the “cruel and authoritarian” truth of Conservative rule.

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Whether or not the Kent police really need defunding, the Thursday Murder Club series is certainly not politically radical. From Agatha Christie onwards, as the historian Alison Light has argued, English crime has always contained a strand of deep conservatism, suspending a cyclical, domestic space of puzzles and resolutions at a safe remove from the anxieties of modernity. With Osman, this can be even more robustly applied. His pensioner-vigilantes are literally bubbled away from the threats of the contemporary world, even more so than Christie’s middle-class assassins. His goal is entertainment, not critique or attack. The “whip-smart” millennial novelist can angrily deconstruct online sexual politics as much as they like; in Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice, one of the inconsequential running gags is Joyce’s new Instagram account, @GreatJoy69, and the slew of unsolicited messages and pictures it attracts.

The truth is that Osman’s characters, readers and viewers are the same constituency: Britain’s comfortable gerontocrats. Everything that I associate with being and feeling modern — atomisation, digital culture, urban space, irony — is absent from these books. They’re not for me; they’re for the shrinking number of people who still reliably get their laughs and news from television. And Osman knows this is his gift. “My whole career is formats, really,” he told the Guardian, from Deal or No Deal to The Bullet that Missed.

The scale of his success tells us some things we know already: we’re getting older, we’re retelling the same stories, rehashing the same jokes. But it’s also a reminder that for the vast swell of people, a good time looks a bit like an endless panel show: inconsequential, cringey and hopelessly trite; but good-natured, and conscious of a collective national mesh of humour and sympathies which we are sometimes of in danger of forgetting.

That’s no reason to head out to mourn Western civilisation. The great hope for Osman’s books may be the news that broke soon after his first started breaking records: Steven Spielberg is to adapt it for the screen (producer: Richard Osman). In the hands of Spielberg — a technical master of his medium in a way that Osman will unfortunately never be — the true role of stories like this will become plain. Not to sermonise or uncover the economic basis of society, but to move and thrill the common heart.

A conservative in everything else (literature, politics, jazz), in this Larkin was a trendsetter. An aggressive reappraisal of the work based upon revelations about the life — this is the pattern that has established itself for every successive male literary titan, and which is in the post for the rest. But today, 100 years from his birth, Larkin’s lines remain widely loved and quoted at a time when poetry in general seems to be in terminal decline. That he survived this cancellation makes its story a parable for our age of intolerance, forcing us to reckon directly with the relationship of the dignified public to the sordid private, of art and beauty to ugly, human truth.

Larkin’s letters, published in 1991, are first and foremost a triumph of life-writing. A chronicle of the pinched English post-war, they record (in hilarious, confiding detail) a time of rationed cigarettes, economical beer-drinking, class resentment and fear of “abroad”. And they are rich in the era’s comedy of coping, recording money troubles (“I am having an ineffectual economy drive. It consists of not buying other people drinks”), dysfunctional dwellings (“central heating in the sense that it never reached the bedrooms or bathroom”) and self-conscious ageing (“There are some nice pictures of me from when I didn’t look like a pregnant salmon”).

But their publication also immediately opened up Larkin to attack. They lifted the veil from a carefully protected personality, rendering a writer who had aimed at the universal suddenly and frightfully particular. Most obviously they drew him into the realm of politics, littered as they were with reflexive prejudices around race, class and women. And the insularity of Larkin’s world and perspective was soon transferred by his attackers onto his poetry, itself downgraded to “minor” and “provincial”. But more troublingly still, they hinted at the underlying source of these prejudices: his distaste for the world as it stood. Morbid humour aside, the letters’ key theme is decline, and a growing resentment at life’s failures and Larkin’s own inability to correct them.

Initially, failure seemed distant. A First from Oxford, two novels and a book of poems published by the age of 25. But first the fiction dried up, and novel three was abandoned. Ambition and hope fell away from Larkin like clumps of hair, his dreams of an independent writer’s life (which he deeply envied Kingsley Amis for enjoying) replaced by the drudgery of his work as a librarian. He was sustained only by his poetry, until that mostly went too in the late Seventies, leaving only the illness and alcoholism of his final years: “I used to believe that I should perfect the work and the life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.”

This was all unhappy enough. But it took Andrew Motion’s biography two years later to fully entangle the personal and political, to smash the glass and set sirens wailing with outrage. Far from the eccentric chronicler of 20th century Englishness, it seemed the real Larkin — a midden of unexamined neuroses — had been unearthed. Of course, it all starts with mum and dad, in this case especially dad, Sydney Larkin, a domestic totalitarian who decorated his office and home with Nazi regalia and took the young Philip on holiday to the Reich in 1936 and 1937 to witness the “new Germany”. Philip then heads up to Oxford where — besides developing his poetic talent — he developed the odd and introverted sexuality that beset him all his life.

Under the auspices of “Brunette Coleman”, Larkin spent an abnormal amount of time at university writing a series of lesbian schoolgirl fictions (“As Pam finally pulled Marie’s tunic down over her black stockinged legs, Miss Holden, pausing only to snatch a cane from the cupboard…”) These stories were harmless smut, mainly produced for the amusement of friends. But bondage and schoolgirls would become erotic constants for Larkin — he made sorties from Hull to Soho to seek out specialist magazines on the subject, a cache of which was kept in his library office (“to wank to, or with, or at”), and also circulated with like-minded comrades (“do pass on any that have ceased to stimulate”). But presumably not shared was the dream journal Larkin kept at university, in which sex dreams featuring Nazis, black dogs, faeces and oppressive but distant parental figures predominate.

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This far from cloudless adolescent psychology is not immediately suggestive of an empathetic poetic spirit, and we are now understandably wary of such a congealed male sexuality. It would be easy to write off the young Larkin as a borderline incel. But after this inauspicious start there were several love affairs, and Larkin’s erotic misalignment remains as Martin Amis recently wrote “mysterious and very hard to infiltrate… a maze, or a marshland with a few slippery handholds”. Sex itself more or less dried up in Larkin’s mid-30s — like trying to get “someone else to blow your own nose for you” was how he described the act itself. And terrified of marriage his whole life, he strung along his companion of more than 30 years, Monica Jones, in a relationship in which he was manipulative and unfaithful — not through any philanderer’s prerogative but through a juvenile fear of commitment.

A recent biographer of Jones even judges Larkin’s behaviour to be coercive control, and clearly shows how he stifled and inhibited her life. And there is one instance of now-immortalised cruelty: he colluded with Amis in fictionalising Monica as the clingy, boring, attention-seeking Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim. He even sent her a nervous copy after publication which she read over an agonising three days, and never forgot. “Oh he was a bugger,” Monica later said. “He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.”

Whether one’s response to this suburban tragedy is pity or disgust, the effect is the same as his letters: to de-universalise Larkin. To make a man, whose secluded personality meant he was only known through his work, seedily peculiar. It is a blow that has struck many a stale male in recent years, the reputations of (most recently) Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, and Saul Bellow collapsing from their 20th century pomp as their work, which pitched itself at broad, sweeping themes, was shown to be the product of a flawed masculinity.

Unlike them Larkin has come through the other side. So, what do readers continue to find in his work? It can’t be his personality or his surroundings — indeed, the post-war so wonderfully enlivened in Larkin’s letters no longer exists. But his poetry has endured because it does capture a universal human instinct, one which can now be read as a subconscious retort to the attacks upon his personality: the desire to record what is humdrum and shameful, and to transform it into something sublime. To, in John Updike’s phrase, give “the mundane its beautiful due”.

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Larkin did not live in an age of therapy and self-care — he would barely have known how to recognise his emotional flaws, let alone “work on them”. And he never directly addressed the most squalid parts of his interior world. But, as he famously said, “deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth”, a quip often interpreted as cutesy and self-dramatising. But he really meant it; misery stirred his muse. And you can see it happening within the poems as he takes some highly personal, ignoble incident and uses it as a platform to ascend toward some classical profundity.

There is a needy, lustful instinct behind the initial lines of “Sunny Prestatyn” and “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”, and Larkin often uses his openings as confessional hooks, drawing you into the naked reality of his consciousness before leading you away and above it. But this movement is best seen in “High Windows”, opening with the notoriously obscene lines:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

The poem continues relatively plainly from this ugly statement of generational sexual jealousy, weighing up this feeling and pondering if Larkin’s elders had envied him in his own youth. And then, from nowhere, an extraordinary shift takes places, up and away from that scene:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

This is an image of ambiguous oblivion, perhaps implying religious absolution behind what could be stained-glass church windows, or a nihilistic absence of meaning beyond them. But either way, the image is that of a thwarted 20th century Romantic, a poet fully aware of the coarseness of his age and personhood, but able to find in it metaphysical beauty nonetheless. Not all Larkin poems take such an extreme route. But this is the technical accomplishment that recurs across his greatest works, a capacity to transfigure train journeys, music, photographs, and churches into pockets of narrative which illuminate what he saw as the abiding human themes. “Time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.”

The greatest writers will always be those who have suffered dully all the wrongs of man, and yet remain alive to a greater wisdom and beauty beyond what they could afford themselves. And to read through Larkin’s letters, with all their everyday drollness and tedium, and grapple with his personality while remembering the genius of his poetry is to be confronted with this truth. But what is more, his poetry insists upon it, understanding that to be human is to be familiar with what is low and wrong, and to yearn for what could, possibly, transcend it. This is why Larkin resists what our age of moral purity would prefer: to be able to separate the fuddled bigot and the sedate chronicler of his age. Both men wrote the poems.

Shovelling information and entertainment was Northcliffe’s business model. His conjuror’s trick was simple: give as many people as possible what they want, and attention and dumb human curiosity can be transformed into merchandise. Nationalism, revolution, Enlightenment — all the forces of modernity sprung up under the transformative systems of print communication and capitalism. Northcliffe was the first to spot the potential of simply merging the two. And where’s the problem with that? Only that, as Pound felt, we don’t seem to like it when the dignity of human communication depends upon the whims of mercurial businessmen.

Northcliffe became the first in the line of suspicious personalities who have owned and administered our media: an evolutionary chart from frock-coated newspaperman to geeky social networker. And it is the megalomaniac perception of Northcliffe that Andrew Roberts seeks to rebut in a new and sympathetic biography. As ever, Roberts has been drawn to a well-fed “great man” of appetite and ambition (his previous subjects include Churchill, Napoleon, and George III). His approach to biography is traditionalist, using the lives of his characters to narrate a broader social and political period. The bulk of this book is therefore concerned with Northcliffe’s role in the political manoeuvres of the Edwardian era.

Throughout, Roberts serves as Northcliffe’s minder as much as his biographer, fending off the slights which have accumulated in the century since his death. (Briefly: Roberts concedes Northcliffe’s paranoid anti-Semitism and occasional brutality, while slapping down accusations of dictatorialism with convincing if over-defensive force.) Northcliffe’s attackers are snobs, he concludes. This man was a self-made genius who spoke for the people. If you don’t like him, comes the implication, perhaps it’s his readers you really don’t like.

Amid all the reputation-management, though, Northcliffe’s most interesting legacy from a 21^st-century vantage is neglected. He was the first global tech-media mogul and, like Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg, his genius lay in his instinctive understanding of how humanity wished to communicate with itself. As Roberts suggests, more than a “great journalist”, Northcliffe was a “great psychologist”. Press barons of the hands-on variety, now evolved into multiplatform world-emperors, have to be more than men. They are cultural hegemons, portraits of their age, “the way we live now”. Much as digital media now moulds our psychologies, in the time of Northcliffe, as he put it, “Our tons of ink make millions think”.

The British media was, until the 1890s, a staid affair, dominated at a national level by boring newspapers reporting court circulars and parliamentary speeches. It was revolutionised by a demand for something more exciting from a newly-literate office class, and the arrival of men like Northcliffe willing to supply it. Born in 1865 to a respectable family of genteel, Micawberish size and poverty, the young Northcliffe had access to the Establishment, but was outsider enough to scale its walls with the hunger of a parvenu. From his middle-class context, he spotted what every media entrepreneur has since exploited: that people would rather consume something banal than anything important.

His first great hit came in 1888 with Answers, a magazine to which readers could write with questions, which his journalists would answer. This formula launched a thousand inanities (“Can Monkeys Smoke?”; “How Madmen Write”; “What the Queen Eats”) published alongside now very recognisable tabloid featurettes: “Mysteries of a Hashish House”; “Horseflesh as Food”; “Narrow Escapes from Burial Alive”. Answers’s contemporary, doom-scrolling analogues are all too obvious. But the model was only preparation for the launch of Northcliffe’s real triumph in 1896, the Daily Mail, which served up a full Edwardian breakfast of aspirational snobbery, sex scandals and imperial jingoism. The Daily Mail rapidly cornered the market, selling a million copies a day by 1900 and becoming the world’s biggest daily paper.

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Nothing dates an era more than its cutting edge, and Northcliffe’s use of electrophone, linotype, rotary presses, ticker-tape and motor vehicles sounds inherently antiquated. But they were the motherboards and algorithms of his day, revolutionising the speed at which his papers could be printed and dispersed. Northcliffe’s technological enthusiasm was also personal. A motorsport enthusiast, in 1909, he was pictured pulling the Wright brothers’ new aeroplane into position, the super-wealthy plaything of its day, much as commercial space travel is ours.

Other innovations were more purely journalistic. A.J.P. Taylor called Northcliffe’s use of the short, punchy paragraph, “the greatest advance in communication since the abandonment of Latin for English” — a judgement which seems excessive, until you recall how the civilisational importance of 280-character communiques has been chewed-over for the past 10 years. And Northcliffe did have an eerie apprehension of the accelerationism that modern media would create. In a 1901 article titled “The Simultaneous Newspapers of the Future”, he laid out a vision for a duopoly of two global papers, providing synchronous news thanks to the telegraph and telephone. It was a remarkable foresight for such a Gutenberg-brained individual.

The Mail became the first colony in an empire. Several of our most famous titles were launched or at some point owned by Northcliffe: the Daily Mirror, the Observer and, in Northcliffe’s greatest coup over the Establishment, The Times. By 1914 Northcliffe controlled just under half of daily newspaper circulation and with popular appeal came political power. Northcliffe was raised to the House of Lords in 1905 but kept his political interventions backstage. His headlines helped destroy governments, but even more breath-taking was his reach. When Northcliffe published an editorial on his vision for peace after the Great War, he was read across the Empire, the United States, Europe and Japan. His dream of a global newspaper seemed almost a reality.

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After Northcliffe’s death in 1922 he was succeeded in the role of press baron and political Machiavel by Lord Beaverbrook (Daily Express, Evening Standard) and Northcliffe’s little brother Lord Rothermere, who had to sell The Times to cover the death duties on Northcliffe’s vast estate, but retained much of the rest, including the Mail. (It would be considerably harder to write such a defensive biography of Rothermere, who was on personal terms with Hitler and praised his “great and superhuman” work.) But Northcliffe’s spiritual successor in ambition and ingenuity was, of course, Rupert Murdoch. As Roberts covers (with a respectful nod to Rupert in his acknowledgements), Northcliffe had even been a personal mentor to Rupert’s father Keith, who some nicknamed Lord Southcliffe.

It was Murdoch fils who seemed to inherit Northcliffe’s feline charm and instinctive media nous. He took Northcliffe’s principles and dialled them up (for instance: bypassing Edwardian sexual priggery with Page 3 models). And unlike Northcliffe, Murdoch had the historical luck to apply two-dimensional tabloid energy to the three-dimensions of multimedia and broadcasting. With satellites and cable television as its printing presses, the Northcliffe formula survived the multimedia shift intact.

But the digital media innovation of the past 25 years has been, simply put, to de-editorialise. To merge private and public communications so they all occur in the same place. Northcliffe and Murdoch were lumbered with the assumption that they at least had to produce material for people to enjoy. But a new generation saw that by building and owning the means of communication they could remove this middleman. Murdoch isn’t at home in the 21^st century — the foul-mouthed, burly Logan Roy outgamed by his gawky, slimy Silicon Valley replacements. Simply create the right host platform, and there’s no need to churn out those stories about rapist boxers, bulimic royals and online paedos.

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People would generate their own tabloid press, pouring their personal lives onto the new media platforms, soon to be joined by the legacy media outlets who can’t afford not to be there. To put it in terms Northcliffe would understand: the Royal Mail and Post Office, The Times and the Mail, intimate diaries and international news reports, all jostling in the same terrifying ecosystem. As Richard Seymour has described it, now “we are all scripturient”, all responsible for turning in the copy we then go onto consume.

Does it do humanity any good to talk to itself so much, to know itself so well? Mark Zuckerberg thinks so, believing that it will foster understanding and empathy. All while building a business that has stoked the lowest human instincts, titillating and piquing our anger, tribalism, lechery and self-loathing, and indulging these atavisms simply because they keep us scrolling and watching and reading. Understanding Lord Northcliffe lets us see the longevity of this dynamic, a modern and very human struggle between what is important, and what is footling and ephemeral, but captivating.

Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian technophobe, set the tone for the snooty attitude of some towards the twittering machine when he saw the telegraph as “that great rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking inutilities!” But much as we might condemn those who preside over our deracinated media landscape — or even wish them in Hell — the savage irony is the same one Northcliffe spotted over a century ago: they’re only giving us what we want.