It’s one of a number of lines that makes its way from Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film Pride into the fabulous new stage adaptation at the National Theatre. Beresford and his co-writer, Matthew Warchus, have transformed the classic Brit-flick portraying the then-unlikely union between working-class communities and metropolitan progressives during the miners’ strike into a piece of bombastic and campy musical theater. It lands in a political milieu markedly different from the 2014 film — and certainly from LGSM’s Eighties heyday. In recent years, the story recounted quite faithfully in Pride has become a political fable of the kind beloved on the Left. Like the Jarrow Crusade, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the Paris Commune, and the Spanish Civil War before it, it is a somewhat melancholic story of a social movement that is said to have succeeded in history’s long vista — in spite of near-term defeat.

But where Pride’s story differs from the parables of the Left canon is in the split fortunes of the LGSM coalition. Britain now is a far-cry from the widespread homophobia of the Eighties, whose officials responded so shamefully to the HIV epidemic. When the young today are told of how Manchester’s chief constable James Anderton — “God’s copper” — described gay men affected by HIV as “swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making”, they are rightly disgusted. Thatcherism failed to suppress gay rights. Within a generation, her Conservative successors would go on to denounce Section 28 and legalize gay marriage, David Cameron declaring this — in an admittedly small pool — to be “one of the things of which I’m proudest”.

But Thatcher and her heirs did succeed in shuttering British heavy industry and neutering the political weight of organized labor. Britain’s breakneck deindustrialization process was faster than any other nation; even the collapsing Soviet Union wasn’t so extreme. It is now a country where skilled manual work has become a niche career choice. Outside London are countless communities that have never recovered from the offshoring of their local industry.

It’s hard not to wonder how LGSM’s visionary founding member Mark Ashton would feel about how things turned out. Mischievous as well as driven, as a young man he spent a six-month stint in the King’s Cross Conservative Club undercover in drag. Played by Jhon Lumsden in Pride, he radiates a manic confrontational energy, simultaneously pithy, erudite, roguish and possessed of a rare moral clarity. When asked why a group of gay people should come to the aid of people who persecuted them growing up, he phlegmatically retorts: “Because miners dig for coal, which produces power, which allows gay people like you to dance to Bananarama till three o’clock in the morning.”

Ashton instinctively connected social liberty and class struggle. Millions of Brits were gay and millions worked in industry, and it was clear how contributions to the economy and social life of Britain linked the two. It would be difficult to draw the same threads together today. How does one link a piebald economy of casualized work, AI data centers, Deliveroo riders, vape shops and photovoltaic cell installers with the remaining contested battlegrounds of social liberty? It isn’t quite so clear how each of us contributes to the life of the other anymore.

Still, it is worth challenging the narrative that has emerged, particularly since the Brexit referendum, that these two core components of the old Labour vote — the urban progressives and the traditional working class — are somehow fundamentally opposed. The commonplace bigotry that I encountered at comprehensive school in a former pit community in the Nineties is dying. Indeed, polling by the likes of YouGov consistently disproves the stereotype of the bigoted, provincial “gammon” who has bewitched progressives since Brexit. People living in Britain’s social mobility cold-spots, characterized by the ghosts of production lines and shipyards, are no more likely to feel animosity towards the non-straight population than people anywhere else. Where homophobia is more prevalent is within religious communities, which leaves the modern progressive with difficult scales to balance, as those people often don’t resemble the middle-aged men of post-industrial England who have become their Ur-baddie.

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I saw the heartbreaking effects of this homophobia first-hand in 2014 — the year the movie Pride was first released. I was a key-worker in various homeless hostels in London. One was for young people in Sydenham where roughly half of my young charges were the disowned teenage children of homophobic parents — all of whom had been taught by their religious leaders that their children’s sexuality made them evil. Each case file would come with a letter from a parent containing words to the effect of: “I do not support my child’s lifestyle. They are no longer my child.” This social and familial ostracization used to be a common part of the gay experience in Britain; activists like Ashton fought so hard to overcome it.

The continuation of such attitudes within highly religious communities is a reality that most modern progressives mostly prefer to ignore. When, in 2019, a school in Birmingham was subject to a months-long campaign of picketing by Muslim parents outraged at a curriculum encouraging acceptance of LGBT+ relationships, most progressives seemed keen to shuffle the episode under the carpet. False claims that mimicked the worst of post-war-era bigotry whirled around social media: the school had a “paedophile agenda”, staff were “teaching children to masturbate”, and children were “being indoctrinated” into homosexuality. The campaigner Amir Ahmed said that children were being “conditioned to accept (gay relationships) as a normal way of life”, while the Imam Mullah Bahm pronounced the school’s headteacher was a “shatani” (a devil) who “needed to be broken”.

There is little sign at present that Left progressives are prepared to challenge such bigotry today; those who did turn up, tying messages of solidarity to the school gates, later went to the police after being pelted with eggs by the protestors. If Zack Polanski, whose Green Party is buoyed by a defecting Muslim vote after Labour’s Gaza failings, is following LGSM’s lead of building solidarity partly as means to a cultural end, he’s doing so very quietly. Meanwhile, Tribune, the magazine built by pioneering feminists like Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Barbara Castle, is now owned by the same religious-conservative businessman whose Islam Channel has been fined by Ofcom for, among other things, advocating acquiescing to marital rape as a religious duty.

In this light, the ethical ethos that Ashton and his comrades held themselves to seems almost alien. LGSM were willing to put in hard yards to convince others they were on their side. Today, according to the pollsters More In Common (and anyone else who has spent any time in progressive circles), the group denoted as “Progressive Activists” are now the most insular citizens in Britain. They almost exclusively socialize with people who agree with them — and they are also the ones most likely to think those who don’t agree with them are morally deficient.

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Can Labour restore our pride in place?

By David Littlefair

Rather than drive hundreds of miles with donations for the skeptical but depressed villages of Britain, contemporary progressives stick to their own. They are the type to respond to national news of racial tensions in the depressed estates of Teesside by organizing a night-time vigil on the other side of the country in Walthamstow. They write, read and display dense, self-flagellating books about the difficult and intellectually taxing work of “not being a racist”. They swap Labour councillors for Green councillors in cities already full of Low-Traffic Neighborhoods and car-use penalties, reacting with shock when the small council budget allocations that aren’t already taken by elderly care don’t allow much in the way of revolutionary change.

In many ways, this is a politics of resigned indignation. One that has given up on Britain’s potential and instead built a members-only club inside of her major cities. The Mark Ashton of 1983 would surely feel a sense of disappointment. Progressivism may hold the kind of cultural dominance that previous generations could only have dreamed of — but it has also become an insular subculture. Outsiders are, if not the enemy, irrelevant.

Pride’s relevance today is in the contrast it sets out between LGSM and the modern activist. Rather than cultivating the necessary humility to find common purpose between groups of people, a culture of social media-incentivized extremism and righteous indignation has turned many on the Left into sniffy inquisitors, not entirely convinced that the poor are good enough people to be worth helping.

The National Theatre is Pride’s second stop after a stint in Cardiff. It isn’t clear whether the play will then go on tour, but it’s worth noting that if it does, it’s unlikely to visit the parts of Britain permanently broken by the end of the miners’ strike. Though it is a play that would be ideal for neglected England, it might be almost exclusively applauded by an audience of comfortable Londoners. I wonder whether that is what Ashton would have wanted.

***

Pride is at the National Theatre until 12 September. Friday Rush tickets are available.

The Cambridge Five, as they are known — Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross — continue to fascinate and baffle us, though the world in which they lived, and which they betrayed, has utterly vanished. Mind you, it is notable in this context that in Enemies Within (2018), Richard Davenport-Hines sees a continuing, direct link between the treachery of the Five and British politics right down to our own day. He writes:

“The undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise, the suspicion of educational advantages, and the use of the words ‘elite’ and ‘Establishment’ as derogatory epithets transformed the social and political temper of Britain. The long-term results of the Burgess and Maclean defection reached their apotheosis when joined with other forces in the referendum vote for Brexit on 23 June 2016.”

These men were born into privilege, to a greater or lesser degree; they had money, education, social status; they drank, they caroused, and in a puritan age they had sex galore; and if to disapproving eyes they might have seemed frivolous, they had in secret a core of steely resolution, thanks to an unfaltering allegiance to their Marxist-Leninist convictions. They were, to their own eyes, the loftiest among men.

And theirs was a man’s world. As Davenport-Hines writes, “Masculine loyalties rather than class affinities are the key that unlocks the closed secrets of communist espionage in Britain. The jokes between men — the unifying management of male personnel of all classes by the device of humor — was indispensable to engendering such loyalty. Laughing at the same jokes is one of the tightest forms of conformity.” It is also a way of excluding women from the serious business in which men must engage. This is no small point. The contempt shown by Philby and his fellow-conspirators towards the institutions that employed and indeed prized them has a dismayingly male cast to it. Needless to say, to a man, they treated women abominably.

The most famous of the Five, and probably the one who caused the most wide-ranging harm to the security of the West, was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed, with unwitting prescience, Kim, after the eponymous boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling’s novel. His father was St John Philby, an Arabist and a cad, who started out as a socialist but later on had some questionable dealings with the Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann. Kim Philby began his career in journalism, but went on to join British intelligence, where he flourished as a spymaster, while at the same time passing reams of secret material to the Soviet Union, which he continued to do, with extraordinary success, from the Thirties until his defection to Russia in 1963. Antonia Senior, author of the recently published Stalin’s Apostles, a magnificent and surely definitive history of the dark doings of the Cambridge Five, observes that “Two of Philby’s greatest talents were lying and camouflage”.

But then, the ability to tell plausible lies, to lie in plain sight, so to say, is a prerequisite for all undercover agents. What marks Philby, and to an even greater extent Anthony Blunt, as special cases, is how coolly they kept their heads while others around them were losing theirs. Philby brazened it out to the very end, while Blunt, the effete son of a Church of England clergyman, was the rock to which the others would cling, seeking shelter in times of storm and crisis.

The pressure under which the spies lived and operated would have called not only for superhuman fortitude, but also for unfailing sangfroid and an effortless insouciance. In the wake of the defection of Burgess and Maclean, and the lingering suspicions swirling about the heads of those who had been intimate with them, Philby called a press conference at his flat in 1955, not only for print journalists but Pathé News cameramen as well. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had told Parliament that Philby was not a spy, and as one watches Kim’s performance in that old newsreel, one cannot but be impressed by the amused impishness with which he carries off the charade.

And yet: look more closely, and there is detectable in the traitor’s eye a lurking glint of the terror of being found out.

They all had a wobble, sooner or later. In Master of Lies, his new book on Blunt, Piers Blofeld recounts an anecdote that already appeared in Miranda Carter’s masterly biography, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001). Coming away from a party one night in the mid-Fifties, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann shared a taxi with Blunt, who suddenly lost control and burst into tears. This is Blofeld:

“‘I am very, very sorry, Rosamond,’ he said to her. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’ When she asked why, Blunt just shook his head, as if it was all too much for him. She found the whole thing very staged and insincere — as well as plain baffling: forgive him for what?”

What is most striking in this incident, and it is not in Miranda Carter’s version of it, is the suggestion that Lehman found Blunt’s fit of weeping “very staged and insincere”. It is as if the old deceiver, even in extremis, could not but put on an act.

Both Blofeld and Senior have mined into a cache of MI5 files released in 2025, and some of the material they have turned up only adds to the shock of what was already a shameful history of deceit and betrayal. It positively chills the blood to read, in Blofeld, that under the Nazi-Soviet pact, “Blunt had been directing the Luftwaffe to British targets during the Blitz and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of British, American and Commonwealth soldiers as well as the suffering of countless millions more in Eastern Europe”.

Towards the end of the war, Blunt was still passing intelligence to the Nazis, because Stalin’s plan was to advance as far westward into Europe and seize as much territory as possible before the fighting stopped. “Every day that prolonged the war in the West brought the Russians closer to Berlin from the East,” writes Blofeld.

Horrifying too in Antonia Senior’s book is the story she recounts of the betrayal by Philby of a mission in 1951 to infiltrate the Soviet Union by agents of Western intelligence. A squad of Ukrainian partisans was parachuted into what the author calls the “restless Soviet fringes” between communist Poland and the Soviet Union. Philby was able to monitor the operation from beginning to end, an end which, thanks to him, was bloody in the extreme.

He scotched a similar anti-communist exercise in Albania, which Senior describes in fascinating if heartbreaking detail. A band of partisans, composed of émigrés, rendezvoused by night in a mountainous area in the Albanian interior with what they assumed was a party of like-minded Cold Warriors. The scene smacks of le Carré or Len Deighton:

“Both sides called out the pass phrase: ‘Death to the Bloody Communism’. Tomori [one of the reception party] identified the leader of the other group. ‘A well-dressed young man stood out, wearing an English-style coat draped over his shoulders. He carried a cane, a watch, and a shiny ring, and was armed with a revolver and the latest Italian automatic weapon, specifically crafted for agents of his kind.”

As one might expect, it was a trap; while the émigrés were backed by British and American intelligence agencies, Tomori and his men were committed communists. “There were gunshots and confusion in the darkness,” Senior writes. “One escaped, three were taken, and the local intermediary was shot in the head.” Years later, Philby, who had helped set the trap for the émigrés, wrote dismissively of them in his autobiography, “we Anglo-Saxons never forgot that these agents were just down from the trees”.

Among the Cambridge Five, the one who wrought the most serious damage, and who was himself perhaps the most seriously damaged by his clandestine work, was Donald Maclean. He also seems to have been the most deeply committed to the Marxist cause. When, after his exposure, Blunt was asked why he had done what he did, he shrugged and said, “Cowboys and Indians”. For Maclean, however, there was nothing playful about his intentions, or his actions. It was he, along with his fellow agents Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May, who sped up Russia’s development of the atomic bomb by at least a few vital, Cold War years.

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Maclean was the son of a Liberal MP whose constituency was on the Scottish borders. At Cambridge, young Maclean read Modern Languages, and dabbled in Left-wing politics. In his final year, 1934, he was recruited for the Russians by the shadowy but ever resourceful Arnold Deutsch, a Soviet agent who had already brought Philby into the Cambridge circle. Deutsch was undoubtedly good at spotting potential spies, but if his judgment of Philby is anything to go by — “It is difficult for him to tell lies” — he was a dud when it came to character.

Once recruited, Maclean was instructed to get himself taken on by the Diplomatic Service, which he did with ease. At the final interview for the job, he earnestly repudiated his student Left-wing tendencies, which prompted the members of the board to exchange benevolent smiles. The league of gentlemen had welcomed another “one of us” into its ranks.

Maclean worked first in the Foreign Office in London, and then at the British Embassy in Paris. However, it was in Washington, where he served from 1944 to 1948, that he provided the richest material to his masters in Moscow. Thanks to him, the Russians were kept thoroughly up to date on every step of the West’s development of nuclear weapons.

The Cambridge spy ring was soaked in alcohol, which seems to have been the only way the five could keep at bay the unremitting fear of being unmasked. Maclean was a violent drunkard; in one gin-fueled rampage he almost strangled his wife.

The biggest boozer of them all, though, was Guy Burgess. Scion of a wealthy family of Huguenot origins, Guy was as black as a sheep could get. A promiscuous homosexual, he would make a pass at any passing male, however perilous the circumstances. After Eton, where he shone, he went on to Trinity College Cambridge, and there he met Anthony Blunt; the two were possibly lovers, and certainly remained close right up to the day of Burgess’s flight to Moscow, in 1951. Philby had recognized Burgess’s potential, and recommended him to Arnold Deutsch, who recruited him and gave him the surely unintentionally apt codename, “Mädchen”.

After Cambridge, Burgess worked for the BBC’s Talks Department, where he brought in such twinkling lights as the poet John Betjeman, the arch-gossip Harold Nicolson, his old flame Blunt, and Kim Philby’s father. So all was cozy as usual, over at Auntie’s. It was partly his experience in broadcasting that led to Burgess’s recruitment into MI6, where he was able to harvest bales of fodder on Establishment thinking and planning, and rolled them on to Moscow.

By the mid-Forties, Burgess was embedded, if that is the word, at the British embassy in Washington, where the top-secret pickings were far richer than at the BBC or even in MI6. It is at this point that the mind becomes thoroughly boggled. As the Cold War warmed up, there were at the heart of the American intelligence establishment three clever, extremely determined and utterly ruthless Englishmen, all of whom were spying, busily and productively, for the Soviet Union.

However, the ring was starting to unravel. The Americans had set up a counterintelligence program, codenamed Venona, with the aim of identifying a Russian spy known to his handlers as “Homer”. Much of the accumulating evidence pointed to Maclean as the culprit. Meanwhile Burgess was disgracing himself by getting repeatedly and noisily drunk in Washington’s bars, hotels and political salons, careering from one watering hole to the next in his open-topped Cadillac — in a single day he managed to collect three speeding tickets — and in general scandalizing the nation’s notably strait-laced capital.

In May 1951, he returned to England, where he and Blunt began making arrangements to get Maclean safely off to Moscow, before the Americans had gathered enough incriminating material to unmask him as Homer. The abiding puzzle is that Burgess was supposed to accompany Maclean only part of the way — the route was through France and Switzerland to Prague and then on to Moscow — yet in the end they both ended up in the Russian capital. It is possible that Burgess thought he could deliver Maclean into the hands of his communist hosts and then return home as if nothing had happened; the notion is almost endearing.

And what of the Fourth Man, as he was called, before Blunt was outed as the Fifth? John Cairncross was in fact the odd man out. He was Scottish, for a start, and, as the son of the manager of an ironmongery, decidedly non-U. Not that the others were quite as posh as they would have liked to be; in Enemies Within, Davenport-Hines neatly defines them as of the “mezzanine class”, neither aristo nor middling, but something in between.

Cairncross did not even get to that floor. Though he was a dedicated and highly dangerous agent, he somehow never fails to raise a smile. He is like the inveterate straggler in a hen party, slightly forlorn, slightly dowdy, and more than slightly resentful. According to Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, he was the only one of the Cambridge Five who was motivated by money. He was finally exposed as a spy in 1981, but the authorities did not bother to prosecute him, seeming to prefer that he would just go away. They probably thought of him as did Philby’s sister, when she wrote in a letter to him in Moscow, “We’ve had just about as much as we can take for the moment.”

Why did they do it? Nothing, not even Cairncross’s avarice, seems to account for the vigor, ingenuity and singlemindedness with which they pursued their aims — that is, if they even knew what those aims were. It is unlikely that they read Marx at all deeply, nor did any of “Stalin’s Apostles” have any illusions about the Soviet paradise awaiting them should they be forced to cut and run. All three defectors, whatever good face they might put on it, detested life in Russia; while Blunt, urged by one of his handlers to make the great leap over the wall to Moscow, inquired bitterly if, once settled there, he would be guaranteed access to the Louvre.

Many books have been written on the Cambridge Five, and much speculation has been made about their characters and their motives. We began by invoking Nietzsche’s figure of the iron-willed Over-man, spurner of mundane, middle-class values, and certainly the Five considered themselves to be, as the title of one of Nietzsche’s books has it, “beyond good and evil”. However, even Nietzsche, had he stopped to consider, would have realized that beyond good and evil, as beyond Heaven and Hell, there is only Limbo — which is exactly where the Cambridge Five ended up.

So we ask again, why did they do it? Perhaps the matter is far simpler than the Nietzschean model would suggest; indeed, perhaps it is more accurately expressed by Aristotle, the philosopher of the mundane, when he observes that the man with a secret is the man possessed of power. And as we know, nothing, not even Georgian champagne, intoxicates more thoroughly than a draught of that heady brew.

It’s hard to offer a pithy summary of what A World Appears is about, but one can scarcely blame its author Michael Pollan for that. As the science journalist and polymath acknowledges, there is just too much vagueness in how “consciousness” gets used. One split is between those who use it loosely to mean awareness or experience generally, and those who insist the term refers only to subjective aspects in particular. The latter are interested in our capacity to mentally focus on “the windowpane” — Pollan’s metaphor — and not just what can be seen through it.

According to the standard story, conscious experience has an internal perspective built into it, and so implicitly refers to a self — as the sight of a candle flame also indicates your own (distant or near) spatial position to it. Or as philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in his famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?”: “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism”. And if that doesn’t help, just focus on what it is like to be a reader now, failing to understand Nagel’s deathless prose.

The “subjective” part has made many a philosopher conclude that the inside is less real than the outside. Galileo split the world in two, putting quantifiable, objectively detectable stuff like mass, weight, and number in first place, and relegating private subjective aspects like color and taste to the realm of so-called secondary properties. Other thinkers followed; eventually, as Pollan nicely puts it: “the method morphed into a metaphysics”. We got the idea that the felt reality of consciousness is deceptive, and despaired of it ever being fruitfully studied by science at all.

Yet more mystical types have suggested that it is possible to drop the subjectivity completely — to reach a state of pure “self-less” awareness — and that counts as consciousness too. Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher, tells Pollan that this idea would be better understood if researchers did more meditation and more drugs. “You have these people who are superambitious and dominating the discussion yet in their own mental lives are … completely impoverished” he complains. 

The temptation to take your own inadequate mind as your only laboratory seems to be a frequent hazard. Pollan relates how some of the loudest voices in the field possess what psychologist Alison Gopnik calls “professor consciousness”, a fact which tends to skew their findings in a different way. Socially clueless, screen-bound boffins discover that the essence of consciousness lies in the capacity to process information, while being physically embodied and having feelings turn out to be of negligible interest. What are the chances?

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Worse: effectively, these theorists are then rewarded for their literal narrow-mindedness. For if you define the thing you are investigating in a relatively circumscribed way to begin with, you’re more likely to derive a sexy-sounding answer to a hot button question like “are computers conscious?” later. If, for instance, consciousness is simply equivalent to information processing, then by definition you won’t need a human brain for it. Abracadabra! — information-processing computers can now be conscious too. 

Alternatively, if you treat consciousness as a kind of sentience, involving positive or negative responses to a changing environment, then it will turn out that plants can be conscious as well. Wordsworth’s “faith that every flower/ Enjoys the air it breathes”, vindicated at last. Again, this is a cool-sounding result; except that by stripping the original phenomenon down to something so minimal, you conveniently changed the subject.

Pollan avoids this mistake, as you might expect from someone who co-founded a center for the science of psychedelics at UC Berkeley. He is interested in the whole shebang: “the sense impressions, feelings, words, images, daydreams, mind-wanderings, ruminations, deliberations, observations, opinions, intuitions, and occasional insights”, not to mention the “the banalities, the trivialities, and all the seemingly arbitrary bits and bobs of mental flotsam”. At one point he takes part in an experiment, wearing an earpiece which beeps randomly throughout the day, so he can then write down everything he is aware of at that moment. Having hoped for mental brilliance or even just a bit of edgy transgression, he is dismayed at “the sheer tedium” of his inner world.

He agrees that there can occasionally be self-less consciousness, recalling a markedly non-tedious mushroom trip where he saw himself dissolve into a puddle of blue paint, yet from “a completely unfamiliar vantage — perfectly disinterested, uninflected, unruffled, and utterly indifferent … a state of consciousness without a subjective perspective or qualities of any kind”. At this point, the skeptic in me sprang briefly to life, as I wondered how you can see anything without at least an implied spatial perspective, indicating the position of a self that is looking. But maybe I just haven’t taken enough drugs yet.

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Are we living in a simulation?

By Zachary Hardman

Casting your net this widely increases the complexity of what is to be analyzed, and makes a complete physical explanation of consciousness look further off. Understandably, a central question of the book is what recently has become known as the hard problem of consciousness: how to explain all that subjective, ephemeral, flickering mental stuff in a way that shoves it firmly back into the brainbox. Or as Pollan puts it, more beautifully: “no scientist or philosopher has charted a plausible path from the intricate gray and white folds of the cortex to the felt experience of an early winter’s day at the end of fall semester.”

In my view, there are better and worse defenses of the ultimate insolubility of the hard problem. The philosopher who coined the phrase, David Chalmers, has argued that materialism — that is, the attempt to tether every aspect of consciousness to a physical cause — must be false, because he personally can imagine the existence of a zombie duplicate, physically identical to a human, who does not have consciousness at all. Quite why we are supposed to take what Chalmers can or cannot imagine as relevant is unclear, though. Imagination, precisely, thrives on an absence of knowledge about the limits of reality; and philosophers’ imaginations especially so, in my experience. 

But there are better reasons to think consciousness can’t smoothly reduce to the physical, as Pollan explores. One is that “the very act of sneaking up on our experience becomes part of the experience”, so that we can’t get a stable hold on what is to be explained. When the beeper goes off and the mind dutifully looks inward to monitor its own stream of thought, does it actually create something new? Is there really a fact of the matter about whether the thoughts I had 10 seconds ago took the form of images or words, before I stopped to inspect them? We are tempted here by a homunculus fallacy, imagining consciousness like a livestream or ticker tape, passively watched by a miniature version of the self. But there is no clean separation between the watcher and the watched. Nor, says Pollan, is there even a sharp distinction between hardware and software; for experience is constantly rewiring the circuitry.

And there’s also the fact that — thanks to Galileo and co — moving from the third-personal, objective idiom of science to the first-personal stance feels like moving beyond the official remit of science altogether. But even if this inference is unfair, it still looks improbable that we could ever get a satisfying translation manual, exhaustively transforming the experience of a memorable meal or a terrible dream into information about neuronal activity, electric pulses, and hormones. 

And nor is the inert language of scientists or philosophers ever likely to properly capture our feelings of awe at the mystery of it all. For this we have poetry — specifically Wordsworth, described by Pollan as the “great poet of the numinous”. His Prelude, for instance, gives us: “Dust as we are/ The immortal spirit grows/Like harmony in music/ There is a dark/ Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles/ Discordant elements, makes them cling together”. It’s a magisterial riposte to the hard problem, and without a stupid zombie in sight.

Not surprisingly, scientists intent on formulating the evolutionary purpose of consciousness tend to play down such issues. They say they don’t require a physical explanation for every fleeting thought, but only a general account of consciousness’s function and origin. According to one approach — championed by figures such as Karl Friston, Antonio Damasio, and Mark Solms — the point of consciousness is to advance the system’s basic goal of homeostasis: maintaining internal equilibrium in response to changing external conditions. Just as hunger prompts us to find food, and feelings of cold to find warmth, more sophisticated conscious feelings — including the capacity to reflect on one’s own perspective, as such — help us to explore, understand, and predict the behavior of complicated fellow humans, again for the purposes of survival. Summing up the depressingly disenchanted thrust, Solms tells Pollan that “the mind’s ultimate goal is to render consciousness superfluous by reducing uncertainty to zero and putting the maintenance of life on autopilot”.

But again here — this time, thankfully — we run into the unbridgeable gulf between the scientist’s bloodless coding of the material world, and what goes on in the private here-and-now. From the inside, as it were, rendering consciousness superfluous is absolutely not on my bucket list. On the contrary: having read Pollan’s illuminating book, I long to dive further in. What count as adaptive goals for a species or an individual, couched baldly in scientific terms — the passing on of genetic material, fuel acquisition, the hoarding of resources, or whatever it is — are scarcely ever recognizable amongst the desires, fancies, whims, and wishes a person is aware of right now. Nobody can stay in the language of science for very long; not even the scientists. It’s too inhuman.

Why, then, do we fear that this consciousness stuff somehow lacks reality, even when we each know our own version so intimately? After all — as idealist philosopher Bernard Kastrup points out to Pollan — “matter is an inference” while “mind [is a] given”. Right now, each of us has already access to a boundless, telescoping universe full of fascinating transformations. All we have to do is go in.

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond — including Roddy Doyle, Frank Skinner and Alan Titchmarsh — Jeeves Again, is the new anthology that reimagines Jeeves and Wooster through fresh eyes,” burbled the press release. “Jeeves Again is the statement publication for this 50th anniversary year, showcasing Wodehouse’s enduring legacy as a much-beloved and perennially relevant British Literary icon.” (Punctuation and capitalization all sic.)

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond…” I marveled. “And beyond!” I exclaimed. “Statement publication?” I thought. The only statement that this makes, as far as I can see, is that we imagine that what made Wodehouse work was the Jeeves ‘n’ Wooster brand, and the reason that Alan Titchmarsh isn’t P.G. Wodehouse is that he hasn’t been allowed to write the characters — rather than the fact that nobody before or since has written comic prose like that, and the reason they haven’t is because it’s bloody hard.

Would we, on Mozart’s birthday, invite a cash-in tribute album where someone who used to be on EastEnders produced a piece for the harpsichord? I wondered aloud. “No, we would not,” I said to myself. “Jesus bicycling Christ,” I muttered. What a shitshow. So. I am in an awkward position. Many of the contributors to this book are people I admire. One or two I count as friends. I therefore say this, as Dame Edna would have put it, in a loving way: this is one of those projects that should have been strangled in its cot.

Some of the more acute of these writers have picked up on Wodehouse’s stylistic tics — the definite article where a possessive is expected, or the surprising verb of motion (“I trickled home”; we “biffed off”) — and the less acute have contented themselves with sprinkling the text with epithets such as “spiffing” and “dashed”, or populating the scene with “chaps” and “blighters”. We get, across these stories, a good number of aunts, hangover cures, bathetic classical allusions, over-elaborate metaphors and unsuitable fiancées. Wodehouse isn’t, to thwart the cliche, inimitable; but what makes him sublime is.

To be fair — and I detest being fair like sin, but critical self-respect demands it — this collection isn’t all bad. Nearly half the authors are in the “more acute” camp. Frank Skinner, John Finnemore, Andrew Hunter-Murray and Jasper Fforde just about get away with it, and sometimes even sparkle. Dominic Sandbrook cleverly dodges the challenge of the prose by presenting a series of spoof historical documents about the later career of Roderick Spode; Roddy Doyle yoinks the Jeeves-and-Wooster set up into his Irish comfort-zone (“Ah Jaysis, Jeeves”) with some elan. The rest are pretty much duds.

But it’s the principle underlying the whole project with which I take issue. It is very much of our time, and it is deeply misbegotten. It betrays the sort of thinking that sees the works of great authors — specifically, their characters and worlds — as intellectual property, aka what the suits call “eye-pee” (that stings!) to be infinitely exploited. That, as Bertie would put it, is where they make their bloomer. It isn’t the presence of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie and Jeeves that makes Wodehouse Wodehouse: it’s the fact that sentence by sentence P.G. Wodehouse was among the finest half-dozen writers of comic prose in the 20th century. Nobody else could do what he did.

Yes, Jean Rhys set Wide Sargasso Sea in what would now probably get called “the Bronteverse”: but she was doing her own, very different thing. She wasn’t the contributor to a project lashed up by the Charlotte Brontë estate to squeeze a bit more dough out of the wind-lashed moor genre. Nobody would create a franchise extension of Lolita — “from the world of Vladimir Nabokov!” — by asking a collection of that book’s admirers to produce some new stories featuring Humbert and Lo, with cameos from that adorable rascal Clare Quilty. Without Nabokov’s prose, the world of Lolita is nothing, and without Wodehouse’s prose, Jeeves and Wooster are nothing.

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A common mistake — betrayed in the fact that nobody sane would think of doing this with Nabokov — is to assume that because something is popular fiction, or genre fiction, or comic fiction, the prose doesn’t matter. Sometimes, it doesn’t: Harlan Coben and Dan Brown are very limited stylists, but their thrillers work excellently. But often, it does. As witness, for instance, the disappointing results of Lee Child passing the Jack Reacher franchise to his brother. Lee Child makes what Lee Child does look easy, but it very much is not. And when it comes to comic fiction, even more than the literary type, prose is everything. Comic fiction is super difficult, and Wodehouse’s is at the absolute pinnacle of what has been achieved there.

Corporate interests will tend to see everything that makes money as reducible to IP: because, right enough, that is how the biggest entertainment products of our time do work. The special sauce of the Marvel, DC and Star Wars universes *is* the IP in the characters and worldbuilding. They’ve always been the products of diverse hands — many thousands of journeyman writers and artists, some sublimely talented and some much less so, have worked on comics, novels, films and whatnot based on these properties since the middle of the last century. Fans, and I include myself among them, will tend to read an X-Men comic very happily because we can be pretty sure at some point Wolvie will call someone “bub” and pop his claws (“snikt!”), or a ninja will show up, and this will tickle a small childish part of our soul in an agreeable way.

But to see all art in this way is corrosively reductive. It is to miss that special quality that differentiates art from IP. It is to see artists as “content creators” and art itself as fungible property, all the more monetizable when a franchise is taken over by celebrities with existing fanbases. It is to say, a couple of steps down the line, for that matter: “AI can do that for us.” It’s the school of thought that says “perfect for fans of…” Well. I’ll tell you what’s perfect for fans of P.G. Wodehouse: P.G. fucking Wodehouse.

All films today are too long, irrespective of how long they are. You sit there and think to yourself, in real time, as it were, how easy it would be to trim off bits here and there, 10% or 15% overall — and, in a lot of cases, 100% in total — with no loss at all, only an overall improvement in quality. Even Anora, which is a lot of fun, suffered from a kind of serial redundancy in that extended sequence where they’re driving around to about 50 different joints looking for the little Russian brat-punk, energy draining from the picture with each stop. Clocking in at precisely 197 minutes (why didn’t they add another three minutes and round it up 200?), About Dry Grasses was like the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Philippine Sea: at the extreme limit of my fuel, so even when all the sport on telly had come to an end, it still took an effort of will to get out of the house and into a cinema — the number of places it was showing had, by then, shriveled considerably — with very comfy reclining seats and plenty of leg room. This piece is a kind of one-year anniversary celebration of that evening in the middle of August when my wife and I schlepped into the West End, to the Picture House Central.

We were always going to go because Ceylan is not only a master, obviously, but a very funny one too. I pride myself on never having laughed during any film by the witless Coen brothers. Why? Because I have a sense of humor. Laughs in Coen films are just for laughs. They have a reputation as auteurs, those bros, but their films are more frat-house than art-house. Bong-water humor. Ceylan has a sense of humor in the more highly evolved — i.e. deeper-rooted — sense of a comprehensive worldview, a worldview that is pretty much restricted to Turkey, to Anatolia in particular — but it’s all-encompassing. There’s something funny going on most of the time, either in the center or lurking around the edges. I’ve no desire to go there, to Anatolia, which frankly looks like a bit of a shithole, but if I did at some level I’d be happy because it looks like the kind of place where you can have a bit of a laugh — have to have a lot of a laugh, actually, because otherwise life would be unendurable, which it might still be even with the laughter thrown or, more accurately, built in.

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Needless to say, when I say Ceylan is funny I mean he’s deadly serious, as serious as Mahmut, the intellectual and photographer in his 2002 film Uzak. Mahmut lives in Istanbul where he is obliged to host Yusuf, a clodhopping relative who has lost his job in a factory. Yusuf sits there, bored out of his mind, as they watch Tarkovsky’s Stalker on TV, the long tracking sequence where the three travelers take the little engine into the Zone. When the provincial visitor can’t take any more of this unbelievable tedium he trudges off to bed whereupon Mahmud flips off the Tarkovsky and settles down to some serious girl-on-girl porn — which he then has to hastily switch off when Yusuf makes an unexpected return to the living room. The humor is not at anyone’s expense, it’s free in the same way that the air we breathe is free, so even if it’s toxic you can’t expect a refund which, incidentally, my wife and I did manage to get from the relevant box offices after watching 20 minutes of Dune (at an Imax) and 30 minutes of David Fincher’s The Killer on the grounds that they were not fit for adult consumption.

Unlike Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) — which really puts the dead in deadpan — About Dry Grasses isn’t laugh-aloud funny. But it declares the film-maker’s stylistic signature instantly, opening with one of those wide-screen shots of a figure emerging out of a white blankness of snow. From that moment, I was able to relax, thinking, “Yeah, I’m glad I’ve come.” The figure we’ve seen coming out of the snowy nothingness is Samet, a teacher returning to a school in a remote village, a place with very few romantic possibilities, where everyone’s more or less pissed off. There’s another teacher, Kenan, and there are rumors of scandals and the possibility of a male teacher having crossed the line — less distinctly drawn here than it is in American universities — with a young female student. Discontent is simmering. Nothing ever quite comes to the boil in this place, but everything is almost boiling over the whole time. There’s a third teacher, an attractive woman called Nuray, who does bring things to the boil in a curious way in that, first of all, Samet tries to set her up with Kenan and then, when it appears that these two are indeed getting on well, conceives a perverse kind of longing for her, for himself: a desire to thwart the very things he’d previously set in motion.

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In all and any art, the bigger the theme the more important the details. About Dry Grasses deals with themes so huge I’m not even sure what they aren’t. The greater the work of art the more difficult it is to say what it’s about and this is true, of course, of un-Ronseal-ishly titled About Dry Grasses. That’s one of the things that makes it utterly transfixing — for the most part. Attention drifts during a long ideological debate but it’s then followed by a sequence — a sort of seduction — so intense you have to remind yourself to blink. Or there’s an earlier scene when Samet and Kenan are at a dreary diner, though that word “dreary” is redundant since everywhere in this town is dreary as all hell. They’re there to meet Nuray, the teacher Samet has told his friend he’ll be attracted to. She says she’s interested in Kenan’s face. The weather systems passing through Samet’s face as he registers this, as she takes a picture of his friend’s face, are so complex it would be a useful exercise to slow them down, like Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, to watch them unfold, but that would be futile because it’s not just the changes but the flickering speed of those changes that is so illuminating as to resist illumination.

Often an Oscar for Best Actor goes not for best acting but best impersonating: so Timothée Chalamet, for example, got a nomination for his dead ringer of the young Bob Dylan. Or an actor will impersonate a person with some physical or mental ailment. To paraphrase something Capote said of Kerouac, that’s not acting that’s afflicting. Speaking of affliction, Nuray has had a leg amputated as a result of an accident, which considerably complicates all of the many factors intermingling during the decision-making process of the seduction dinner and its aftermath. I don’t think I’ve ever studied faces as closely as I did those during these scenes. And I was compelled to do so.

In other words, this was the opposite of being bored which means it was the opposite of watching action scenes which bore the living shit out of me. In The Whole Equation, David Thomson writes that in the history of cinema no effect is “as momentous as shots of a face as its mind is being changed”. I’d push this a bit further and draw attention to the face that can’t make up its mind, that perhaps doesn’t know for sure what its owner is thinking, or that is taking pains to make sure that this process is concealed from the other participants in the scene but is somehow revealed to the audience so that the face on screen effectively holds up a mirror to our attempts to work out what we’re seeing, if we are capable of attending closely enough. That, it goes without saying, is worth attending to very closely. About Dry Grasses insists not only that we attend very closely, but that we do so over an uncomfortably extended period of time. As a result time, if you have a comfortable seat, flies by, almost.

Much has been learned — so much that we are unable to process it, partly because nothing is resolved at the end. It’s like life, ongoing. This is in the starkest possible contrast with the pathetically neat little twist at the end of Conclave. And that got an Oscar for Best Original Script! You might as well have an Oscar for Best-Tied Tie or Best-Tied Shoelaces — and even then it would probably go to a pair of slip-ons because they’re easier to get (on and off). The human relations in About Dry Grasses are impossible to unknot; the more you pull at one strand of them, the tighter and more intractable the tangle becomes.

There are other elements to mention briefly. The breaking of the fourth wall — is it the fourth? I forget how many there are and what it is each of them do — that occurs immediately before the sexual negotiation has been concluded. That’s a vertiginous jolt, but I like a little detail here, as Samet washes down a pill of some kind in the bathroom. Presumably in anticipation of the sexual encounter that lies ahead, a precaution because he is not motivated by lust (neither is she) and both parties are of course acutely aware that the amputated leg, the leg that is not there, might play a part in how the sex might unfold. In a sense, they have sex in order to find out — which is often what motivates people to have sex for the first time anyway.

There are plenty of other points that I’d like to check again. But that would mean watching the film on my computer which I’m not prepared to do. I’ll wait for it to come around again on a big screen — and you should do the same — sometime in the future, ideally when it’s part of a complete Ceylan retrospective, when there’s no competing sport on TV. The film earns its size and its length and has elicited a corresponding loyalty on my part.

Today, these darts could easily be thrown at Wes Anderson, whose new anthology film, The French Dispatch, revolves around a New Yorker-style magazine published by the French bureau of a wealthy Kansas newspaper between 1925 (also the New Yorker’s birth date) and 1975. Framed as articles in the magazine’s final issue, the stories draw on characters and episodes from the New Yorker’s history, many of which are named in the credits. Owen Wilson’s Herbsaint Sazerac covers “hobos, pimps and junkies” much like the legendary reporter Joseph Mitchell, while Jeffrey Wright’s melancholy, hilarious food writer Roebuck Wright is James Baldwin with a dollop of AJ Liebling.

The ecstatic testimonials quoted by Yagoda could also apply to Anderson. One staff writer calls his first contract “my pass to an enchanted kingdom”. The narrator of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying says: “It was not that I merely read the New Yorker, I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world.”

Anderson’s ability to create his own enchanted, self-contained world is well-established. Twenty-five years after he debuted with Bottle Rocket, film-goers know what they make of him and he has no apparent interest in changing their minds. It’s not true that he never changes. The Fantastic Mr Fox was a triumphant venture into stop-motion animation, while The Grand Budapest Hotel deepened his obsession with fastidious eccentrics who create beautiful sanctuaries from the ugliness of the world by pitting one of them, Ralph Fiennes’s Monsieur Gustave, against the extreme ugliness of totalitarianism. His appetite for new storytelling techniques is underrated, as are his emotional rug-pulls, which are all the more effective because his characters are so reluctant to broadcast their feelings.

Still, he does what he does. Critics have exhausted the metaphors of snowglobes and dollhouses to describe his meticulously curated out-of-time worlds. Arguments about style versus substance (as if they were two distinct qualities in cinema) are old and tired. Fans know how his characters will talk, dress and move. There is even an art book called Accidentally Wes Anderson, featuring travel photographs that conform to the director’s love of symmetry and colour. Anderson effectively operates on a subscription model rather than hustling for passing trade.

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The only surprising thing about The French Dispatch is that it took him so long. A New Yorker reader since his teens, he owns a collection of bound volumes going back to the Forties; the magazine’s sensibility is as foundational to Anderson as grindhouse movies are to Quentin Tarantino. The Royal Tenenbaums in particular is infatuated with the aesthetic of the mid-century Upper West Side intelligentsia, striking a tone somewhere between a New Yorker cartoon and the short stories that J.D. Salinger published in the magazine.

But what exactly is that sensibility? It’s not the confident diversity of David Remnick’s 21^st-century New Yorker, where ageless cartoons featuring wry exchanges in offices and desert islands can decorate longform explorations of hip hop and Instagram while the website does roaring traffic. No, Anderson’s New Yorker is the one that has inspired films, plays and dozens of histories and memoirs: the mythologised golden age of editors Harold Ross (1925-51) and William Shawn (1952-87). Its hallmarks were urbane sophistication, dry wit, scrupulous attention to detail, and a certain squeamishness about abstract ideas, sexuality and intense emotion. (A sign in the office of the French Dispatch reads: “No Crying.”) All of this gave it immense cultural cachet. In the post-war years, it was reluctantly acknowledged that many subscribers were using the magazine for the purposes of home decoration rather than reading material.

Closing in on its centenary, the New Yorker is by some distance the most celebrated and fetishised magazine in the world, and with good reason. Between 1962 and 1965 alone, it spawned Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Its pages have given us Salinger’s Glass family, James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, John Cheever’s The Swimmer, Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and The Addams Family.

Like Monsieur Gustave, Steve Zissou or Mr Fox, French Dispatch editor Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray) is a version of Anderson the director, but in New Yorker terms he is three parts Ross to one part Shawn: two very different men united by their heart-and-soul devotion to the magazine. Ross, a journalist and war veteran of enormous energy and charisma, co-founded the New Yorker with his wife Jane Grant, funded by his wealthy poker buddy Raoul Fleischmann. A member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, he made the magazine a vehicle for the qualities in journalism that he admired (wit, clarity, accuracy, charm) and a rebuke to those that he loathed (sentimentality, pretension, “bunk”). “We don’t cover the news; we parallel the news,” he explained.

Ross hired women reluctantly and black people not at all, but he cherished those he did employ. “Don’t fuck the contributors,” he would tell new editors, using a word he would never tolerate in print. “Moreover, we don’t hire the people you do fuck.”

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By Dorian Lynskey

Crammed into ramshackle offices on West 45^th Street, cantankerous, hard-drinking talents such as James Thurber, EB White and Wolcott Gibbs produced a magazine that was as pristine as its creation was chaotic. By its 25^th birthday, however, the operation was so professional that fiction editor Gus Lobrano said with some regret that the party at the Ritz-Carlton “seems generally to be regarded as a success, despite the fact that nobody got insulted, nobody fell down stairs, and there were no fist fights”.

The war had forced gravitas upon the New Yorker, a development epitomised by the decision to give over an entire issue in 1946 to John Hersey’s 31,000-word report from Hiroshima, and which left its founder ambivalent. “I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe, and now look at me,” he told a friend shortly before his death during lung surgery in 1951.

The veteran staffer who persuaded Ross to run Hiroshima was more attuned to the post-war mood. William Shawn was a shy, self-effacing man who nonetheless amassed imperial control over the magazine’s output. He was a brilliant talent-spotter and an endlessly curious and patient listener who made his writers feel not just appreciated but profoundly understood. This could make him indulgent to a fault. Joseph Mitchell took five years to deliver his classic 1964 profile Joe Gould’s Secret, then never published another word in the magazine, despite continuing to come into the office to write (and draw his $20,000 salary) for the remaining 32 years of his life. One minor French Dispatch character represents the chronically unproductive older writers who used to joke about which of them would die most in debt to the New Yorker.

Both Ross and Shawn combined a relaxed approach to commissioning (it was considered ungentlemanly to specify deadlines or fees) with a maddeningly rigorous, comma-crazed editing process. EB White joked that the magazine’s style guide was longer than Gone with the Wind, and Thurber complained that Ross’s zero tolerance for ambiguity meant that he seemed to be editing for the benefit of “a little boy or an old lady whose faculties were dimming”. Shawn was no less exacting. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan compared the arrival of marked-up proofs to an “artillery bombardment” while the fabled film critic Pauline Kael grumbled that she “spent more time and effort restoring what I’d written than writing it”.

However annoying this may have been for writers, New Yorker readers could feel confident that every sentence had been considered and every fact verified. To this day, you may not feel like reading 10,000 words on the controversy tearing apart America’s oldest heron sanctuary but you know that they’re the best damn 10,000 words on the controversy tearing apart America’s oldest heron sanctuary that you could ever hope to read.

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What fascinates me about the New Yorker is its remarkable consistency of taste and purpose. Of its five editors to date, only Robert Gottlieb (fired after five years) and Tina Brown (quit after six) have stayed for less than two decades. Some contributors have had even longer tenures: Mollie Panter-Downes wrote ‘Letter from London’ from 1939 to 1984. While most magazines are susceptible to desperate personnel changes and flailing redesigns when the circulation dips, the New Yorker disdains sudden moves. Shawn didn’t even accede to publishing a table of contents until 1969. When Brown introduced photography, subheads and proper bylines in 1992, some traditionalists reacted as if she had added Page Three girls, but she still didn’t dare meddle with the illustrated covers or the headline typeface designed by Rea Irvin in 1925.

When Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, bought the magazine in 1985, Shawn wrote an open letter to readers, reassuring them that its values would not change: “At an age when television screens are too often bright with nothing, we value substance. Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And we believe in the beauty of the English language… And if any single principle transcends all the others and informs all the others, it is to try and tell the truth.”

The New Yorker’s purism and gentility under Ross and Shawn closed it off from some thrilling developments in American prose. Shawn despised the flash and swing of New Journalism (“a debased form of journalism and a mistake”) and sent rejection letters to spiky young fiction writers as important as Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut. Snooty and short-sighted? Probably, but such omissions are the price of taste: every aesthetic needs boundaries.

Which brings me back to Wes Anderson and the pleasure of seeing a director doing exactly, and exclusively, what he wants. When talented young directors routinely go straight from indie movies to the inevitable compromises of the franchise machine, Anderson’s complete lack of interest in mainstream audiences feels like a rare privilege indeed. You can love or hate his artistic choices but even in his weakest films, they are always deliberate. As Howitzer tells his writers: “Just try to sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” And Anderson’s long relationships with key collaborators, from Owen Wilson to composer Alexandre Desplat, echo Shawn’s passionate loyalty to his writers. His movies about families and quasi-families have nurtured one in real life.

The French Dispatch opens and closes with a dual obituary for both editor and magazine. This elegiac tone is typical of Anderson (whose films are usually about the end of something) and of writing about the New Yorker. The final words of Yagoda’s book are “rapidly receding past”, while the title of Renata Adler’s elegantly brutal 1999 memoir is Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker.

Anderson also shares with Ross and Shawn a mission to bring together diverse talents to create something beautiful, and an incorruptible integrity that is uncommon because it is hard to maintain. He is so entirely himself that his films have the same proud energy as the standard reply that one of Ross’s more hardline staffers would send to complaining readers: “If you don’t like us, read something else.”

As I learned from her new graphic novel The Secret to Superhuman Strength, we both eschew team sports, preferring to compete primarily against ourselves. (Bechdel skis, and though I play tennis instead, I prefer rallying for hours on end to matches.) We were both regarded by schoolmates as mediocre athletes; that is, we were both chosen in the middle of the pack for kickball teams. We both took up running as a lark, beginning with short solo distances — in junior high, I did circuits of the football field while the rest of the class scarfed down miniature pizzas; Bechdel started spontaneously running to visit her grandmother. We both steadily increased this distance, and we both pushed our route to ten miles. Over the course of artistic careers, we’ve both been as dedicated to working up a sweat in a literal sense as we have been to our exertions on the page.

We’ve both gone through similar phases: weight training, long-distance cycling. Why, I positively seized on the fact that Bechdel spurns swimming — a difference! — and has got into yoga, which (so far) I’ve resisted. But over the last 50 years, we’ve both also been subjected to the larger western world’s gathering fixation on fitness, which has overtaken our meagre private labours and crashed over our heads like a 30-foot breaker. Overwhelmingly, then, what Bechdel and I have most in common is that at nearly the same time we both took a step back from what Bechdel calls an accelerating “cardio-pulmonary frenzy” and wrote books about it.

A word from our sponsor: my 2020 novel The Motion of the Body Through Space regards a woman of 60 who’s pursued a rigorous, albeit intensely private, fitness regime since childhood.  At the very point that regime has almost entirely destroyed her knees — so much for those ten-mile runs — her sedentary husband announces he’s going to run a marathon. When he ramps up to the triathlon, for which he engages a sexy younger trainer, the marriage, to put it mildly, is imperilled. The purpose of my project was to examine what in God’s name is propelling this latter-day preoccupation with fitness and whether the trend is a force for ill or good. (Answer: both. Now you needn’t buy the book.)

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Yet the graphic novel may be an even better form than the straight prose kind for exploring this topic. Illustration brings to life various forms of self-torture, and Bechdel’s rendering of her multiple exertions throughout the years is dryly self-parodic. The drawings are stylish as well as entertaining. The narrative moves nicely along. Simultaneously detailing her romantic and career travails, Bechdel’s accompanying text is lush enough to parse with some profundity our mysterious exaltation of roundly unproductive suffering. The whole package is presented with more than a soupçon of welcome self-derision. I loved it.

Nevertheless, I confess to some ambivalence about discovering that the powers-that-be created two of me, just in case something unfortunate happened to the spare. One reason people like Bechdel and me avoid competitive sports is that by nature we’re too competitive, and so might take conclusive defeat fatally to heart. Thus the rivalrous devil on my shoulder jeered over these pages, “Oh, yeah?  You’ve biked a hundred miles in a day? Well, I’ve cycled so-called centuries cross-country for months!” I know. Pathetic. Indeed, an aim of both my novel and Bechdel’s is to question why we’ve come to invest so much status in fitness. How come many of us now compare ourselves to others in accordance with who does more repetitions of deltoid dips, even more so than with who earns more money or builds the more dazzling career?

When I started running around the football field at lunch and keeping a secret chart of my daily sit-ups, I imagined that these quirky absorptions were entirely my idea. Now I’m not so sure.  Recognising my double in Alison Bechdel (though she’s massively taller than I am, damn her) made me suspect uneasily that there might be other copies of me out there, hundreds, thousands, even millions.

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Rare must be the parent who looks up “1,000 most popular names for girls” and exclaims, “Look! ‘Olivia’ is number one! Let’s call our baby the same name everyone else is choosing!” Something more enigmatic and subconscious propels “Olivia” to that top slot. “Olivia” is in the air. It burrows into the brains of parents-to-be from the side like an earwig. Meanwhile, all those parents who christened a daughter “Olivia” last year thought the name was fresh, unusual, and their idea.

So with fitness. I think both Bechdel and I were suggestible. The nascent cultural obsession with exercise was already in the air. We were early adopters. But we were still earwigged.

I acknowledge this apparent conformity with no pleasure. Like any proper American, I prefer to regard myself as self-created, not as a predictable product of outside forces, like pasta dough forced through the mould for fusilli. But the amount that Bechdel and I have in common cannot be a coincidence. We started out the same loner, high-achiever type and grew up in the same country at the same time.

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In one respect the graphic artist and I may part ways. Strewn throughout Superhuman Strength are mini-bios of philosophers and poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac. These inserts are a little tedious. The bolstering of Bechdel’s personal story with historical heavy hitters suggests an insecurity about the worthiness of her theme. Writing my own novel about exercise, I shared that insecurity: is this topic meaty enough to justify a book? For me, what came to seem important about the subject was making it seem less important.

Despite her playful, self-deprecating approach, Bechdel portrays her churn through multifarious routes to exhaustion as a form of spiritual seeking. By contrast, I’ve come to see this mystical elevation of exercise as a route to enlightenment as part of the problem — and there is a problem. Obviously, a greater focus on fitness comes with undeniable health benefits, but worship of the hard body is a form of idolatry. Taken to excess, fitness fanaticism naturally nurtures narcissism (the endurance-sport-convert husband in my novel becomes unbearable). What we need is not to go back to being slobs, but to restore a sense of proportion.

Keeping the body in working order is a mechanical matter, one best decoupled from status and virtue. I adore tennis. I happily impute to the sport an element of, yes, spiritual satisfaction — because for me tennis engenders joy in its purest form. By contrast, plain exercise — calisthenics, running when you’re not in the mood (almost always) — is drudgery. Exercise constitutes the dullest part of my day. The fact that I keep doggedly at it is one of the least interesting things about me, and I’d rather talk about almost anything but.

The elevation of fitness to the highest of attainments is a sure sign of a culture grown neurotically inward and stunted. It’s a sign of diminished aspirations. When “self-improvement” entails not learning German but doing star jumps, we’re aiming to clear the lowest of bars. We’re not producing superheroes, but gym bunnies. In the end, no matter how much agony we undergo to build our biceps, those perishable muscles will still atrophy in old age and then end up on the scrap heap — at which point, what have we got to show? We could stand to demote the press-up back to the floor where it belongs.

The whole purpose of maintaining a functional body is to be able to do something else: write books, invent new software, land a rover on Mars. Theoretically, Michelangelo could have spent all his time on chin-ups and never have got round to the Sistine Chapel. Alison Bechdel won’t be remembered for her running time, but for exuberant drawings, droll captions, and candid self-reflection. The West’s obsession with physical strength, perversely, is a weakness.

Lionel Shriver’s novel The Motion of the Body Through Space is now out in paperback.