This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Lodge re Joyce
John Self is right to praise the novels of David Lodge [SERIOUSLY FUNNY, APRIL] but Lodge should also be celebrated for his critically acute, catholic (pun intended) and highly readable criticism.
Working with Structuralism (with its playful title as if the controversial movement is some form of struggle as in “Working with Disaffected Youth”) has a groundbreaking discussion of Hemingway’s short story “Cat in the Rain” whilst “After Bakhtin” contains a stunning dissection of Kipling’s ultimately unknowable short story “Mrs Bathurst”.
During the 1980s at the University of Birmingham, Lodge offered undergraduates a one-year course on Joyce’s fiction with most of the year spent on Ulysses; I will always be grateful to him for introducing us to that masterpiece.
Since those seminars in 1980, Joyce’s novel has remained unrivalled and a constant presence for me whether, like Leopold Bloom, I’m just walking down the road, popping into a bar for a drink or gazing at the night sky.
Tony Macilwraith
Worcester, Worcestershire
Soporific listening
Paul Lay’s piece on Radio 3 is bang-on [MUSICAL MORPHINE TO LULL YOU TO SLEEP, APRIL]. Waldteufel’s “The Skaters’ Waltz” was recently repeated several times in a few days, and we have had endless repeats in various guises from Carmen, Rimsky-Korsakov by the bucketload (Scheherazade, of course) and much other over-familiar stuff, including ladlefuls of Vivaldi at his most repetitive.
I had a guest staying recently, and, as Radio 3 was on most mornings as I prepared breakfast, he asked if the BBC had run out of recordings, there was so much repetition. The station should be called the Light Programme, for that is what it mostly is now.
As “relaxation” and “unwind” have replaced serious broadcasting aims, Lay is right: this soporific pap is the musical equivalent of assisted dying. And to hear some of the mangled English now spouted by the favoured presenters, one might well long for death.
Professor James Stevens Curl
Holywood, County Down
Questions of life and death
Why is the right to die so opposed [DYING TO SAVE THE NHS, APRIL]? Who would criticise the right to freedom of speech — but what about freedom of choice? Why is the debate on dignity in dying so controversial? Whose life is it anyway? Why should the opinion of those who hold a strong religious belief override the logical view of those who believe in a more compassionate alternative?
The sanctity of life is a core belief to many, but as we have tampered with the body’s natural decline, thanks to the marvel of modern medicine, should the sanctity of life concept apply to artificially prolonged life? Why should we not also tamper with the date of death?
Why unnaturally prolong the pain and indignity of declining health? If I wish to avoid the indignity of a bed wash in an expensive old peoples’ home, why should that be regarded as a sin? Why should it be branded as suicide rather than a reasonable and logical personal decision that is the ultimate freedom of choice?
Lord Vinson
Alnwick, Northumberland
Churchillian Chronology
In his review of James Muller’s edition of Winston Churchill’s My Early Life [BOOKS, APRIL] Daniel Johnson claims that “the beginning of his [Churchill’s] political career, his unsuccessful parliamentary by-election candidacy in Oldham, is placed after his first military service in India and Sudan — when in reality the sequence of events was reversed” and that this was deliberate for “aesthetic rather than strictly factual requirements”.
In truth, there was no scope at all for such deliberate tampering with chronology.
The Oldham by-election took place in mid-1899, Churchill having resigned his commission with the army in March of that year after serving in India and the Sudan from the autumn of 1896 to the spring of 1899. Following a general election (“the Khaki election”) in the autumn of 1900, Churchill became one of the two members for the Oldham constituency.
The period of 18 months or so between by-election failure and general-election success could not have accommodated 30 months or so of Army service in India and the Sudan.
Even if the post-by-election period had been one of 30 months, the historical events in India and Sudan recorded by Churchill would have post-dated those found in the pages of his book.
Perhaps there is confusion about the period when Churchill served in the army as a commissioned second lieutenant for the months between by-election failure and Khaki election success when he was covering the Boer War for the Morning Post, a period during which he also contrived to become an unpaid assistant — adjutant with the South African Light Horse?
Wilfred Attenborough
Lincoln, Lincolnshire
