#72: In Our Time

 

One of my favourite programmes on BBC Radio 4 is the long-running series ‘In Our Time’, in which three guests, usually academics, discuss central topics, events and people from history, science, religion, philosophy, literature, natural history and more. Three weeks ago it was Italian writer Italo Calvino. The previous episode was on the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek bronze object rescued from the seabed in 1900 which experts think was a kind of analogue computer for calculating the movements of the planets and stars.

What does the programme contain?

Typically the three participants introduce the topic broadly, then explore it in more detail and finally comment on its legacy for present and future times. The programme is 42 minutes long (plus some ‘bonus material’ available on catch-up, in which guests add something they didn’t have time for). Veteran presenter Melvyn Bragg manages the discussion.

The medieval composer Hildegard of Bingen has featured 

One of the programme’s attractions to me is that it explores these topics on their own terms rather than through the filter of present-day preoccupations and values. It usually starts by placing the person, work or idea firmly in their own time (despite the title of the series). Only towards the end of the programme does Bragg ask explicitly about current opinion of the topic. The programme also eschews modern parallels with its subjects. And despite the efforts of the ‘In Our Time’ website to provide click-bait soundbites (‘it remains shocking today’ on the Sistine Chapel), this is long form listening without bells and whistles – just talk.

Why listen instead of read?

So why listen to the programme when you could read Wikipedia, more quickly, for an overview?

One reason is that because it is spoken, one is somehow more aware of the fluidity of knowledge, that it is always developing. In addition, something of the personality of the speakers and their enthusiasm comes across, and it is interesting to hear the often skilful way both they and Bragg marshal the material.

As an example of all of these, here is a fairly long, lightly edited, excerpt from the September 2024 programme on wormholes (shortcuts between galaxies):

Katy Clough: One speculative idea that’s quite fun to think about is the idea that universes are born in black holes. So when you have a black hole, instead of having a singularity, you actually balloon out into a new universe, so maybe the collapse of a star can be the birth of a new universe. And I’ve always kind of liked that, but I think I like it for purely aesthetic reasons and not for any good scientific reason.…

Melvyn Bragg: There’s talk that in one sense physics is as imaginative as science fiction – what do you make of that?

Andrew Pontzen: I agree that physics is fundamentally a very imaginative endeavour… We were talking about Newton and his unification of the heavens with earthly phenomena – if that’s not a leap of imagination, I don’t know what is.… Science more broadly requires a huge amount of imagination as well as experimental rigour – [we need to find] the right balance, and we’ve been right on the edge of that talking about wormholes because we are so far away from experiment.

Toby Wiseman: I might say actually it’s creative rather than necessarily imaginative. Particularly when we talk about these fundamental sciences, our understanding of the universe is really a mathematical one… Newton didn’t just give us gravity, he gave us the notion that you could really analytically control physical phenomena through mathematics, and he developed calculus in order to do that. Then for hundreds of years, the theme that has dominated is, you can imagine wonderful things and be creative in working with maths, but at the end of the day the mathematics keeps you honest. We would never understand the universe in the way it is today if it wasn’t for for the fact that it didn’t require imagination – it’s all there in the mathematics. When for example in 1916 the first black hole solution was written down… it wasn’t understood to be a black hole solution, but at the same time there it was.

Andrew Pontzen: I think we’ve finally found a point of disagreement, which is an achievement! If you look at someone like Faraday, for example, Faraday did remarkable experiments on electricity and magnetism in the mid nineteenth century and had very little mathematical ability… And yet he was able to extrapolate… He wrote about things like ray vibrations… – these were things that came out of his mind, they were not mathematically elucidated. And the fact Michell was writing about black holes in the time of Newton, long before someone came along and got the maths correct. So I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you say.

Actually the disagreement above is a rarity on ‘In Our Time’; the academics usually support or praise each other’s speeches. This is one deficiency of the programme, since differing viewpoints make a good discussion, and is a reason for inviting different guests. Another disappointment for me is the literature episodes, since guests talk about the literature but rarely quote it. This is a missed opportunity to let people, both guests and listeners, respond to poetry or novels moment-by-moment or to compare knowledge about the writer as a person with their actual writing. For example, in a programme on Simone de Beauvoir, Melvyn Bragg asked Professor of French Margaret Atack to give listeners a ‘taste’ of some of the disturbing content of the letters between Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. The Professor responded in generalities and it was left to Bragg to say that the letters include details of how the two philosophers took the virginity of girls and passed them between them. Even then there were no direct quotes from the letters. One can also hear Bragg’s occasional frustration with academics being over-subtle rather than defining their terms or stating their position straightforwardly.

My top three?

Three that stick in my mind are on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the idea that you can accurately measure either the position or momentum of an atomic particle, but not both; the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 50 million years ago, when crocodiles swam at the North Pole; and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, on John Maynard Keynes’s book attacking the 1919 Versailles agreement at the end of World War I. There’s also a listeners’ top 10 here.

The Muses and the history of inspiration were another topic

#71: Gratitude

 

Picture credit: @DigitalMosaics 

I’ve been intrigued to see the prioritisation of gratitude a couple of times recently, one in the ethos of the very successful Michaela secondary school in north-west London, who ‘love to celebrate kindness and gratitude’, the other in a speech by author Douglas Murray to a class at New York’s Columbia University in which he praised the ‘unpopular virtue’ of gratitude and exhorted students not to live lives ‘tied up in resentment’. Before this, I recollect reading claims that gratitude improves psychological well-being.

Why gratitude?

Why be grateful, rather than happy? Gratitude is to someone or something, so I suppose it implies that you alone are not responsible for good things and thus encourages an acknowledgement of wider society. It also implies a sense of obligation to that society, an owed return, however small.

Grateful to who?

Traditionally, of course, thanks were and are devoted to God. But there are many other possibilities – people past and present, known and unknown; nature’s processes; even man-made objects.

Are there proven benefits of being grateful?

Some research looks at ‘dispositional gratitude’, a tendency to notice positive aspects of life – being naturally cheerful. This type of gratitude contributes to well-being according to this 2015 study with 233 participants. Likewise, this 2020 study says it is ‘moderately to strongly correlated’ with well-being. So if you are more inclined to feel grateful, you are likely to be happier. Unsurprising, perhaps – bordering on the tautological?

Then there are ‘gratitude interventions’, in which people are asked to do extra things such as keep a gratitude journal. Evidence in support of these is more mixed. A 2017 analysis of 38 studies found that encouraging people to develop their gratitude can improve ‘numerous outcomes, including happiness’, but that benefits may be overemphasised. This 2020 study found that gratitude interventions had only modest effects on depression and anxiety, and recommended that people find other ways of reducing these feelings. This 2016 analysis of 20 studies found that gratitude interventions with young people were generally ineffective.

On this evidence, it is hard to escape the conclusion that if you are naturally inclined to be grateful you will be happier. If you are not, it is harder to cultivate happiness through deliberately feeling grateful. None of the studies I looked at seemed to measure long term happiness, though of course it would be much harder to attribute this to a single factor such as gratitude.

What would I be grateful for?

Once I start thinking, the list seems endless. The astoundingly lucky chain of processes which mean the Earth has surface water, and thus can support life. The fact that life ever evolved in the first place. All the public and private health advances that mean I have lived over 20 years more than the average person in the Middle Ages. City planners, lawmakers, educators, people who have sat on committees to push through regulations on pensions, education, rights, health and safety legislation, transport… The fact that I happen to live in a stable country with low crime levels. Being able to work from home, even. Such statements sound unexciting and don’t make headlines, but are true nonetheless.

Short-term things to be grateful for

Here, at random, are some things just from the past week:

HMRC’s plain English, clear, step-by-step tax self-assessment webpages. A lot of thought has gone into making this process accessible and bureaucracy-lite.

The Saturday Walkers’ Club – they organise a fantastic selection of walks in the UK, all reachable by train, put together and updated by volunteers.

Five well-stocked supermarkets within walking distance.

Suncream.

Seeing friendly faces nearly every time I go out in the town where I live.

Gratitude in literature

To finish, here are a poet and novelist being grateful. The first celebrates an overflowing thankfulness to God for another day, the second expresses a longer-term debt to the generations that have preceded us. The first ecstatic, the second sober. The first leaning towards feeling, the second towards thinking. Gratitude interventions indeed.

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

E. E. Cummings

And from a novel:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The closing lines of Middlemarch by George Eliot (speaking of the book’s heroine, Dorothea). Does that ‘incalculably’ hint at things which research cannot capture?

picture credit: John Hain

#70: Parklife

 

Ducketts Common (a rather flattering shot)

Ducketts Common lies opposite Turnpike Lane tube station in north London. Calling it an ‘oasis’ or ‘green lung’ would be stretching it; the common is only 24,000 m² (smaller than most parks) and is bordered by the wide and noisy Green Lanes as it takes over from Wood Green High Road.

Park life

I’d always thought of it as a bit scrubby and barren, but jogging round it on a few occasions recently I found a surprising amount going on, and a revitalised space for which Haringey Council and the Friends of Ducketts Common must presumably take some credit. On Sunday a rap soundtrack and the smack of ball on tarmac came from the basketball courts (black, brown and white players together, a miniature antidote to the riots that have been filling the media lately). Elsewhere, a group of Middle Eastern- or Turkish-looking men were sitting on the grass in a circle around a pile of cash playing cards, and a little girl ran next to me as far as the playground gates (‘Is she bothering you?’ asked her father).

You can see thoughtful touches – the chunky logs placed around the perimeter (good for sitting on, running along, or trying to balance on for a Simone Biles impression). Half the park is ‘a wildlife area’, and the council's website mentions a 'wildflower meadow', which is somewhat creative with the truth, but the pigeons bathing and preening in a puddle didn’t mind. The outdoor gym was seeing some use and there were even some sunbathers.

The next day, Monday, the park had a different feel – fewer people on the benches and grass, some on work breaks and some perhaps not, Rizla papers and beer cans much in evidence. Litter had built up by Tuesday and I was not that impressed seeing someone urinating against a tree as I jogged past.

Use of London parks – the figures

So what are the figures on London park usage? How many people use them, and for what? Have visits to parks increased recently? I can find no statistics about visits to Ducketts Common itself from Haringey Council’s latest management report. However, a 2017 Yougov poll based on a survey of just over 1000 Londoners showed that 10% visit a park or green space every day, and 48% at least once a week. Only 9% never visit them.

More broadly, recent government figures show about 50% of people in England had visited urban parks, fields or playgrounds in the previous month, based on surveys of about 6000 people each quarter between April 2020-December 2023. This figure had remained stable since July 2020. (Strangely I could see no effect of lockdown on visits, though 4% fewer people visited between April and June 2020). According to these figures, urban green spaces were visited by about 20% more people than other natural spaces such as beaches, woodland and countryside.

What do people do in parks?

I couldn’t find any figures for what people do in parks, but according to these government figures by far the most popular activity in all green spaces (including other spaces such as beaches, mountains and rivers) was walking (including dog walking), with 71% of people surveyed saying they did this. Next most popular was wildlife watching (25%), followed by picnicking (14%) and playing with children (12%).

The personalities of parks

In my experience parks have varied characters, just like neighbourhoods. I’ve just visited Bushy Park near Hampton Court, which has wide tree-lined avenues, and abundant bracken which provides cover for the baby deer born each year. A far cry from Ducketts Common in size and landscape, but all part of what makes London a comparatively green city.

A red deer feeding in a river in Bushy Park

#69: Write Cut Rewrite exhibition

 

Write Cut Rewrite exhibition
Photo: Ian Wallman

‘Kill your darlings,’ enjoined Stephen King, advising writers to cut words which may have taken hours to develop. This exhibition of writers’ editing processes at the Bodleian’s Weston Library gives evidence of such murder through manuscripts, jottings and notebooks.

So what ‘darlings’ do we see here? Opening the exhibition is a twelfth century manuscript, The Ormulum, commenting on the Bible in early English. This is a literal cut and paste – one page trimmed to a third of its size, overlying another with almost every line heavily scored through. ‘For a notebook which is almost a thousand years old it looks surprisingly modern because it features so many crossed-out passages,’ says the label.

Yet why do crossed out passages look more modern than the finished product? Because they show a common human impulse to revise, with its hesitancy and changes of mind, in a way that the fixed final text does not? Doodles in Shelley’s notebook, displayed here, also seem strangely modern. Perhaps it is use of the pen rather than fixed type which makes them seem more human?

Also included are three wonderful sheets of witty lines kept in reserve by Raymond Chandler for his detective novels, ticked off in pencil after being used. Unused was ‘I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a struggle. She nearly won.’ I can imagine that in The Big Sleep. Another aide memoire is Philip Pullman’s list of Oxford colleges and the names he called them in his children’s books, e.g. All Souls becomes St Scholastica.

A list of witty lines kept by Raymond Chandler

Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks show poet’s Alice Oswald swirling coloured sketches which she then tries to translate into words. Le Carré‘s drafts are handwritten, then typed up, then the typescript is cut up again and stapled between further handwritten parts. Fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy can read a highly edited, handwritten opening in which Ricki Tarr tracks down fellow ex-spy Jim Prideaux to a school where he is teaching. But in the final book, they never meet. This is one ‘darling’ which was killed.

Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one A3 sized manuscript page with just one correction. Were his robust rhyming couplets a confident guide, so little revision was needed? One can also see him underlining words (which would be italicised in a modern addition), bringing out the oral qualities, like a musical score.

Pope's Essay on Criticism – left-hand page corrected, right hand page hardly at all

Pope's Essay on Criticism – left-hand page corrected, right hand page hardly at all

Electronic editing

And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? This is covered by a digital display with ‘Cuttings’, a poem by Fanny Choi, where one can track the electronic editing process – ‘every keystroke, every pause, every typo, every half-developed idea later abandoned’.

Before going to the exhibition I had wondered whether a museum, which must preserve objects and halt time, could convey any of the fluency or even urgency of the editing process. It turns out that it can.

Corrections to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

‘Write Cut Rewrite’ is at the Weston Library, Oxford, until 5 January 2025. 

#68: Proofreading

Auntie needs to up her proofreading game. The standard of English on the BBC Radio 4 website has deteriorated over the past few years. I recently counted these mistakes in the 250-word blurb for the You and Yours weekly consumer rights programme:

5 vocabulary

3 grammar

3 style

1 each spelling, syntax, punctuation

Mistakes included ‘stationary’ instead of ‘stationery’; ‘concerns of the subscription trap’ instead of ‘concerns about the subscription trap’ and this sentence:

Tourism tax, you may have come across it if your travelled abroad, but increasingly they are being used around the UK as well.

Syntax (what’s the object doing out on its own at the beginning of the sentence?); grammar: it should be ‘you’ve’ travelled’ not ‘your travelled’ abroad; and finally, ‘it’ not ‘they’ for an uncountable noun, ‘tourism tax’.

I would correct this sentence to:

You may have come across a tourism tax if you’ve travelled abroad, but increasingly you will find them around the UK as well.

Do such mistakes matter?

Even Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’, which demonstrated how indiscriminating use of language stops us thinking properly, didn’t think correct grammar and syntax mattered per se. A defence of the English language, he said, ‘… has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear’. In fact there is only one mistake in the You and Yours piece which impedes meaning (‘concerns of the subscription trap’ sounds like the trap has concerns, whereas ‘concerns about…’ means our concerns about it).

Yes they matter, because…

I think good grammar and vocabulary matter, and these are my reasons:

1. Good grammar and vocabulary aid precision. If you read ‘fall foul to the [subscription] trap’, as on the site, instead of the correct ‘fall foul of the trap’, you may understand the main meaning, that someone has been caught out, but be unsure whether the writer means something slightly different. (In addition, ‘fall foul of’ often means that someone has done something wrong – I would change this to ‘fall into this trap’.)

2. If you are distracted by inaccurate English when reading, it detracts from focusing on the sense.

3. Incorrect English undermines one’s professionalism and gives an impression of being poorly educated.

It is especially important for BBC. It is in their Royal Charter ‘to show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services’. Good grammar and vocabulary are part of such output, and enable creativity. In fact, the BBC itself has a (very good) service for teaching English and its own grammar guide. It’s not a good look if one’s own use of language is poor.

Does the BBC need a head of grammar?

The BBC has a department for pronunciation, but none for grammar and vocabulary. In 2007 the Queen’s English Society criticised BBC presenters’ grammar and recommended the corporation employ a full-time head of grammar (with ‘100 unpaid “monitors” working from home’! Why unpaid?). It is easier to correct written than spoken English and with today’s AI checkers (which of course themselves need to be checked) is faster than ever. Perhaps the BBC used AI, but forgot the human check?

My suggested corrections to the You and Yours piece are here.

#67: 'A Journey' by Tony Blair

 

Published by Hutchinson 2010

       Why read political memoirs?

I enjoy political memoirs. I find fascinating the inside story of a job I could never do, subject to astounding amounts of pressure, whose outside story I already know of through the media. I would group these memoirs into two – firstly diaries, like those of Alastair Campbell or Alan Clark. These are edited to be sure, but in Campbell’s case give some idea of the hothouse pressures under which decisions are made and policies developed and in Clark’s of what it’s like to be human and involved, with fluctuating enthusiasm, in Parliament’s politicking and procedure.

Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd 1993

Then there are more reflective memoirs written once out of power such as Denis Healey’s Time of My Life. These are more profound and often less party political, but do not convey with such immediacy what it’s like to be in at the precious moment when action can be taken. In my experience they are also more sanitised and tactful than diaries; less honest about the ruthlessness needed to reach the top or about the behind-the-scenes negotiations which never reach the headlines.

Published by Penguin 1990

Tony Blair’s memoir

A Journey by Tony Blair is in the latter category. I picked it up by chance and ended up reading it more or less cover to cover. The book gives, among other things, a clear explanation of the New Labour project, of the reasons for Blair taking the country into the Iraq war, and on the negotiations leading to the Good Friday agreement of 1998.

New Labour

First, the New Labour project. Blair states more than once he was a willing heir to Margaret Thatcher’s dismantling of state monopolies, her cutting of taxes and weakening of unions. But Thatcher, he says, did not realise that the playing field for individual achievement is not level:

Where she was wrong… was in… her refusal to countenance the fact that the majority of people were always going to have to rely on public services and the power of government to get the opportunities they needed.… She just went too far in thinking everything could be reduced to individual choice. She was in that sense a very traditional Tory, but with the added impatience, like my dad, with anyone who hadn't succeeded – she had, so why hadn't they?

So spreading opportunity was part of New Labour. So was increasing competition for public service contracts to get more value for money, for example by inviting private companies to do NHS work for the first time. Other measures such as giving schools independence as academies were meant to encourage freedom in fulfilling these contracts.

The Northern Ireland peace process

Blair gives a detailed explanation of the Northern Ireland negotiations in 1998 and afterwards, and a 10-point crystallisation of lessons learned. Point 2 particularly struck me:

… The thing needs to be gripped and focused on. Continually. Inexhaustibly. Relentlessly. Day by day by day by day. The biggest problem with the Middle East peace process is that no one has ever gripped long enough or firmly enough.

The Iraq war

As someone who stood in London’s Haymarket for three hours in 2003 in an anti-Iraq war protest, I was interested to read about the build-up, execution (the easiest, quickest part) and aftermath of the Iraq war. Although Blair remains convinced of the rightness of the course, his mental jury is still out on whether he would have gone ahead, knowing how plans for rebuilding were brutally wrecked by Al Qaeda and Iran-backed forces. He takes Western protesters to task for being against UK and US efforts to rebuild the country, rather than protesting about Al Qaeda and Iran-backed suicide bombers sent into markets and churches, and soldiers, police, NGOs and civilians ‘gunned down, blown up, kidnapped and killed’.

When was there a single protest in any Western nation about such evil?… And where were the Iraqis’ Muslim brothers and sisters at their hour of need?

One consequence is that the these terrorists’ influence spread not only to the Middle East and Africa, but to ‘our own streets, on our airways, in the meeting places of our own nations, each country now obliged to spend billions each year in protecting ourselves against terror.

The civil service…and the media

The book also contains some interesting reflections on the outdated nature of the civil service as Blair found it – more attuned to giving policy advice in the shape of long-gestated papers than on the project management and delivery needed now. Thus the need for nimble, experienced special advisors able to handle ‘the pace of modern politics and the intrusion of media scrutiny [which means]… that decisions have to be made, positions taken, strategies worked out and communicated with the speed that is the speed of light compared to the speed of sound.’

It also makes clear how difficult it is to work with a media which goes into frenzies about an MP’s affair or bogus expenses claims, at the expense of publicising government policies which will affect people’s day-to-day lives but offer much less juicy stories.

Doing not saying

Lastly, the book is good on how much harder it is to be in power than in opposition. In opposition your prerogative is to criticise, in power you have to actually make the difficult changes:

We were very quickly appreciating the daunting revelation of the gap between saying and doing. In Opposition, the gap is nothing because ‘saying’ is all you can do; in government, where ‘doing’ it’s what it’s all about, the gap is suddenly revealed as a chasm of bureaucracy, frustration and disappointment.

He also criticises the Liberal Democrats for not being up for this ‘doing’:

… the Lib Dems seemed to be happier as the ‘honest’ critics, prodding and probing and pushing, but unwilling to take on the mantle of responsibility for the hard choices and endure the rough passages.

Fourteen years later…

So how has the book fared in the 14 years since it was published? With a Labour landslide likely in the UK general election this year, perhaps even bigger than Blair’s in 1997, how does it compare with what the two main parties are offering, as I understand it?

I don’t detect any overall cohesive vision such as Blair describes from either of the main two parties – more a set of separate, piecemeal policies such as Sunak’s recent smoking ban. In fact, I’ve not detected such a vision in any election since 2005. For example, Cameron’s ‘common sense revolution’ of 2010, aimed at allowing police, teachers and doctors more scope to make their own decisions, was not as ambitious in trying to reform the actual structure of those organisations as Blair was. Nor was it set inside a vision of Britain’s continuing place in Europe and the world. (Perhaps the nearest to this was Boris Johnson’s vow to ‘get Brexit done’ which won him the 2019 election, which was connected with a vision of Britain in an international context).

Some issues loom larger as well. I will pick out a couple. Illegal immigration is even more visible, with the daily arrival of small boats across the Channel. Blair says asylum claims exploded from 30,000 per year to 100,000 per year in 1998 and 1999, most claims not being genuine, and the ‘broken’ processing system, still based on a post-war model, not able to cope. Numbers are similar now (just over 80,000 in 2022).

Secondly, despite the Blair government’s introduction of the minimum wage, today’s exploitative gig economy continues and I would guess is more widespread than in Blair’s time, due partly to globalisation and new technologies. Neither party has promised to fully implement the 2017 Taylor Report into modern working practices, although Labour has said it will strengthen self-employed workers’ rights, promising to ban or at least allow opt-out from zero hours contracts.

I’m not sure if political programmes always do need an all-encompassing vision. But in my view Britain, like all countries, does need a strong sense of identity which can unite a greater part of the population. In the introduction Blair says:

… the British people are, at their best, brave, determined and adventurous. But… we need a vision, a concept, a sense of our place in the world today and in future, as well as strong regard for our past.

I agree that it is part of the task of government to encourage such a vision and sense of place, not just through words but through actions. For anyone interested in how the Blair government tried to do this, this book is a very good starting point.

Published by Random House 2007

#66: Watching the detectives

 

On a list of my favourite luxuries, listening to detective stories would come pretty high. Intricate plotting, puzzling details which are all smoothed out at the end, broadbrush and bold characterisation — the flirt, the unhappy lover, the observant housemaid — and an action-centred story with little introspective agonising. And on top of that, characterful, endearing, quirky detectives. Here are my favourites.

My top six detectives

In no particular order:

Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey

1. Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers’s tweedy sleuth, as portrayed by Ian Carmichael in the BBC Radio 4 series. His dropped gs (havin’, goin’ to) and question tag ‘ain’t it?’ are an endearin' part of his upper-class speech. His faithful, stolid, literal-minded manservant Bunter provides the crucial assistance in untangling intricately plotted, usually rural, crimes.

2. Mma Ramotswe, proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, in Alexander McCall Smith’s series of novels. She initially employs a secretary, Mma Makutsi (proud recipient of 97% in the Botswana College of Secretarial and Office Skills), not because she has enough work (she doesn’t), but because no self-respecting detective can work without a secretary. Motivation for crimes runs deep and moral choices must be made by the two ladies. For example, should a client be told about his wife being adulterous with a richer man if spilling the beans would mean his son would be deprived of an expensive education?

John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot

3. ‘Hastings! Hastings! I have been blind!’ exclaims Hercule Poirot to his friend on finally seeing how the details fall into place. The vain Belgian who can solve everything with his ‘little grey cells’ is portrayed memorably by John Moffatt on BBC Radio 4 or of course by David Suchet in the TV series – the latter worth it for the costumes and lavish art deco clothes and interiors alone.

4. Sherlock Holmes. The prototype, with his solitary musings and slow, often clumsy sidekick Dr Watson, the proxy for the thick audience (us) as we need matters explained simply. My favourite story? 'The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist', for its plucky young woman who comes to Holmes because she wants to know why she is being stalked by a man on two wheels on her way to and from a job in an out-of-the-way spot. On examining the shape of her fingers, Holmes almost decides she is a typist, but then realises she is a musician because ‘there is a spirituality about the face… which the typewriter does not generate’.

5. V I Warshawski, in Sara Paretsky’s series. Radically left-wing Vic’s jobs usually involve uncovering murky doings by big business and defending the marginalised, such as victims of big pharma, or those who need to use her friend Lottie Herschel’s abortion clinic. Kathleen Turner and Sharon Gless portray her memorably on the BBC Radio 4 series.

The Penguin edition of The Big Sleep

6. Philip Marlowe. Wild behaviour and wild plots at the hard-bitten end of Los Angeles society where no one gives anything for free. The hard-drinking sleuth turns up in his car to poke innumerable hornets’ nests and see if the response will help him resolve matters for clients who are often themselves hiding things from him. Great sardonic lines, e.g. ‘my face was stiff with thought. Or something else my face was stiff with.’

What do they have in common?

Some curious common themes emerge:

- All but one (Mma Ramotswe) have relationships with local police, seeking help when they need to, keeping them at arms’ length if they can, sharing information when they must. Warshawski and Marlowe almost end up in prison themselves on various occasions.

 -All except Marlowe and Warshawski have dependable, though limited, assistants.

-Transport is important – cars feature heavily in stories about Marlowe and Warshawski. And let’s not forget Mma Ramotswe’s little white van, always on the verge of giving up, and the trains and horse-drawn carriages in the Conan Doyle stories. The detective must be able to travel easily and quickly to far-flung places and crime scenes.

-The detectives are all, apart from Mma Ramotswe and Lord Peter Wimsey perhaps, eccentric to various degrees. They could even be called outsiders, though they want to do good in society (why else solve crimes?) and are themselves regarded with various degrees of affection (though there’s not usually much love lost between Marlowe and the local police). Perhaps being an observer means being somewhat of an outsider.

-All except Wimsey (whose wife is crime novelist Harriet Vane – they have to solve a crime on their honeymoon) and Mme Ramotswe (married to the kindly mechanic Mr J. L. B. Maketoni) are single.

A critic speaks

Literary critic Walter Ong, in his charting of the movement from oral to literate societies, cited modern detective stories as the example par excellence of narrative in literate culture. Narrative in purely oral societies had necessarily been full of repetitions so the audience could keep on track, and was episodic rather than tightly plotted. But in a detective story ‘ascending action builds relentlessly to all but unbearable tension, the climactic recognition and reversal releases the tension with explosive suddenness, and the dénouement disentangles everything totally’. This thorough, intricate plotting is possible partly because the reader can notice intricate clues, turn the pages forward and backwards, check details, all of these impossible if one depends on listening to a story.

The joy of audio

Yet I often enjoy listening to, rather than reading, detective stories. I may not be able to keep abreast of all the clues, but enjoy the feeling of being swept along in a story which will come right in the end – the delight of observing a charismatic maestro or maestra who finds their way through a thicket of puzzling and contradictory detail. Mon ami! Let me tell you how it happened…

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