What’s the point of ‘TheArticle’?

I have now written 300 pieces for The Article. It has been a great privilege writing for Daniel Johnson, an outstanding editor, and to write for the same publication as so many distinguished writers, including Jeffrey Meyers, Philip Ball, Nigel Biggar, Robert Tombs and many, many more.

The best things about writing for The Article are that it allows you to address topical issues, to be read by so many thoughtful readers and to cover the full range of your interests. In my case, this includes the  increasingly parlous state of BBC News, especially its anti-Israel bias in recent years, to praise my favourite writers and artists from Alan Bennett and Paula Rego to Arthur Miller and Philip Roth. It also allows you to pay tribute to the recently dead, whether the great literary critic, George Steiner, the master of spy-writers, John Le Carré, broadcasters like Bryan Magee or the historian Norman Stone. It also allows you to praise underrated subjects such as the extraordinary photographic exhibition, Seeing Auschwitz, the great historian of medicine and madness, Roy Porter, and Israeli-noir (TV series like Fauda or Tehran) or to criticise overrated subjects like the BBC broadcaster and  panjandrum John Simpson or The Oscars.

Of course, we all have our tics and bugbears. Since 2019 I fear I must have tried your patience with my preoccupations with the BBC (from Question Time, Doctor Who and Lord Hall to Jed Mercurio, Russell T. Davies  and various presenters of  the Today programme), with Israel, antisemitism and American TV.

My defence would be that during my lifetime I have never known antisemitism on such a scale in Britain and certainly not such unrestrained hatred for Israel on our news media, especially the BBC annd Sky News. The failure of Ofcom and the people who run BBC News and indeed the BBC, to deal with this has been shaming.

As someone who  was fortunate to work for BBC2 during what proved to be  the end of its golden age, I am sorry to see how little coverage this has received. Soon repeats on BBC iPlayer may be the last thing worth watching.  When the BBC showed the disappointing second series of The Night Manager, someone at BBC iPlayer had the inspired idea of  repeating some of the greatest TV spy dramas ever shown by the BBC — the Le Carré series with Alec Guinness and Alan Bennett’s dramas about Burgess (An Englishman Abroad) and Blunt (A Question of  Attribution), all masterpieces.

Finally, back to the subject of the underrated. This has been an extraordinary time for the discovery of modern central and east European writers such as Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Bruno Schulz and Antal Szerb (all born in the old Habsburg empire), Aharon Appelfeld, Norman Manea and Mihail Sebastian (all born in Romania), and the great Soviet Ukrainian writers, Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman and the poet Lev Ozerov. Our thanks  to translators such as Michael Hofmann, Madeline Levine and Stanley Bill, to Robert and  Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, should be boundless. Small publishers such as Pushkin Press and New York Review of Books (NYRB) have redrawn the map of modern European literature, shifting its focus from London and Paris to Odessa, Berdichev and the rest of the Jewish world of what is now Ukraine. It is no coincidence that this has happened at the same time as European historians such as Norman Davies, Mark Mazower and Timothy Snyder have discovered the “Bloodlands” between Warsaw and the Baltic Republics and Ukraine. In the Preface to  his masterpiece,  Bloodlands: European Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder wrote, “In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. During the consolidation of National  Socialism and Stalinism (1933-1938), the joint German-Soviet occupation of Poland (1939-1941), and then the  German—Soviet war (1941-1945), mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon the region…Yet not a single one of the fourteen million murdered was a soldier on active duty.”

We often complain about Brexit and rightly talk of the rise of antisemitism, yet many of us read more great east European and Soviet Jewish literature and original new history books about the world east of Berlin. These paradoxes tell us a lot about the times we live in. It so happens that Daniel Johnson, the Editor of TheArticle, is someone very much at home with such contradictions, someone I suppose who was a supporter of Brexit but who is definitely soaked in European culture and history. This is perhaps yet another  reason why after 300 pieces, I am so happy to write for TheArticle.

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