The Face of Britain accompanies Simon Schama’s BBC Television series on British portraits, and the form of the book keeps very closely to the form of the broadcasts. There are examinations of single faces, in single lives, ranging from the earliest days when real faces were studied and represented, to photographs of life in Notting Hill in the 1960s and 1970s taken by the Jamaican-born Charlie Phillips. The studies are roughly but not narrowly chronological, and are arranged thematically in groups – “The Face of Power”, “The Face of Love”, “The Face of Fame”, “The Face in the Mirror”, “Faces of the People”. Most of the studies concentrate on one face, one person – the historical and psychological moment, the relation between artist and subject.

Schama begins with a meditation on faces and how we scan them. Like him, I knew my children were searching to see my face from the moment of birth, even though theory then said this was not possible. Eyes, he says, are the part of our body that does not change size. How do we recognise individuals in their portraits? How do we know what Francis Bacon or Thomas Gainsborough saw when they made their works – or Samuel Palmer, or Gwen John?

Schama’s first example is the painting that Graham Sutherland made of Winston Churchill in 1954. He writes succinctly and splendidly about the historical moment, Churchill’s expectations, Sutherland’s lack of prior thought about painting history. Churchill and his wife disliked the work intensely and it was covertly destroyed. Schama shows us a transparency that survived – and remarks that it “is enough to make it painfully clear what was lost in the fires of Lady Churchill’s sorrow and anger”. He knows the history, the biography, and the art history, and connects them subtly.

The succession of finite broadcasts, one after the other, turns out to be a wonderful form to read. We meet the individuals, painters and painted, in their own worlds, as we would in an art gallery, before moving on to the next – and yet the juxtapositions change the individuals.

“The Face of Power” shows us the iconic images of Charles I by van Dyck and others, as well as Cromwell in a marvellous miniature by Samuel Cooper, warts and all; Schama comments on the painterly brilliance of the warts: “so lovingly rendered that they cast their own individual shadows, from the pimply one at the crease of the brow to the majestic King Wart beneath his lower lip, incompletely concealed by a small beard”. This section also contains the family faces of power – the ambivalent domesticity of Victoria and Albert, the aristocrats of the 18th-century Kit-Cat Club – and also James Gillray’s ferocious mockery of royalty and politicians: Pitt as a toadstool on a dunghill, or as Death in a lethal parody of Milton. Yet the image that sticks most in the memory is Gillray’s image of himself, drawn as “the dimness closed in” and titled Pray Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Blind Man. He is grey, with closed eyes and few teeth, begging; and this sadly decrepit figure is scribbled over with shadows and spidery blots in fine black lines, unfinished faces and figures.

Towards the end of “The Face of Love” Schama juxtaposes two studies of obsession – Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s repeated paintings of William Morris’s wife, Jane, or Janey. It is interesting that I, too, keep these images side by side in my mind. My primary emotion about them is a ferocious embarrassment.

Carroll’s photographs of prepubescent girls were part of a cult in the early days of photography. They represented innocence. He had to proceed with caution in asking for permission – above all for photographs of naked nymphets in their purity and truth. Alice Liddell lived her life as the girl to whom the Wonderland was told. Reading little girls like me admired the written Alice, for her brave and intelligent independence, whatever mad thing came her way. Yet what we see here of the real Alice is not loveable.

Schama juxtaposes three images of Alice Liddell. One in carefully arranged tatters, a little girl holding out a begging hand, both quizzical and sad. It is hard to like her and hard not to feel she is being used. Then there is the photograph Carroll took of Alice when she was 18 – an image to which I return again and again. She is a young woman with her hair up, sitting in a leather-covered chair, in a pretty dress, and corseted. Her head is turned aside. She is looking down. Her mouth is sulky – or something stronger than sulky. Her body is embarrassed in an angry way. What was the Reverend Charles Dodgson thinking?

And then Schama prints a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron from 1872 of Alice as Pomona: looking ahead, still with the corners of her mouth downturned. Schama argues that Cameron’s strong woman, long-haired and inviolate, is both a deliberate reference to Dodgson’s poses and an assertion of female independence.

There is something terrible about Rossetti’s renderings of Janey Morris’s louring beauty. Schama prints a photograph of her at Morris’s ideal country home – Kelmscott, from which Morris generously went away, in order to leave Rossetti and Janey together. Janey is brandishing willow boughs, part of the language of Morris’s life and work. She is unforgettable, threatening and a captive. I was amazed to find that L S Lowry of all people collected paintings of Janey – because he found her terrifying. I try to imagine how Morris felt, at home with these images by his wife’s lover on his wall. Janey, like Alice Liddell, is being used by her artist-lover.

“The Face in the Mirror” deals with self-portraits, and particularly the rendering of women, and women’s bodies, by women. Schama interweaves the stories of two great artists – Laura Knight (1877-1970) and Gwen John (1876-1939). How does a woman present herself, in a world where nudes have been desirable or repellent; objects, not subjects? There is a wonderful discussion of Knight’s self-portrait of 1913, which Schama says is a masterpiece. In it, she is standing in the foreground, seen from behind, in businesslike clothes, a scarlet working jacket and “her favourite high-crowned black fedora”. She is painting a female nude from the back, whom we see on a raised stage and on canvas – an intricate form, rendered exactly. The impression of work being done, the relation between the women, is complicated yet simple. Schama’s background descriptions of other standing naked women with clothed companions is masterly. He made me look and learn.

I know of Gwen John, I thought – I look at her paintings whenever I can, and have always been happy that her then more famous brother Augustus insisted she was a better painter than he was. Like Knight, she painted herself clothed with a naked model. Schama shows two self-portraits, one from 1902, calm in a red blouse with a cameo at her neck (the only painting she signed) and the other, a few years later, in a brown shirt, holding a letter. Schama recounts her wild and desperate affair with Rodin in heart-rending detail; it changed her from poised New Woman to maniacal letter-writer and obsessive sex object: “My master. I am not an artist. I am a model and I want to remain your model for ever.” Later she went back to drawing and painting: nude women, a series of nude self-portraits, “executed with a kind of wistful tentativeness, images that seem to stir and move a little in the empty white space as if blown by a draught coming through the window”.

As he does throughout The Face of Britain, Schama deepens our understanding and excites our interest – the two women illuminate not only each other but also the work of Tracey Emin and Yoko Ono. He is a great storyteller and we learn something new on every page.

A S Byatt’s most recent book is “Ragnarok: the End of the Gods” (Canongate)

Simon Schama appears at the Cambridge Literary Festival, in association with the New Statesman, on 29 November

The Face of Britain: the Nation Through its Portraits by Simon Schama is published by Viking (£30, 603pp)

Every time you think politics is getting a bit OTT and people are complaining a little loudly about the disputed waters in Gibraltar, something else is reported. Right now it’s Spanish police ramming fishermen, according to the Daily Mirror, which has video evidence. UKIP MEPs have raised the Gibraltar flag in the European Parliament, reports the Olive Press, no doubt in a bid to calm things down a bit. Philip Hammond used his speech at the Conservative Party conference to assure Gibraltarians and Falklanders that they still had the support of the UK.

Business, and the Gibraltar Chronicle reports the establishment of a new salvage business in the area – well, new to Gibraltar but well established elsewhere. There’s also a new initiative en route with the Israeli Chamber of Commerce – more on that on our hub on Tuesday.

Oh, and the team is still losing at football. It could be worse, they could be the home rugby team in England, hosting a tournament in which they’re no longer taking part…

The Program is a film in search of a hero. It never really finds one. On one hand it has the crusading journalist David Walsh, played by Chris O’Dowd, who risks the derision of his colleagues and the scorn of the cycling industry to expose Lance Armstrong as a drugs cheat. On the other, it has Armstrong himself (Ben Foster), propelling himself to multiple Tour de France victories and into the hearts of his countrymen by foul means, not fair. It feels hard to root for Walsh: he’s on the side of truth, but he never comes to life as a character, and the movie hits a slump whenever we’re back in the newsroom with him. Then again, we know we shouldn’t get behind the cyclist. But if the film is conflicted over whose story it’s telling, there is at least one element about which there can be no argument: Ben Foster’s resemblance to Armstrong.

It is not a prerequisite that an actor playing a real figure must be able to swap places with them unnoticed in an identity parade, but Foster could certainly pass that test if it were. Both men have their features crammed into the centre of their faces, lending them a concentrated intensity. And Foster has captured the intentness of Armstrong’s expressions – that taut downward curve in the mouth that looks like an exaggerated frown as drawn by a child.

For the biopic performer, there are several options when it comes to physical accuracy. There is the simple, almost effortless mimicry – a classic example being Ben Kingsley in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. (There have been occasions on which newspapers have printed pictures of Kingsley to accompany a story about the real Gandhi. Let’s blame that on the actor’s persuasive ability to inhabit the part, rather than any laziness in the media.)

Where there is no overwhelming natural similarity, this can be helped along by a recognisable accoutrement or physical characteristic. I wouldn’t swear that Robert Downey Jnr was the spit of Charlie Chaplin (in another Attenborough film, Chaplin).

Or that you couldn’t tell Salma Hayek from Frida Kahlo (in Frida) but it certainly helped that the former had that universally familiar toothbrush-moustache to trick our eyes, and the latter sported a convincing unibrow.

Even once the physical side is in the bag, there is the matter of poise and demeanour to consider. Did Helen Mirren look like Elizabeth II in The Queen (another Frears) or on stage in The Audience? Not especially. But then the bit that isn’t covered by hair, make-up, wardrobe and physiognomy is called “acting”. It should, if all goes according to plan, render cosmetic objections irrelevant. Look at Gary Oldman with the black porcupine spikes and milky-white pallor of Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy. We can see that’s a fancy-dress Sid. But Oldman’s self-belief pushes him, and us, over the line. We buy it. His Joe Orton (Frears yet again: Prick Up Your Ears) is even better, perhaps because he shares with the playwright a natural knowingness that lights them both up from within.

My own favourite sorts of biopic actors are those that succeed through sheer force of will. They don’t look like the people they’re playing, and only the most cursory attempts have been made to convince us they do, but their own internal conviction overrides any complaint. Anthony Hopkins did a fine job of playing the lead in Surviving Picasso but I prefer him in two movies where he had to take more of a running jump: Nixon in Nixon and Hitchcock in Hitchcock. No one ever said about Richard Nixon and Anthony Hopkins: “Isn’t it funny how you never see them in the same room?” But there was something in the slightly delusional casting that made sense in a film about Nixon – never a man, after all, to face the truth when he thought a bald lie would do the job just as well. And by the end of Oliver Stone’s impressively controlled movie, Hopkins had done it. He had strong-armed the audience and bent the whole endeavour to his will. The same was true in Hitchcock: he expanded into a part as though it were an oversized suit he was convinced he could fill. It was a confidence trick. Doesn’t that go for most acting?

It doesn’t always work. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote? The physical disparity is so great (compare it to Toby Jones, far better-suited to the role, in Infamous, which opened around the same time) that it seems to make the effort visible. Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s Milk? Just about. The bubbly enthusiasm of the performance is very winning, just as Milk himself was; it’s a charm offensive, a campaign. Like Hopkins as Nixon, it suits the part. Denzel Washington as Malcolm X in the Spike Lee film of the same name? Yes: he has the looks and the charisma. Josh Brolin as George W Bush in (Stone again) W? Remarkably, yes, even though he’s too bulky. His physicality is reduced magically by the character’s small-mindedness and inexperience. Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland is good but he’s too actorly and not terrifying enough – unlike Yaphet Kotto in the same role in Raid on Entebbe.

Awards season is upon us, so there will be more games of compare-and-contrast: Johnny Depp as the criminal James “Whitey” Bulger in Black Mass, Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs. Don’t talk to me about Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Phillipe Petit in The Walk. Good film but why have they tinkered digitally with the actor’s imploring eyes? He looks like a motion-capture version of himself at times. But no one can seize the Complete Lack of Physical Resemblance prize from Benedict Cumberbatch, who seems not to even believe in himself as Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate.

Though with his elfin eyes and silver mane, Cumberbatch is a shoo-in if they ever make Legolas: The Later Years.

“The Program” is released 16 October.

The "like" button is perhaps the simplest of the website's features, but it's also come to define it. Companies vie for your thumbs up. Articles online contain little blue portals which send your likes back to Facebook. The action of "liking" something is seen to have such power that in 2010, a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook claiming teenagers should not be able to "like" ads without parental consent. 

And today, Facebook begins trials of six new emoji reaction buttons which join the like button at the bottom of posts, multiplying its potential meanings by seven: 

All this makes it a little surprising that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent a good portion of the noughties giving the like button a thumbs down. According to Andrew Bosworth, Vice President of Advertising and Pages at Facebook (and known simply as "Boz") it took nearly two years to get the concept of an approval button for posts off the ground.

In a fascinating Quora thread, Boz explains that the idea of a star, plus sign or thumbs up for posts first came up in July 2007, three years after "TheFacebook" launched in 2004. Throughout these initial discussions, the proposed bursts of positivity was referred to as an "awesome button". A few months later someone floated the word "like" as a replacement, but, according to Boz, it received a "lukewarm" reception. 

The team who ran the site's News Feed feature were keen, as it would help rank posts based on popularity. The ad team, meanwhile, thought "likes" could improve clickthrough rates on advertisements. But in November 2007, the engineering team presented the new feature to Mark Zuckerberg, and, according to Boz, the final review "[didn't] go well". The CEO was concerned about overshadowing the Facebook "share" and comment features - perhaps people would just "awesome" something, rather than re-posting the content or writing a message. He also wanted more clarification on whether others would see your feedback or not. After this meeting, Boz writes, "Feature development as originally envisioned basically stops". 

The teams who wanted the button forged ahead with slightly different features. If you were an early user, you might remember that News Feed items and ads collected positive or negative feedback from you, but this wasn't then displayed to other users. This feature was "ineffective", Boz writes, and was eventually shut down. 

So when Jonathan Piles, Jaren Morgenstern and designer Soleio took on the like button again in December 2008, many were skeptical: this was a "cursed project", and would never make it past a sceptical Zuckerberg. Their secret weapon, however was data scientist Itamar Rosenn, who provided data to show that a like button wouldn't reduce the number of comments on a post. - that, in fact, it increased the number of comments, as likes would boost a popular post up through the News Feed. Zuckerberg's fears that a lower-impact feedback style would discourage higher value interactions like reposting or commenting were shown to be unfounded. 

A bigger problem was that FriendFeed, a social aggregator site which shut down in April 2015, launched a "like" feature in October 2007, a fact which yielded some uncomfortable media coverage when Facebook's "like" finally launched. Yet Boz claims that no one at Facebook clocked onto FriendFeed's new feature: "As far as I can tell from my email archives, nobody at FB noticed. =/". 

Finally, on 9 February 2009, "like" launched with a blogpost, "I like this", from project manager Leah Pearlman who was there for the first "awesome button" discussions back in 2007. Her description of the button's purpose is a little curious, because it frames the feature as a kind of review: 

This is similar to how you might rate a restaurant on a reviews site. If you go to the restaurant and have a great time, you may want to rate it 5 stars. But if you had a particularly delicious dish there and want to rave about it, you can write a review detailing what you liked about the restaurant. We think of the new "Like" feature to be the stars, and the comments to be the review.

Yet as we all know, there's no room for negative reviews on Facebook - there is no dislike button, and there likely never will be. Even in the preliminary announcements about the new emoji reactions feature, Zuckerberg has repeatedly made clear that "dislike" is not a Facebook-worthy emotion: "We didn’t want to just build a Dislike button because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. That doesn’t seem like the kind of community we want to create."

Thanks to the new buttons, you can be angry, excited, or in love with other people's content, but the one thing you can't do is disapprove of its existence. Championing positivity is all well and good, but Zuckerberg's love of the "like" has more to do with his users' psychology than it does a desire to make the world a happier place. Negative feedback drives users away, and thumbs-down discourages posting. A "dislike" button could slow the never-ending stream of News Feed content down to a trickle - and that, after all, is Facebook's worst nightmare. 

The Midlands: this “formless” place is where much of Labour’s fate lies. The party witnessed some of its most disappointing 2015 results here. In those early, depressing hours of 8 May, Nuneaton was the result that rang the death knell of Labour’s election chances. Burton, Cannock Chase, Halesowen & Rowley Regis, Redditch and Telford weren’t far behind. To win here Labour need to build a grassroots movement that engages swing voters.

Luckily, this is also a place with which Labour’s new leader has a natural affinity. The bellwether seat of Nuneaton is where Jeremy Corbyn chose to hold his last regional rally of the leadership contest; just a couple of counties over you’ll find the home Corbyn moved to in Shropshire when he was seven. He cut his political teeth round the corner in marginal constituency The Wrekin; it was in this key seat he did his first stint of campaigning. Flanked by a deputy leader, Tom Watson, who represents Labour stronghold West Bromwich East, Corbyn has his eye on the Midlands.

As MP for Islington North since 1983, Labour’s leader has earned London-centric credentials that have long since overshadowed his upbringing. But Corbynism isn’t a phenomenon confined to the capital. The enthusiasm that spilled out of Corbyn’s summer leadership rallies across the country has continued into the autumn months; Labour’s membership is now over 370,000. It’s fast catching up with 1997 figures, which are the highest in the party’s recent history.

London is the biggest beneficiary of this new movement - with 20 per cent of Labour’s members and 19 per cent of new members who signed up the week before conference coming from the capital. But Corbynism is flourishing elsewhere. 11 per cent of all Labour party members now reside in the southeast. In that same pre-conference week 14 per cent of new members came from this mostly Tory blue area of the country. And since last year, membership in the southwest increased by 124 per cent. Not all, but a good deal of this, is down to Corbyn’s brand of anti-austerity politics.

A dramatic rise in membership, with a decent regional spread, is nothing to be sneered at; people are what you need to create an election-winning grassroots movement. But, as May proved, having more members than your opposition doesn’t guarantee victory. Corbyn has spoken to many who’d lost faith in the political system but more people need to be won over to his cause.  

This is clear in the Midlands, where the party’s challenges are big. Labour’s membership is swelling here too, but to a lesser degree than elsewhere. 32 per cent of party members now and 13 per cent of those who joined up in seven days preceding conference hail from this part of the country.

But not all potential Labour voters will become card-carrying members. Corbyn needs to speak to swing voters. These people have no party colours and over the summer they had mixed views on Corbynism. In Nuneaton, Newsnight found a former Labour turned Ukip voter who thought Corbyn would take Labour “backwards” and put the economy at risk. But a fellow Ukip voter said he saw Corbyn as “fresh blood”.

These are enduring splits countrywide. Voters in key London marginal Croydon Central gave a mixed verdict on Corbyn’s conference speech. They thought he was genuine but were worried about his economic credibility. While they have significant doubts, swing voters are still figuring out who Labour’s new leader is.

This is where the grassroots movement comes into play. Part of the challenge is to get out there and explain to these people exactly who the party is, what it’s going to offer them and how it’s going to empower them to make change. 

Labour have nascent plans to make this reality in the Midlands. Tom Watson advocated bringing back to life this former industrial heartland by making it a base for manufacturing once again – hopefully based on modern skills and technologies.  He’s also said the leadership team will make regular regional visits to key seats. Watson’s words chime with plans floated by shadow minister Jon Trickett: to engage people with citizens’ assemblies where they have a say over Labour politics.

But meetings alone don’t make grassroots movements. Alongside the economy, regional identity is a decisive issue in this – and other – area(s) of the country. With the influx in money brought in by new members, Labour should harness peoples’ desire for belonging, get into communities and fill the gaps the Government are leaving empty. While they’re doing this, they could spread the word of a proper plan for devolution, harking back to the days of municipal socialism, so people know they’ll have power over their own communities under Labour.

This has to start now, and there’s no reason why the Midlands can’t act as a model. Labour can engage with swing voters by getting down to a community level and start showing – and not just saying –  how the party can make a difference. 

Today I will welcome Denis Baupin, Vice President of the French Assembly, to Hinkley.

His own choice to come and visit the site of the proposed new nuclear power station reflects his strong desire to prevent the UK disappearing up a dangerous dark alley in terms of energy policy. It also takes place as France takes a totally different path, with the French government recently adopting a law which will reduce nuclear energy in the country.

Greens have opposed Hinkley ever since the government announced its nuclear strategy. Hinkley, with its state aid and an agreed strike price of £92.50 per megawatt, has always been financially and legally suspect but it is now reaching the level of farce. So much so that George Osborne is required to be economical with the truth in front of a House of Lords committee because he cannot find anything honest to say about why this is a good deal for the British people.

Mr Baupin and I will join hundreds of protestors – and a white elephant – to stand in solidarity against this terrible project. The demonstration is taking place under a banner of the triple risks of Hinkley. 

First, there are the safety and technological risks. It is clear that the Pressurised Water nuclear reactor (EPR) – the design proposed for Hinkley C – simply does not work. France’s nuclear safety watchdog has found multiple malfunctioning valves that could cause meltdown, in a similar scenario to the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the US.  The steel reactor vessel, which houses the plant’s nuclear fuel and confines its radioactivity, was also found to have serious anomalies that increase the risk of it cracking. Apart from the obvious safety risks, the problems experienced by the EPR reactors being built at Flammanvile in France and Olkiluoto in Finland have pushed the projects years behind schedule.

Secondly, Hinkley poses risks to our energy security. Hinkley is supposed to produce 7% of the UK's energy. But we now know there will be no electricity from the new nuclear plant until at least 2023. This makes power blackouts over the next decade increasingly likely and the only way to avoid them is to rapidly invest in renewable energy, particularly onshore wind. Earlier this week Bloomberg produced a report showing that onshore wind is now the cheapest way to generate electricity in both the UK and Germany. But instead of supporting onshore wind this government is undermining it by attacking subsidies to renewables and destroying jobs in the sector. 

Thirdly, there is the risk of Chinese finance. In a globalised world we are expected to consider the option of allowing foreign companies and governments to control our essential infrastructure. But it is clear that in bequeathing our infrastructure we lose the political control that strengthens our security. The Chinese companies who will be part of the deal are part owned by the Chinese government and therefore controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. What a toppy-turvy world globalisation has created, where our Conservative British government is inviting the Chinese Communist party to control our energy infrastructure. It also seems that China National Nuclear Company is responsible for the manufacture of Chinese nuclear weapons.

Of course it is the Chinese people who suffer most, being at the hands of an oppressive government and uncontrolled companies which show little respect for employment rights or environmental standards. By offering money to such companies from British consumers through their energy bills our government is forcing us to collude in the low human rights and environmental standards seen in China.  

Research I commissioned earlier this year concluded we can transform the South West, not with nuclear, but with renewables. We can generate 100 per cent of our energy needs from renewables within the next 20-30 years and create 122,000 new quality jobs and boost the regional economy by over £4bn a year.

The white elephant of Hinkley looks increasingly shaky on its feet. Only the government’s deeply risky ideological crusade against renewables and in favour of nuclear keeps it standing. It’s time for it to fall and for communities in the South West to create in its place a renewable energy revolution, which will lead to our own Western Powerhouse. 

Making it easier for people to own their own first home is something to be celebrated. Most families would love to have the financial stability and permanency of home ownership. But the plans announced today to build 200,000 ‘starter homes’ are too little, too late.

The dire housing situation of our Greater London constituency of Mitcham & Morden is an indicator of the crisis across the country. In our area, house prices have increased by a staggering 42 per cent over the last three years alone, while the cost of private rent has increased by 22 per cent. Meanwhile, over 8200 residents are on the housing register, families on low incomes bidding for the small number of affordable housing in the area. In sum, these issues are making our area increasingly unaffordable for buyers, private renters and those in need of social and council housing.

But under these new plans, which sweep away planning rules that require property developers to build affordable homes for rent in order to increase the building homes for first-time buyers, a game of political smoke and mirrors is being conducted. Both renters and first-time buyers are desperately in need of government help, and a policy that pits the two against one another is robbing Peter to pay Paul. We need homes both to rent and to buy.

The fact is, removing the compulsion to provide properties for affordable rent will be disastrous for the many who cannot afford to buy. Presently, over half of the UK’s affordable homes are now built as part of private sector housing developments. Now this is going to be rolled back, and local government funds are increasingly being cut while housing associations are losing incentives to build, we have to ask ourselves, who will build the affordable properties we need to rent?

On top of this, these new houses are anything but ‘affordable’. The starter homes would be sold at a discount of 20 per cent, which is not insignificant. However, the policy is a non-starter for families on typical wages across most of the country, not just in London where the situation is even worse. Analysis by Shelter has demonstrated that families working for average local earnings will be priced out of these ‘affordable’ properties in 58 per cent of local authorities by 2020. On top of this, families earning George Osborne’s new ‘National Living Wage’ will still be priced out of 98 per cent of the country.

So who is this scheme for? Clearly not typical earners. A couple in London will need to earn £76,957 in London and £50,266 in the rest of the country to benefit from this new policy, indicating that ‘starter homes’ are for the benefit of wealthy, young professionals only.

Meanwhile, the home-owning prospects of working families on middle and low incomes will be squeezed further as the ‘Starter Homes’ discounts are funded by eliminating the affordable housing obligations of private property developers, who are presently generating homes for social housing tenants and shared ownership. These more affordable rental properties will now be replaced in essence with properties that most people will never be able to afford. It is great to help high earners own their own first homes, but it is not acceptable to do so at the expense of the prospects of middle and low earners.

We desperately want to see more first-time home owners, so that working people can work towards something solid and as financially stable as possible, rather than being at the mercy of private landlords.

But this policy should be a welcome addition to the existing range of affordable housing, rather than seeking to replace them.

As the New Statesman has already noted, the announcement is bad policy, but great politics for the Conservatives. Cameron sounds as if he is radically redressing housing crisis, while actually only really making the crisis better for high earners and large property developers who will ultimately be making a larger profit.

The Conservatives are also redefining what the priorities of “affordable housing” are, for obviously political reasons, as they are convinced that homeowners are more likely to vote for them - and that renters are not. In total, we believe this is indicative of crude political manoeuvring, meaning ordinary, working people lose out, again and again.

Labour needs to be careful in its criticism of the plans. We must absolutely fight the flawed logic of a policy that strengthens the situation of those lucky enough to already have the upper hand, at the literal expense of everyone else. But we need to do so while demonstrating that we understand and intrinsically share the universal aspiration of home security and permanency.

We need to fight for our own alternative that will broaden housing aspirations, rather than limit them, and demonstrate in Labour councils nationwide how we will fight for them. We can do this by fighting for shared ownership, ‘flexi-rent’ products, and rent-to-buy models that will make home ownership a reality for people on average incomes, alongside those earning most.

For instance, Merton council have worked in partnership with the Y:Cube development, which has just completed thirty-six factory-built, pre-fabricated, affordable apartments. The development was relatively low cost, constructed off-site, and the apartments are rented out at 65 per cent of the area’s market rent, while also being compact and energy efficient, with low maintenance costs for the tenant. Excellent developments like this also offer a real social investment for investors, while providing a solid return too: in short, profitability with a strong social conscience, fulfilling the housing needs of young renters.

First-time ownership is rapidly becoming a luxury that fewer and fewer of us will ever afford. But all hard-working people deserve a shot at it, something that the new Conservative government struggle to understand. 

It is a fitting that in a tumultuous year for global peacemaking, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the little-known Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, a coalition made up of the union federation UGTT, the employers’ institute, the Tunisian human rights league and the order of lawyers . Over the past few years, the Quartet has been quietly shepherded in democracy to the country that lit the fuse of the Arab Spring. In part thanks to the efforts of this broad cross-section of civil society, Tunisia has stayed the course in transitioning from an authoritarian past to a democratic future, even in the face of terrorist violence and as other revolutions in the region have faltered.

The award comes at a time of escalating sectarian conflicts in Syria, Libya and Yemen. Islamic State’s campaign of terror has uprooted Iraqis and Syrians alike, driving desperate refugees into small boats to battle the waves of the Mediterranean. They join others fleeing to Europe from political and economic crises in Africa and Asia, forming a stream of humanity symbolising failures in leadership in three continents.

Among all this, it is not hard to identify why the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the world’s most coveted peace prize to the Tunisian Quartet.

First,Tunisia deserves to be celebrated for its momentous achievements in consolidating democracy. Unlike other countries in the region, it has trodden a path that is slow but solid, adopting a comprehensive and consensus-building approach to decision-making.

In this it provides a rare and extremely important example, not only for the region but also for the world. Thanks to Tunisia, it is no longer possible to argue that the Middle East and North Africa are inherently undemocratic or prone to violence.

Civil society steps up

Second, the role of civil society is fundamental for bringing about sustainable peace. Political leadership is important, but the scale of the challenge in transitional societies means that we cannot simply leave things to political leaders to sort out.

At local level especially, peace feels a lot more real when it comes with tangible improvements to quality of life. Citizens want to see the economy motoring again and to have confidence in the state’s institutions. They want to know that they can sleep soundly and safely, without fear of violence, persecution or poverty. Governments often lack the capacity and credibility to deliver these dividends alone. Civil society must step up to the plate – particularly the associations of trade, justice and human rights of which the Quartet is formed.

And third, the Quartet’s work relies heavily on forming constructive relationships across the political spectrum – from secularists to fundamentalists. It has walked a fine line, keeping disparate groups with diverging interests invested in an inclusive national process of dialogue. It has, in the words of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, laid the “groundwork for a national fraternity”.

Politicians are often the most cynical of creatures, yet the Quartet has managed to build a sense of collective endeavour among them. It has encouraged them to put the country’s best interest ahead of personal or sectarian interests, making this the guiding principle for decision-making.

Other bright spots

The transition in Tunisia is a work in progress and there will be more setbacks and successes. The country was left reeling from two terrorist attacks earlier this year, when 22 people were killed at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and another 39 people died during an attack on a tourist resort in Sousse. But the message today is clear – Tunisia has made remarkable progress since 2010, despite the odds. This is in large part due to a credible and engaged civil society, a remarkable achievement in a new democracy. The country has forged a path of inclusive national dialogue from which many lessons can be learned.

Elsewhere this year, Myanmar goes to the polls in November – the country’s first free national ballot since 1990. Colombia is closer to lasting peace than ever, ending half a century of war that has taken 220,00 lives and uprooted six million people.

The US restored diplomatic relationships with Cuba, and also struck a landmark agreement with Iran over its nuclear programmes. And the UN has adopted the sustainable development goals, explicitly recognising peaceful and inclusive societies as a development priority for the first time. Behind every step forward there is an individual or institution worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, but only one can win and the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet is a worthy laureate.

Laura Payne is a Research Fellow and Director of RISING Global Peace Forum, Coventry University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Eight years ago Rupert Goold’s Macbeth made his name. The critics were unanimous in their praise, with one calling it the “Macbeth of a lifetime”. Goold’s first Olivier Award soon followed (Enron won him a second in 2009, King Charles III nearly won him a third last year). It was a family triumph; Lady Macbeth was played by Goold’s wife, Kate Fleetwood.

Now the pair has finally reunited and Fleetwood is his undisputed lead. She is playing Medea in the Almeida’s latest and final play of its Greek season. Directing your wife is one thing. Directing her in a play about a woman who murders her children because her husband abandons her is another. And it’s been harder than Goold expected.

“You live with someone every day, and they don’t age because the change is so incremental, and then you do something together and you realise how much you’ve changed. It’s like playing tennis with someone after eight years: you’re completely different players.”

As it is, Goold thinks the director-actor relationship is inevitably fraught. “There is an essential slave-master, sadomasochistic, relationship,” he says. “The incredibly complicated thing about being an actor is you’re constantly being told what to do. And one of the most damaging things about being a director – and why most of them are complete arseholes – is because they get off at telling people what to do.”

Goold doesn’t. He’s as amicable in person as the pictures – bountiful hair, loose jacket, wide grin – suggest. And when we meet in the Almedia’s crowded rehearsal rooms, tucked away on Upper Street, 100 yards from the theatre, he’s surprisingly serene given his play is about to open.

He once said that directing a play is like running towards a wall and hoping it becomes a door just before the curtain goes up. Has the door appeared? “It’s always a funny moment [at the end of rehearsal]. Sometimes you do a show and it’s a bit dead and the costumes and set transform it. Then sometimes it’s perfect and the design kills it.”

We meet shortly before last Thursday’s press night, and he can’t tell how good it is. But it “certainly feels quite private. The idea that loads of people are going to come and watch it now feels a bit weird. You bring a lot of your sense of relationships and parenting into it.”

Goold has always argued that the classics wither without intervention. So in this revival of Euripides’ 2,446-year-old play, Medea is a writer and her husband, Jason (of Argonauts fame), is an actor. “But it’s not really about that… it’s more about divorce, about what it means to separate.”

“It’s about the impact of a long-term relationship when it collapses. I don’t know whether there is a rich tradition of drama like that, and yet for most people, those kind of separations are far more profound and complicated and have greater ramifications than first love; and we have millions of plays about first love!”

Every generation discovers their own time in the Greek plays. Goold thinks he and playwright Rachel Cusk were shaped by the aftermath of the 1970s in interpreting Medea; “That’s the period when the idea of the family began to get tainted.” And when critics praised Oresteia, the Almeida’s first Greek play and a surprise West End transfer, they compared it to the Sopranos.

Yet there is something eternal about these plays. Goold says it’s the way they “stare at these problems that are totally perennial, like death,” and then offer answers that aren’t easy. Medea kills the kids and a mother rips her son to shreds in the Bakkhai (the Almeida’s predecessor to Medea). Where’s the moral compass in that?

Except there is a twist in Goold’s Medea, and it’s not one every critic has taken kindly to. It was enough to stop the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, otherwise lavish in his praise, from calling it “a Medea for our times”. Nevertheless, the reviews have been kind, as they often are for Goold; although The Times’ Ann Treneman was vitriolic in her dislike (“Everyone is ghastly. The men are beyond irritating. The women even worse.”).

In theory, Goold welcomes the criticism. “I’d rather our audience hated something and talked about it than was passively pleased,” he tells me ahead of reviews.

Controversial and bracing theatre is what Goold wants to keep directing and producing; as the Almeida’s artistic director he is in charge of more than just his own shows. But how does he do it? I put a question to him: if I had to direct Medea instead of him, what advice would he have given me?

He pauses. “You’ve got to love words,” he begins. “There’s no point doing it unless you have a real delight in language. And you have to have vision. But probably the most important thing is, you’ve got to know how to manage a room.”

“It’s people management. So often I have assistants, or directors I produce, and I think ‘God, they’re just not listening to what that person is trying to say, what they’re trying to give.’ They’re either shutting them down or forcing them into a box.”

“Most people in a creative process have to focus on what they want to say, but a director always has to be more of a listener. People do it different ways. Some people spin one plate incredibly fast and vibrantly in the middle of the room, and hope all the others get sucked in. It’s about thriving off of one person – the director, the lead performer, whomever.”

“I’m more about the lowest common denominator: the person you’re most aware of is the least engaged. You have to keep lifting them up, then you get more creativity coming in.”

It’s not always simple. When actors and directors disagree, the director can only demand so much, especially if the actor is far more famous than them. When Goold directed Macbeth, Patrick Stewart was his lead. Stewart was a movie star and twice his age.

“Patrick’s take on Macbeth… I didn’t think it should be played that way. I’d played him as a student and I had an idea of what he was.”

“But then you think, ‘Ok, you’re never going to be what I want you to be, but actually let me get rid of that, and just focus on what’s good about what you want to be, and get rid of some of the crap.’”

Goold doesn’t think he’s ever really struggled to win an actor’s respect (“touch wood”). The key thing, he says, is that “they just feel you’re trying to make legible their intention”.

And then you must work around your lead. In Macbeth, Stewart was “a big deep river of energy… when normally you get two people frenetically going ‘Uhgh! Is this a dagger I see before me! Uhgh!’ and there’s lots of hysteria.”

“So we threw all sorts of other shit at the production to compensate, to provide all the adrenalin which Patrick was taking away to provide clarity and humanity.”

Many people want to be theatre directors, and yet so few are successful. The writers, actors and playwrights who sell shows can be counted on a few hands. Depressingly, Goold thinks it’s becoming harder to break in. It’s difficult to be discovered. “God, I don’t know, what I worry – wonder – most is: ‘Are there just loads of great directors who don’t make it?’”

 The assisting route is just not a good way to find great new directors. “The kind of people who make good assistants don’t make good directors, it’s almost diametrically opposite.” As for regional directors, newspaper budgets have collapsed, so they can no longer rely on a visit from a handful of national critics, as Goold did when he was based in Salisbury and Northampton. And audiences for touring shows have, by some measures, halved in the past twenty years.

Theatre has also evolved. When Goold was coming through, “There were not a lot of directors who felt they were outside the library, so for me to whack on some techno was radical! Now it’d be more commonplace.” New directors have to find new ways to capture our attention – or at least the critics’.

But the critics have changed too. A nod from a critic can still be vital in the right circles, but the days when critics “made” directors is long over. “I remember Nick de Jongh saying, ‘Oh Rupert Goold, I made him.’ Because he’d put Macbeth on the front page of the Standard. I owed my career to him, and in some ways I did! But it's an absurd idea, that would not happen now.”

“It’s all changed so much in literally the past three years. There was a time, for better or worse, when you had a big group of establishment critics: de Jongh, Michael Billington, Michael Coveney, Charlie Spencer – they were mostly men – Susannah Clapp. And if they all liked your show, you were a hit.” (“They could be horrible,” he adds.)

“Now I get more of a sense of a show by being on Twitter than reading the reviews.” It’s “probably a good thing”, Goold thinks, and it certainly beats New York, where a single review – the New York Times'– makes or breaks plays. But it’s another problem for aspiring directors, who can no longer be so easily plucked from the crowd.

It’s no longer a problem Goold needs to overcome. His star could wane, but he seems likely to be among the leading voices in British theatre for a while yet.

It has long been clear that the NHS is in financial ill-health. But today's figures, conveniently delayed until after the Conservative conference, are still stunningly bad. The service ran a deficit of £930m between April and June (greater than the £820m recorded for the whole of the 2014/15 financial year) and is on course for a shortfall of at least £2bn this year - its worst position for a generation. 

Though often described as having been shielded from austerity, owing to its ring-fenced budget, the NHS is enduring the toughest spending settlement in its history. Since 1950, health spending has grown at an average annual rate of 4 per cent, but over the last parliament it rose by just 0.5 per cent. An ageing population, rising treatment costs and the social care crisis all mean that the NHS has to run merely to stand still. The Tories have pledged to provide £10bn more for the service but this still leaves £20bn of efficiency savings required. 

Speculation is now turning to whether George Osborne will provide an emergency injection of funds in the Autumn Statement on 25 November. But the long-term question is whether anyone is prepared to offer a sustainable solution to the crisis. Health experts argue that only a rise in general taxation (income tax, VAT, national insurance), patient charges or a hypothecated "health tax" will secure the future of a universal, high-quality service. But the political taboo against increasing taxes on all but the richest means no politician has ventured into this territory. Shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander has today called for the government to "find money urgently to get through the coming winter months". But the bigger question is whether, under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour is prepared to go beyond sticking-plaster solutions. 

Recent years have brought a number of popular stories, told about Jews who lost their patrimony during the Nazi period: Edmund de Waal’s book The Hare With Amber Eyes, for example, which focused on a group of netsuke – small Japanese figurines – that was all that remained of his family’s once-vast art collection, and the film Woman in Gold, which tells the story of the descendants of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who successfully sued to reclaim Gustav Klimt’s portrait of her.

It is no coincidence that these stories are emerging just at the historical moment when the last survivors of the Holocaust are dying. The actual victims of the Holocaust suffered too much to be plausibly recompensed; there is no way to tell their lives ­except as stories of irrecoverable loss. It is only for the second and third generations that the restoration of lost property can seem like a form of making whole, or a viable way of reconnecting with a familial past. There is, however, always something a little uncomfortable about such stories, because they seem to suggest that regaining a painting, or a piece of real estate, does something to heal a historical rupture that in reality can never be closed.

The House by the Lake starts out seeming like another one of these stories. In 2013 Thomas Harding travelled from London to the outskirts of Berlin in order to visit a house that had been built by his paternal great-grandfather, a German-Jewish doctor named Alfred Alexander. What he finds is a shambles: “Climbing through, my way illuminated by my iPhone, I was confronted by mounds of dirty clothes and soiled cushions, walls covered in graffiti and crawling with mould, smashed appliances and fragments of furniture, rotting floorboards and empty beer bottles.” The house had been used by squatters as a drug den for years and it was now scheduled for demolition by the local authority. Here is a perfect symbol of a lost estate and the reader half expects Harding triumphantly to restore the house and reclaim it for his family.

Yet The House by the Lake has a more complex and ambiguous story to tell. For one thing, Harding makes clear that his relatives want nothing to do with the house, or with Germany in general. Harding comes from a family of German Jews who emigrated to Britain in the 1930s, starting new lives with a new name (originally they were called Hirschowitz). Understandably, they have no sentimental feelings about the country that drove them out and no interest in rekindling a connection with it. But Harding is an exception. His last book, Hanns and Rudolf, was also an excavation of the family’s past, in which he showed how his great-uncle Hanns Alexander fought in the British army during the Second World War and ended up arresting Rudolf Höss, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz.

Rather than let the house disappear, he sets about recovering its story, in an attempt to convince the German authorities to let it stand as a structure of historical value. In doing so, he broadens his subject from Jewish dispossession to the history of 20th-century Germany, as seen through the lens of a single modest building.

Alfred Alexander built the house in 1927 as a summer home for his family. He was a fashionable Berlin doctor, whose patients included Albert Einstein and Marlene Diet­rich, and he joined a number of successful professionals in building second homes in the village of Groß Glienicke, just west of the capital. The village had a long history – it was founded in the 13th century – but the exponential growth of modern Berlin had disrupted its traditions.

The land that Dr Alexander leased to build his house on was part of an estate owned by Otto von Wollank, who sounds like a stern Junker but was a Berlin real-estate developer who bought the estate (and then his title) in the early 20th century. Already Harding shows that the history of Groß Glienicke is bound up with social changes in modern Germany and in particular those in Berlin, whose population exploded in the years before the First World War. This made it more profitable for the von Wollanks to parcel off their land to city-dwellers than to farm it, as its owners had done since time immemorial.

The house that Alfred Alexander built was a modest one: a one-storey wooden structure with nine small rooms and, because it was intended to be used only in the summer, no insulation or central heating. It was a place for leading the simple life, for rowing and swimming and playing tennis, and the children – including Elsie, who later became the grandmother of Thomas Harding – loved to spend time there.

Groß Glienicke was, however, no ­refuge from rising anti-Semitism: Robert von Schultz, the Alexanders’ landlord and Otto von Wollank’s son-in-law, was a leader in the Stahlhelm, the right-wing paramilitary organisation, and a vocal hater of Jews. After 1933, when Hitler seized power, things became much worse, though the Alexanders attempted to continue living a normal life. Harding quotes a diary entry that the teenage Elsie made in April that year: “Thousands of Jewish employees, doctors, lawyers have been impoverished in the space of a few hours . . . People who during the war fought and bled for their German fatherland . . . now they stand on the brink of the abyss.”

Fortunately, the abyss did not swallow up the Alexander family. By 1936, all its members had escaped to Britain. At first, they tried to keep legal possession of the Groß Glienicke house, renting it out to a tenant named Will Meisel, a successful songwriter and music publisher. (The company he founded, Edition Meisel, still flourishes today.) But Meisel, like so many ordinary Germans under Hitler, was not above profiting from the dispossession of Jews. When the Alexanders’ citizenship was revoked by the Nazi state and their house confiscated, Meisel bought it from the tax office at a bargain price, much as he had previously bought up music publishers abandoned by their Jewish owners. After the war, evidence of this profiteering delayed – but did not prevent – Meisel’s efforts to be “denazified” by the ­Allied occupying powers.

Meisel won the house by the lake thanks to one political upheaval and lost it thanks to another. The postwar partition of Berlin left Groß Glienicke just outside the city limits; as a result, Meisel’s business in West Berlin was in a different country from his lake house in East Germany. This turned him into another absentee landlord, like the Alexanders before him. Indeed, there is an odd symmetry to what happened next. Just as the Nazis had taken the house from its Jewish owners to give it to an Aryan, now the communists took the house from its capitalist owner and gave it to the workers.

Because of the housing shortage in postwar Germany, the small summer house now had to serve as the year-round residence for two Groß Glienicke families, the Fuhrmanns and the Kühnes. This required a series of alterations that destroyed much of the house’s original character – a typical eastern bloc triumph of the utilitarian over the aesthetic.

In tracing this next phase of the house, Harding shows what life in East Germany was like for some of its typical citizens. Wolfgang Kühne, a bus driver, was recruited by the Stasi (his code name was “Ignition Key”) but was soon booted out for failure to do any actual spying. His son Bernd was a promising athlete who unwittingly participated in the state’s doping programme, before an accident destroyed his sporting career. At the same time, the family benefited from the guaranteed food, jobs and housing offered by the state – perks that Wolfgang would miss after reunification brought capitalism back to Groß Glienicke.

The institution of East German life that the Kühnes could never ignore, however, was the Berlin Wall. Because Groß Glienicker Lake was legally part of West Berlin, a section of the wall ran between the house and the lake shore – a three-metre-high ­concrete monolith that was literally in the Kühnes’ backyard. They couldn’t have guests over, since they lived in a restricted border zone, which required a special pass to enter. Occasionally, Harding writes, the young Bernd and his classmates would make a game of tossing sticks over the wall, trying to set off the alarm tripwires.

This emblem of tyranny was just another fact of life for those living in its shadow. And that is, perhaps, the most important lesson of Harding’s book. History, which we learn about as a series of ideological abstractions, is lived concretely. This is why an ordinary house can serve so effectively as a symbol of the German experience.

Today, the Alexander Haus, as it is known, is a designated landmark and Harding hopes to turn it into a museum, a fitting new incarnation for our own age of memorialisation. Whether it will be the last stage in the house by the lake’s career is something only time will tell.

Adam Kirsch is a poet and critic. His latest book is “Emblems of the Passing World: Poems After Photographs by August Sander” (Other Press)

The House by the Lake: a Story of Germany by Thomas Harding is published by William Heinemann (£20, 442pp)

It is not anti-Catholic bias that makes me dislike the Bloody Mary, that lumpish combination of tomato juice and vodka named after a 16th-century English queen who, despite the immense reach of her royal powers, found burning Protestants alive the most effective display of majesty.

My prejudice is against its contents: the pulverised tomatoes that look like run-off from a Tudor torture chamber. A whole tomato is a source of joy and, occasionally, wonder (I remember learning that the Farsi for tomato is gojeh farangi, which translates literally as “foreign plum”) – and I am as fond of pizza as anyone. Most accessories to the Bloody Mary are fine with me: Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, celery, black pepper, even sherry or oysters. But generally I share the curmudgeon Bernard DeVoto’s mistrust of fruit juice in my spirits: “all pestilential, all gangrenous, all vile” was the great man’s verdict. His main objection was sweetness but I will include the admittedly savoury tomato in my ban. At the cocktail hour, I have been known to crave all kinds of odd concoctions but none has included pulp.

To many, the whole point of a Bloody Mary is that you don’t wait until the cocktail hour. This seems to entail a certain shying away from unpleasant realities. I know perfectly well the reaction I would get if I were to ask for a grilled tomato and a chilled Martini at brunch: my friends would start likening me to F Scott Fitzgerald and they wouldn’t be referring to my writing talent. Despite its remarkably similar contents, a Bloody Mary is a perfectly acceptable midday, middle-class beverage. If the original Mary were here to witness such hypocrisy, she would surely tut and reach for her firelighters.

Yet, like the good Catholic I certainly am not, I must confess, for I have seen the error of my ways. In July, on Vancouver Island, I tried a Bloody Caesar – Canada’s spirited response to England’s favourite breakfast tipple (“I’ll see your Tudor queen, you bunch of retrograde royalists, and raise you a Roman emperor”). The main difference is a weird yet oddly palatable concoction called Clamato: tomato juice thinned and refined by clam juice. Replace your standard slop with this stuff, which has all the tang of tomato yet flows like a veritable Niagara, and you will have a drink far stranger yet more delicious than the traditional version.

Apparently, the Caesar was invented by an Italian restaurateur in Calgary, Alberta, who wanted a liquid version of his favourite dish from the old country: spaghetti alle vongole in rosso (clam and tomato spaghetti). He got it – and, more importantly, the rest of us got something we can drink not at breakfast but instead of dinner. Find a really interesting garnish – pickled bull kelp or spicy pickled celery, say – and you can even claim to have eaten your greens.

I’m sure that dedicated fans of the Bloody Mary will consider this entire column heretical, which seems appropriate: that’s the side I was born on, being Jewish, and I like to hope I wouldn’t switch even under extreme forms of persuasion. But this cocktail is in any case a broad church: few cocktails come in so many different incarnations.

The original was invented, according to him, by Fernand Petiot, who was a French barman in New York during Prohibition (and so must have known a thing or two about hypocrisy). It includes lemon juice and a “layer” of Worcestershire sauce and the tomato juice is strained; it may also actually have been named after a barmaid.

All of which proves only that dogma has no place at the bar. Variety is the spice of life, which makes it ironic that the world’s spiciest cocktail bestows a frivolous immortality on a woman who believed all choice to be the work of the devil.

Next week John Burnside on nature

The former Conservative chancellor Lord Howe, a key figure in the Thatcher government, has died of a suspected heart attack, his family has said. He was 88.

Geoffrey Howe was the longest-serving member of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet, playing a key role in both her government and her downfall. Born in Port Talbot in 1926, he began his career as a lawyer, and was first elected to parliament in 1964, but lost his seat just 18 months later.

Returning as MP for Reigate in the Conservative election victory of 1970, he served in the government of Edward Heath, first as Solicitor General for England & Wales, then as a Minister of State for Trade. When Margaret Thatcher became opposition leader in 1975, she named Howe as her shadow chancellor.

He retained this brief when the party returned to government in 1979. In the controversial budget of 1981, he outlined a radical monetarist programme, abandoning then-mainstream economic thinking by attempting to rapidly tackle the deficit at a time of recession and unemployment. Following the 1983 election, he was appointed as foreign secretary, in which post he negotiated the return of Hong Kong to China.

In 1989, Thatcher demoted Howe to the position of leader of the house and deputy prime minister. And on 1 November 1990, following disagreements over Britain's relationship with Europe, he resigned from the Cabinet altogether. 

Twelve days later, in a powerful speech explaining his resignation, he attacked the prime minister's attitude to Brussels, and called on his former colleagues to "consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long".

Labour Chancellor Denis Healey once described an attack from Howe as "like being savaged by a dead sheep" - but his resignation speech is widely credited for triggering the process that led to Thatcher's downfall. Nine days later, her premiership was over.

Howe retired from the Commons in 1992, and was made a life peer as Baron Howe of Aberavon. He later said that his resignation speech "was not intended as a challenge, it was intended as a way of summarising the importance of Europe". 

Nonetheless, he added: "I am sure that, without [Thatcher's] resignation, we would not have won the 1992 election... If there had been a Labour government from 1992 onwards, New Labour would never have been born."

Carlo Rovelli has struck gold. This book began life as a series of articles in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. The series was popular enough to be assembled into a slim volume and it became the bestselling book in Italy this year, beating the Pope’s encyclical and Fifty Shades of Grey. It has already won a slew of prizes and it is easy to see why.

Though in no way a comprehensive ­overview of physics – the English edition is a beautifully bound 83 pages, including index – it feels like a substantial contribution. Here you will find brief but masterful expositions of quantum mechanics, relativity, particle physics and thermodynamics, among other fields. If you want to understand what gets physicists out of bed in the morning, there is no better guide than Rovelli.

The translation into English was accomplished with the help of two poets, whose touch shines through. The prose is irresistible. Einstein’s equation encapsulating the general theory of relativity contains a “teeming universe” and the “magical richness of the theory opens up into a phantasmagorical succession of predictions that resemble the delirious ravings of a madman, but which have all turned out to be true”. Einstein created a universe “where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea”.

Rovelli doesn’t pretend that physicists are on top of it all, however. A whole suite of posited particles has failed to appear as predicted, for instance. “Days, months, years and decades have passed – but the supersymmetric particles have not yet manifested themselves,” Rovelli writes. “Physics is not only a history of successes.” He admits that he cannot construct a clear, communicable notion of the nature of time (“There is so much still to be understood”) and the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics has raised “a tangle of problems where we are still in the dark . . . We do not yet have a theory capable of drawing together all three pieces of our fundamental knowledge of the world.”

Since Einstein and quantum theory, physics has been somewhat stuck. Our understanding of the cosmos has moved on a little but Rovelli clearly envies the youth of other fields – neuroscience, in particular. Rovelli is too old to shift fields now but he gives the impression that he is as fascinated by what we are discovering about the brain as he is about the details that we are failing to uncover about the universe. Neuroscience stands now where physics stood when Einstein was still learning his craft: it is, Rovelli writes, “one of the most interesting frontiers of science, where major progress is about to be made”.

This Proustian sigh comes in the last chapter. The title is slightly misleading: the book contains six lessons on physics and one on “ourselves”. This last entry is an essay that encourages us to be more self-aware, before it is too late. “We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct,” he points out.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is an absorbing, lovely book. It is also a good example of what the Nobel laureate Peter Medawar called “the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us”. If you want to keep a noble, romantic view of science, Medawar said, don’t ask a scientist what goes on behind the scenes. Rovelli is certainly keeping the curtain firmly down; if we don’t ask, he won’t tell. And so, in these pages, the pursuit of physics is almost chivalrous, its practitioners reminiscent of the knights of legend. There is no sense of the competition or personal ambition that haunts the university physics departments of the world. In the chapter devoted to the pursuit of a theory that will unite relativity and quantum physics, for instance, Rovelli discusses only one path: loop quantum gravity, the contender he helped devise. Its more popular rival, string theory, doesn’t even get a mention.

Such tactics are forgivable. The book was written for those who know little or nothing about modern science, Rovelli notes. They are unlikely to care that the light of these lessons is carried to them through a soft-focus lens. What’s more, there is something appealing about physicists who peer steadfastly though the fog, or stand on the beach and gaze out at the “ocean of the unknown”, humbly probing the “mystery and beauty of the world”. This is physics as romantic poetry and, by God, it’s beguiling.

Michael Brooks is the New Statesman’s science columnist. His books include “At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking Science by Surprise” (Profile Books)

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre, is out now from Allen Lane (£9.99, 83pp)

Every word that comes out of YA author Louise O’Neill’s mouth is filled with a spirit of defiance against sexism, misogyny and patriarchy. Her first novel Only Ever Yoursearned her comparisons to Margaret Atwood and she was praised by the likes of Marian Keyes and Jeanette Winterson. The Guardian described her as “the best YA fiction writer alive today” and I find it hard to disagree with this sentiment. And did I mention that the film rights to that novel have now been sold?

She doesn’t shy away from hard topics: Only Ever Yours tackled the problems with beauty, objectification and patriarchy and her new novel, Asking For It tackles consent and rape culture. But O’Neill wasn’t always sure about feminism, describing her first views of feminism as a “mixture of The Spice Girls and The Handmaid’s Tale”. In my view, that isn’t such a bad place to start, but I refrain from telling the author this. Speaking to her now, it’s obvious that she has some very clear views on feminism.

At the start of our interview, I’m a little hesitant about asking O’Neill questions that may be too personal. I’d read about her struggles with anorexia and bulimia and even though I wanted to explore it and the impact it had on her writing, I was conscious that I didn’t want to create an uncomfortable atmosphere. So I tiptoe around the question, silently hoping that she touches on it. Eating disorders and low body confidence are so widespread and common for millions of girls and women. But I quickly learn that I don’t have to worry about asking the hard questions. O’Neill is always ready to tackle anything and plunges into passionate responses that draw on personal experience. It is why I admire her: her honesty is humbling and she’s not afraid of being vulnerable. Instead, she uses that vulnerability to make the stories she tells so frighteningly relatable to readers of all ages.

Only Ever Yours came from a place of frustration and a desire for change. “I became quite disturbed by this culture in which women are put under so much pressure in order to conform to an often unattainable idea of beauty and the negative impact that it can subsequently have on their mental health. I think I was so tired of being made to feel because I was a woman that my value was very much correlated to how attractive I was, or how thin I was, or how sexy men found me.” She then says, “I was a strange precocious child, growing up in a small town, I always felt that I had to conform to fit it. By the age of 13 and 14 I was very practiced in the art of pretending to be something I was not. I think when you do that it’s a pressure cooker and it has to come out somewhere. In the public and at school, I was putting on this act of being really confident and then I would go home and make myself sick or not eat my dinner because I needed somewhere to be the outlet for that stress to maintain this perfect image. And as I edited Only Ever Yours, I saw the raw pain that was shaping the narrative”.

Naturally, I ask O’Neill on whether or not she’s felt her books have had some sort of impact. She talks about how humbling it is to hear from her readers: “Every day I get emails from teenage girls that say my book introduced them to feminism or radicalised them.” One woman wrote to say that she hadn’t weighed herself since finishing her novel. “I just think, ‘wow’, I am just one person. And I think that’s the thing, it needs to be a collective effort, everyone has to play their part to burn the patriarchy to the motherfucking ground. Let’s all get the matches!” O’Neill says this with such a strong sense of purpose, that as I sit there in my school uniform, completely burnt out and exhausted, I feel compelled to just do something. What she says next strikes a chord with me. “To be honest, I just love teenage girls. There’s something about that age that is so painful and so raw. God, I remember it so well. Teenage girls are just the best. This is why I get so angry when people make fun of fangirls. Teenage girls bring passion and real sense of engagement to everything – whether that is books or bands.”

The most haunting thing O’Neill tells me during the hour-long chat I have with her is a harrowing story of a girl that had passed away due to anorexia. In that moment, there’s a sense of total sadness and I’m completely silent as she recounts the tale. “I had one experience where someone got in touch and asked me to write to a girl with anorexia. So I wrote the letter and 2 weeks afterwards, the person got touch with me again and said she had died.” When she finishes with that tale, I’m bewildered by just how the society we live in can have such a negative impact on girls. Soon after this, O’Neill comments on how it makes her angry that people expect her to be grateful for the strides that have been taken for women’s equality. “I’m not sure why you’re expecting me to be grateful that I live in a country that allows me to vote and own property but I still don’t earn the same as a man for doing the same job. Rape convictions are so dismally low. Sexual violence against women is trivialised and treated like a joke a lot of the time and domestic violence is still an unspoken horror story in so many people’s homes. There’s so much work that needs to be done. We need to shout about it at every turn and I get why people might say ‘feminists are so angry. they never shut up!’ But we can’t let any joke or any trivial little piece of sexiam go past without trying to challenge it in some way.”

She begins to rant a little, but I like that about her – I like to see the raw passion and fire she has for making the world a better place for women and girls. She says, “People always say women are just naturally more empathetic and women are just naturally more intuitive and it’s like we're not. We’ve be taught since we were children to read other people's body language, to sense when people are upset, to be people pleasers, to keep the peace, to be nice, polite, good girls. And it’s just bullshit. It’s just another way to keep us silent and under control.”

Our conversation moves onto the subject of her new novel, Asking For It, in which she raises a lot of questions about rape culture and consent. The story is about Emma O’Donovan, an 18-year-old girl who goes to a party and is raped, but has no recollection it, but slowly begins to put the pieces together. In an interview with the Guardian, O’Neill said, “I came across two different cases – the Steubenville case and the Maryville case in the US – which were very similar in that they were small towns in the US in which the football team were the local heroes, and at a party the two young girls in both cases passed out and were gang-raped by members of the team. And in general the local community really rallied round the men rather than the victims. I was so interested in this and also by the fact, especially with the Steubenville case, that they took videos and photographs and posted them on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook without any sort of concept that that is public and what they’ve done is illegal.” With me, she adds: “The story is quite harrowing and by the end I was having nightmares about being raped because I’d immersed myself so much in the character of Emma.”

As I read Asking For It, I was interested as to why O’Neill had chosen to make Emma such an unlikeable character. When O’Neill begins to answer, I am slightly ashamed by the hidden sexism in my question. She laughs, and then she says: “You only get that about women. The male anti-hero is very much celebrated in pop culture and in literature. I want to tell women that there’s a world of difference between being likeable and being nice. But I suspect I wanted to subvert that trope of what kind of victim we feel sympathy for. We have a finite amount of sympathy, and if she’s been drinking, or wearing a short skit or taking drugs or had many sexual partners, or she’s a sex worker, then we lose sympathy and suddenly she was asking for it. I did that with Emma so the reader is almost complicit in blaming her and begins to think about these prejudices.”

On the issue of consent, it’s clear that O’Neill has some very strong opinions. “People can look at the last case in the book and think that was definitely rape. But in the scene with Paul, it was clear that she didn’t want to have sex with him, she asked to go back to the party but he kept going. Now that is really common. In one scene with Jamie and Emma, they’re having a conversation and Emma says ‘You didn’t say no, you said you didn’t say no’ and then Jamie says, ‘Yes, but I didn’t say yes either’. And that is at the crux of this idea of dubious consent. I think girls need to be taught to say no and we need mandatory sex education programs. They tend to focus on reproduction, avoiding pregnancy and STIs, but the issue of consent is so vital. Young men want to conform to the idea of hypersexuality and a lot of the time that means that they will push a girl past her comfort zone because they just want to go back to the lad and say ‘oh yeah, I fucked her’. We need to train young men to actively learn to ask for consent. And we also need to teach them that if consent hasn’t been given and if they go ahead, then they are a rapist. Young men that don’t realise what they’re doing is wrong because they haven't had that conversation. I mean, some of them are just arseholes, but there are a good number that need to be taught.”

The last question I ask O’Neill is what it’s like to be a woman in Ireland. Her answer is preceded by a sigh: “We live in a country where Irish women aren’t trusted to have control over their own bodies. We’re living in a country where a woman is likely to face more time in jail for taking a tablet or a pill to induce an abortion than a man is probably likely to face for having raped her. It’s frustrating but frightening. When I think about the Savita Halappanavar case, a woman who was denied an abortion and subsequently died from septicemia, I get goosebumps. The life of that child is more important than a woman’s. That’s scary, thinking that as a woman, if that had been me in that situation, I would have died.” In that moment, I’m saddened by how far we still have to go. And then I’m reminded on this International Day of the Girl that there’s a new generation of girls and women, just like Louise O’Neill, who are coming forward with their voices loud and strong, demanding for change. It’s only a matter of time.

Asking For It is on sale now

The most basic thing that every young person wants is to have control over their own future.

But for millions of girls around the world their fates are sealed at birth. They have no control over their own bodies, no voice in their community and no choice over who to marry and when. For too long we’ve seen girls and women invisible outside the home.

Today is International Day of the Girl, a day when we have a duty to make the issues facing these invisible millions of girls visible.

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is one of the most extreme manifestations of this brutal inequality. It is a form of violence against women and girls that can result in a lifetime of physical, psychological and emotional suffering.

Over 130 million women in the world today have had their genitals mutilated and 30 million more girls are at risk over the next decade. Here in the UK there are an estimated 137,000 girls and women living with the consequences of FGM.

These figures are simply unacceptable. I want to see a world free from FGM for the next generation.

That is why the UK has been leading the global campaign to stamp it out. We have made the largest ever donor commitment to ending FGM around the world, investing millions to help countries and communities give up the practice, to support new anti-FGM laws and policies and to help galvanise a worldwide movement to eliminate the practice.

In most countries where FGM takes place the majority of girls and women think it should end so the most effective way to end FGM is to work closely with communities at the grassroots level. That is what our programmes are doing.

And we are determined to end the practice in the UK. We have strengthened the law by introducing new FGM protection orders and a mandatory reporting duty for teachers and health and social care professionals. We have provided resources for frontline professionals and training for Border Force officials so they can identify those at risk of being taken abroad to undergo the practice.

The good news is that there are signs that things are changing for the better. The African-led movement to end the practice, bringing together governments, communities, religious and cultural leaders and ordinary people across the continent, is gaining real momentum. Amazing girls and women across the globe are demanding change.

Thousands of African communities have now held abandonment ceremonies to formally give up the practice. Nigeria took the historic step of banning FGM in May earlier this year. Egypt and Kenya now have laws in place on FGM and are upping their game to make sure these laws lead to more arrests. Somalia, where 98% of women have undergone the practice, has agreed to legislate against FGM and adopt a national action plan to end the practice.

The Girl Summit hosted by the UK and UNICEF last summer was a rallying cry in the fight against child marriage and FGM, and has since inspired independent Girl Summits in Ethiopia, Uganda and Bangladesh to drive action against both these practices.

We must capitalise on this momentum: our generation has an unprecedented opportunity to consign this practice to the history books. We cannot let it go to waste.

I’m clear that Britain will continue to play our part, but we cannot do it alone. One year after the Girl Summit the international community needs to do so much more. Efforts to end FGM are underfunded. We urgently need governments to step up and support the movement within Africa to end FGM.

Last month we saw a historic step in the right direction. At the UN General Assembly 193 nations adopted 17 new Global Goals to eradicate extreme poverty.

Following three years of intense negotiations, the UK successfully pushed for a stand-alone Goal to achieve gender equality by 2030, which critically includes a target to eliminate FGM. The world has now formally agreed: enough is enough.

We now need more nations across the globe, rich and poor, to join us and help consign FGM to the history books.

If we can keep up the momentum and secure the right global support, standing shoulder to shoulder with the communities driving the anti-FGM movement sweeping through Africa, I believe we can end FGM in a generation. That surely is a prize worth having.

After three weeks of World Cup Rugby, and England having a very early bath, it’s time to take stock of rugby itself, assess what we football fans have learned so far about the differences between the two codes.

Dissent
This is always mentioned as one of the miracles of rugby, showing how superior they are, and it is. It is so annoying and pathetic and pointless in football when players argue with the ref – they’re wasting our time, their time, dissipating their energies, losing concentration, making themselves look childish and arrogant.

Score: Rugby 5 –Football 0

Toughness Obviously rugby players are tougher, in the sense of being huge and beefy – or fat, as we generally describe it – kicking the hell out of each other, banging and clattering, which is really very stupid. Being a footballer is physically just as tough. It is only if you are really close to football action that you see and hear what happens when a defender stops a striker. There is no drawing out, on either side, no quarter given, hence all the injuries. Footballers are fitter than rugby players – and have to be. There are fewer in the team and they play for longer. Footballers are surprisingly strong; picking up those huge pay packets is not easy.

Rugby 5 – Football 5

Skill The lardy lumps in the rugby scrum don’t have the ball skills and athletic agility of the leaner backs, or need them. In football, they are all lean and athletic and skilful these days: they have to be able to pass, shoot, head the ball, attack, defend and, of course, dive when necessary.

Rugby 2 – Football 5

Playing Fair In football, they do try it on all the time, going down for penalties, claiming every throw-in, affecting
near-death experiences, hoping to get someone sent off. Dreadful, why do they do it? To get an advantage, that’s why. In rugby, there’s furtive hair-pulling and bollock-twisting in the scrum, but no more than the guys did in the dorm at school.

Rugby 5 – Football 1

Speed Oh God, the speed, or lack of it, in rugby is so annoying. All those mauls and rucks, all those line-outs and penalty kicks that take for ever. Yes, it is exciting, when things are moving, or even crawling forward, but half of every rugby game is stationary. Sorry, stationary.

Rugby 2 – Football 5

Fun Rugby can be tedious to watch, but fun to take part in. If you have the right build. So many people in their schooldays were forced to play rugby, when clearly unsuited, and ended up hating it for ever. The thing about football is that it can accommodate all sizes and physiques. Anyone can have a go.

Rugby 3 – Football 5

Popularity Football is worldwide, gets all the money and attention. Don’t be deceived by the current newspaper and TV coverage of rugby. Once the World Cup is over, it will pass. But rugby is often huge in small countries such as New Zealand, Wales, Fiji, where it isn’t dwarfed by football. So well done, rugby, making yourself part of a nation’s identity.

Rugby 3 – Football 5

Rules In football, the offside rule can be complicated and confusing, especially for linesmen, but dear God, so many rules in rugby are totally mystifying. No wonder the refs keep making the sign of the cross, or at least a TV set, hoping for divine help.

Rugby 2 – Football 3

Hairstyles No point in having your hair done when you’re going to spend the game with your head up the bum of another player or face down in the mud. Can you imagine Becks or Ronaldo ever playing rugby? Beards, though, they’re ace. Check out Josh Strauss of Scotland. He’s got a whopper.

Rugby 1 – Football 3

Fans Historically, rugby fans were supposed to be posher, public-school types while the working classes followed football. No longer quite the case. You have to be rich to afford the Prem. At Spurs and Arsenal there’s at least one QC in every row. But rugger fans are beautifully behaved, no fighting or abuse. Too busy in the Twickers car park laying out their tartan rugs and popping the champagne to look for a punch-up, or start any rude but subtle chanting such as “Fuck off, Aussies”.

Rugby 5 – Football 1

Total Scores 
Dunno, I’ll just get it wrong.

All political careers are supposed to end in failure.  Many don’t take very long to achieve this: in every British election, many more people run for parliament than could win, producing, inevitably, more losers than winners.  Most major party leaders since 1945 have failed to win a single general election.  

Given this, you might expect that anyone embarking on a political project, of any ideological stripe, would think of it as a daunting, complex challenge.  Yet politics seems to be full of people who think it’s pretty straightforward. On right and left, electoral victories are planned out – bish, bash, bosh – between rounds of drinks at party conference or in the final paragraph of a 900 word comment piece.  Even those with years of experience observing politics up close, like Jeremy Corbyn today or Ed Miliband before him, rarely seem burdened by a fear of political failure.

One explanation might be that we all tend to think of ourselves as posessing above average skills in conducting simple tasks or possessing positive traits. If you overestimate the number of people who agree with you – a standard psychological finding called the “false consensus” effect – then perhaps doing politics seems simpler and more pleasant than it really is.  But this shouldn’t last forever: there should be a highly reliable antidote to the false consensus effect, called “losing an election”.  Yet, more often than not, this confidence persists even after a crushing electoral defeat.

There is a similar puzzle in the world of economics: why do so many people start businesses that quickly fail? In the pristine world of classical economics, I should only enter the market if I rationally expect my payoff to be higher by starting this business than by doing something else.  If people are making those rational calculations correctly, why do so many end up failing and losing their shirts? 

Behavioural economists, who are always interested in people acting non-rationally, designed an experiment to try and explain this phenomena.  Participants could decide to enter or not enter for each round of a game. If you entered, how well you did would be determined by how well you answered some sports, logic or current affairs questions. In each round, if you were amongst the top performers of those who entered, you got a big payoff.  But if lots of people entered and you scored near the bottom, you lost money. What the researchers found was that people were much more likely to enter these skill related games than when performance was just determined by luck. They were also more likely to lose money.  People were even more likely to be overconfident – and lose cash – if they had been recruited in answer to an ad which stressed that winners would need to know lots about sports, logic or current affairs.  They forgot that, while they might themselves be quite knowledgeable about sports, that would also be true of the people they were playing against.

If overconfidence explains why so many people throw themselves, so regularly, into losing causes, it doesn’t explain why people offer their strategic advice so readily to political parties, even when said advice isn’t based on an awful lot of evidence, experience or even reflection.  This is where what psychologists call “illusions of explanatory depth” come into play.

If you ask me if I know how a sewing machine or a zip works, I’ll probably say that I do.  But ask me to actually explain it and my confidence will drain away: I don’t really know why they are designed the way they are and couldn’t draw out exactly how a zip’s teeth interlock or sewing machine creates a stich. 

American researchers found exactly the same illusions of explanatory depth when it came to politics: people were willing to say that they supported a particular candidate because of their policies on an issue, but when asked to describe those policies 50 per cent found they knew less than they expected, compared to just five per cent who found they knew more. 

The team investigating illusions of explanatory depth found that it was linked to whether you thought abstractly or concretely and, in particular, whether you broke the problem down into its constituent parts.  If you ask me how each different mechanism in a sewing machine functions, I’ll give a less confident answer. 

Similarly, I suspect that if you are asked how you can win the next election, it’s easy to offer a rather shallow answer like “economic security” or “standing up to austerity”.  If I ask how you can win Derby North, the task is actually smaller but those answers looks more trite. 

By contrast, if I encourage you think abstractly – in this experiment, by making you think about why we do things but potentially by asking you why you are involved in politics – you will tend to have an even more overinflated sense that you have all the answers.

This path, from greater abstraction, to greater confidence, and then to seemingly-unexpected depths of electoral defeat, was the path Ed Miliband took in the last parliament.  It is beckoning Labour again.

The announcement of the Booker Prize winner (this year on 13 October) is a significant event in the literary world. A panel of judges, headed by a respected literary critic, sifts a list of notable novels from the past year, ultimately crowning one of them Booker Prize winner. But cynics might suspect that the hoopla around the Booker Prize is as much (read: more) to do with publicity than it is to do with literary criticism.

Getting to put “Booker Prize Winner” and, perhaps, a puff from the panel of judges on your dust-jacket is priceless. But can puffing – the practice of lauding a book’s merits in a few words, usually on its jacket blurb – be considered a kind of literary criticism, however cynically regarded it might be?

Initial signs are not encouraging. Even the definition of the “puff” in the Oxford English Dictionary (which of course has its own puff: “the definitive record of the English language”) is implicitly disapproving. The puff is “inflated or unmerited praise or commendation”, “an extravagantly laudatory advertisement or review”, peddled by a “puff purveyor” or “puff merchant” or – surely worst of all – a “PUFF-MASTER GENERAL”. The puff itself doesn’t get good publicity.

As Nicholas Mason has shown in his insightful, informative book Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (there’s a puff for free), when the term “puff” first emerged around the beginning of the 18th century, it referred specifically to “publishers’ attempts to promote their books outside traditional forms of advertising”. As the scornful coinage “PUFF-MASTER GENERAL”, from the satirical 1779 play The Critick Anticipated, suggests, many have failed to be impressed by this way of attempting, well, to impress people.

One way to tarnish the credentials of a literary rival, therefore, is to suggest that his or her literary virtues have been puffed out of all proportion. In its 1848 issue the Western Literary Messenger acidly remarked of the writer, social campaigner, and friend of Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, that “the ‘career’ of Geo. Lippard, is an illustration of what well-directed and energetic puffing can do for an author. Without pretensions (or at least, nothing save pretensions) to either style or matter; laughed at by one half the world and pitied by the other; he contrives, by the aid of a few such publications as the Saturday Courier, Flag of Our Union, etc., to foist annually upon the public, some half-dozen volumes of the merest trash and twaddle that ever lumbered the shelves of ‘the Trade’”.

If Lippard is either laughed at or pitied by the whole world, it’s hard to imagine who actually buys and reads his books. In any case, Lippard was unlikely to have told his publicist to mine the Western Literary Messenger for a puff for one of his half-dozen books a year: “George Lippard’s latest book is ‘merest trash and twaddle’ (Western Literary Messenger).”

There are many more examples of scorn for the puff – and not just scorn, either, but the sense that it is genuinely damaging to literary culture. George Orwell, for instance, blamed the “disgusting tripe that is written by blurb-reviewers” for the fact that “the novel is being shouted out of existence”. 

According to Orwell, being puffed up is not even all that agreeable to the puffee: “Nobody likes being told that he has written a palpitating tale of passion which will last as long as the English language; though, of course, it is disappointing not to be told that, because all novelists are being told the same, and to be left out presumably means that your books won't sell.” Orwell concludes: ‘The hack review is in fact a sort of commercial necessity, like the blurb on the dust-jacket, of which it is merely an extension.”

But perhaps it is possible to give a slightly more nuanced view of the practice of puffing – one that doesn’t necessarily see it as “tripe” or “drivel” (Orwell’s words). In the wonderfully titled Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, his teeming mishmash of travel writings and reflections, Nathaniel Parker Willis ventured a tentative defence of partial (in both senses) praise for literary friends:

“As to literary puffs, we would as soon sell our tears for lemon-drops, as to defile one of God’s truthful adjectives with a price for using it. […] But if we love a man (as we do many, thank God, whom we are called upon to criticise), we pick out the gold that is inlaid in his book, and leave to his enemies to find the brass and tinsel. And if that’s not fair, we don’t very much care—for we scorn to be impartial.”

What Willis, like Orwell, spurns is the commercial aspect of puffing, rejecting the practice of payment for a puff. But Willis does imply that performing the function of critic in relation to the work of one’s friends is not only allowable, but a benefit to the reading public, since it may now see the gold inlaid in the work, discretely separated from the dross that might, in situ, surround it.

The OED’s definition of the “puff” goes on to suggest, in fact, the emergence over time of a more neutral, less loaded understanding of this term. As well as being undeserved, hyperbolic praise, the puff is also simply “a review, comment, etc., regarded as constituting good publicity”. Nevertheless, there remains here a large and outstanding question. Are puffs in any way literary criticism or are they just PR? Much of the discussion around the practice of puffing concerns its impact on sales; whether they influence how a reader then reads the book she or he has bought, nobody seems much to care.

If we look at a couple of the puffs for this year’s Booker shortlist, we might be able to bring this question into focus. The claim of the unnamed reviewer in the Independent that Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread is simply “Glorious” doesn’t seem to get us very far into the realms of literary criticism. Eleanor Catton’s gnomic description of Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen as “awesome in the true sense of the word” is perhaps more critically promising: what is the true sense of “awesome”? Why does this book in particular evoke that sense?

The answer to the question of whether the puff can be literary criticism depends, of course, on how we define literary criticism. If criticism is, as MH Abrams put it, “the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analysing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature”, then puffs don’t qualify since they’re hardly “studies”. If, on the other hand, criticism is just “public communication on literature comprising both description and evaluation”, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has claimed, then puffs certainly communicate, describe, and evaluate – and do so in public.

Finally deciding this question is no doubt too large a task for this short piece, but for all their implication in commercial imperatives and dubious circuits of mutual celebration, puffs are nevertheless little windows – often smeared and cracked, to be sure – onto the itself deeply imperfect terrain of literary criticism.

Ross Wilson is writing a book titled “Critical Forms: Genres of Criticism from 1750 to the Present”. It is about puffs, prefaces, letters, lectures, and all the other forms in which criticism has been written.

John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have all signed on to the cross-party campaign for a "Remain" vote in the forthcoming referendum on Britain's place in the European Union, in a coup for the Remain camp.

Voters will be asked to choose between "Remain" and "Leave" after the Electoral Commission ruled that a Yes/No question slanted the battlefield in favour of a Yes vote. In addition to signing up the three premiers, Caroline Lucas, the Green Party's only MP, will be on the campaign as well. 

The In Campaign, which officially launches today, has also secured a number of celebrity and business supporters. Sir Stuart Rose, credited with turning around Marks & Spencers, will head up the campaign, alongside Apprentice star and West Ham vice-chair Karren Brady. June Sarpong, the television presenter, will also play a role.