Faulks on Fiction . Great Programs on BBC Two

Faulks on fiction presented by Sebastian Faulks (started on 5 February) were a four part series on the brilliance of the British novel and its characters. Very well done, and a unique opportunity for revisiting marvelous BBC series based on famous books.
The four episodes were : Heroes”, “Lovers”, “Snobs” and “Villains”.
This post presents you with images from "The snob".
Watch the film in the next "post", and you will get the general idea.
Yours ... Jeeves











Faulks on Fiction
Review by John Sutherland

Published: February 4 2011
Faulks on Fiction, by Sebastian Faulks, BBC Books, RRP£20, 376 pages



This is a good book about good books. It, and the four-part BBC TV series it accompanies, will encourage people to read and reread classic British novels.
Sebastian Faulks starts from the position that critical theory, which has been a dominant trend in academic discourse for 50 years, is inherently sterile. Put bluntly, it goes round and round in smaller circles until it disappears up its own vocabulary. Equally dead-ended, in Faulks’s view, is the more recent fashion for biographical explanation. He illustrates his objection with a wry personal recollection: “When I went round the country doing readings after my fourth novel, Birdsong, came out in 1993, most people could not conceal their disappointment. They had expected me to be 105 years old, French and, in some odd way, female.”

What Faulks proposes is a return to “reading for character”. Fiction, he maintains, creates people. They live, we know them, we have relations with them. That is what our focus should be. There follows a survey of great characters in great fiction: “Heroes”, “Lovers”, “Snobs” and “Villains”.
Faulks’s method is to nominate his character (Robinson Crusoe, Heathcliff, Lady Chatterley), describe them, and then offer a résumé of the story with shrewdly enlightening observations.
The tone of the book is resolutely commonsensical. For example, the opening paragraph in the chapter on Jane Austen’s Emma (Miss Woodhouse, unsurprisingly, comes under the category “Snob”): “The trouble with Emma is that she’s had things rather too much her own way; the trouble with Emma is that it’s a novel of such scintillating brilliance, and so quick on its feet, that anything a reader can say about it seems doomed to bathos. If you were to hear the Amadeus Quartet playing Mozart on a summer evening in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles with your lover on your arm and a glass of Bollinger 1990 fizzing on your tongue, it would probably be vain to try to put the sensation into words.”
It’s all amiably chatty. But the chattiness often verges on, well, looseness. Faulks writes of the seventh “bout” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “The prose is sufficiently opaque that it had to be explained to the jury at the obscenity trial in 1960 that this was indeed sodomy.” In fact, as Jeremy Hutchinson, one of the defence lawyers, has assured me, Penguin’s counsel deliberately obfuscated this fact, the prosecution were too dozy to pick it up and the jury never caught on. Had they caught on, the trial might well have gone the other way and post-1960s fiction would have been very different.
Another example of that looseness, from Faulks’s Emma discussion: “When a piano arrives for Jane [Fairfax] from an unknown donor, there is speculation that Mr Knightley has sent it.” No there isn’t. Frank (the actual donor) encourages guileless Emma to believe that it is a gift from Jane’s illicit admirer Mr Dixon. A main section of the plot, and our final judgment on Frank, depends on Emma’s scurrilous misapprehension. Any A-level candidate committing this kind of elementary error could kiss goodbye to Oxbridge. Faulks’s easy-goingness is one of his book’s charms. But there are altogether too many bloopers. The dates ascribed to the many illustrations in the book are, every single one of them, grotesquely wrong – by a century in some cases. The author and his research assistants (whom he graciously thanks) should really have taken more trouble.
The main attraction of this book is how light it travels. Only three literary critics, by my count, are mentioned in passing (I’m gratified to be one of the three). We don’t need all that dry-as-dust scholarship is the implication. All we need is the bracing encounter with novelists and their characters.
A price is paid for this indifference to all those dreary scholars who devote their lives to understanding literature. “When Thackeray,” writes Faulks, “called Vanity Fair in its subtitle, ‘A novel without a hero’, he meant to indicate, I think, that none of the male characters fulfilled the heroic role.” A glance at the scholarship would have informed Faulks that the explanation is quite different. Thackeray began seriously thinking about his “Waterloo novel” in 1842, when London was in a hubbub about Thomas Carlyle’s lectures “On Heroes and Hero-worship”. Vanity Fair is imbued throughout with anti-Carlylism. To miss that fact (as Faulks does) is to miss much of what the novel is about.
Literary criticism, used judiciously, can help. And wilfully ignoring what literary criticism offers can lead the reader into misreading. Unnecessary blemishes somewhat disfigure Faulks on Fiction but the book remains readable, entertaining and well conceived. The corrected paperback might, however, be a better investment.
John Sutherland is the author of ‘Literature: 50 Ideas You Need to Know’ (Quercus).
‘Faulks on Fiction’ begins on February 5 on BBC Two

Sunday Images / Tweedland / "Just Five"

John Martin Robinson's "The Latest Country Houses"

“In contrast tot the widely held impression that country house building in Britain ceased in 1939, John Martin Robinson proves that the tradition is not only alive but has continued to flourish since the Second World War. He shows that in the last thirty years at least two hundred houses have been built which conform tot he country house style of architecture and way of life.”

John Martin Robinson

John Martin Robinson FSA (born 1948) is a British architectural historian and officer of arms.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/John_Martin_Robinson.html

He was born in Preston, Lancashire, and educated at Fort Augustus Abbey, a Benedictine school in Scotland, the University of St Andrews (graduating MA and awarded D.LITT in 2002) and then in 1970 arrived at Oriel College, Oxford, to prepare for a DPhil. He worked for the Greater London Council's Historic Buildings Division from 1974. to 1986, where he worked inter alia as architectural editor of the Survey of London, and Historic Buildings Inspector for Westminster, and also revised the Statutory Lists of Historic Buildings for 2 east London boroughs. As an independent consultant since 1988 he has advised on the restoration of numerous country houses churches and other listed buildings. His contribution to the Conservation Plan for 7 Dials and Covent Garden in London won the 1998 Camden Environmental Award. He also wrote the Conservation Plan for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in association with Rick Mather Architects.

He has been an Architectural Writer for Country Life for over 40 years contributing nearly 400 articles and reviews. As chairman of the Art and Architecture Committee of Westminster Cathedral he has overseen the completion of the mosaics in St George's and St Joseph's chapels, the Vaughan Chantrey and several individual panels

Robinson was Fitzalan Pursuivant Extraordinary at the College of Arms from 1982 and is now Maltravers Herald Extraordinary. In 1978 he was appointed Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk Earl Marshal.

Robinson is also a Knight of Magistral Grace of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. He lives at Beckside House, Cumbria, and is an active member of the Georgian Group of which he was a trustee and vice-chairman for 20 years, acquiring their HQ Adam townhouse in Fitzroy Square, setting up the Casework committee, and instituting the Young Georgians, and founding and presiding over the Annual conservation Awards for 10 years from 2003-2013. He served on the North West Regional Committee of the National Trust for 10 Years and is Heraldic Adviser to the National Trust. He was a trustee of the Lakeland Arts Trust for 25 years, and served on the Council of the Society of Antiquaries, the council of the National Records Association, and is a trustee of Arundel Castle , Burghley House and Wilton House. He was a founder member of the Friends of Christ Church Spitalfields and helped establish the music Festival there. His scholarly book on James Wyatt is the definitive treatment of the subject. His witty New Georgian Handbook, co-authored with Alexandra Artley of Harpers Magazine , was the architectural face of the "Young Fogey Movement" in the 1980s and remains a cult book with young enthusiasts.

See the "post" below : "The Return of the Young Fogey "

Tales of Hoffman Square

A classical conversion enriches a former almshouse. Keith Miller reports

College look: built around a courtyard, Hoffman Square has the air of an Oxford college. The refurbishment has filled it with apartments that developers Copthorn Homes called 'lofts'

By Keith Miller12:00AM BST 08 May 2002

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/4814790/Tales-of-Hoffman-Square.html

SHORTLY after the corkscrew-haired savant Peter York hit paydirt with The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in the early 1980s, some of his chums at Harpers & Queen published a slightly more obscure piece of popular social anthropology. This time the tribe under discussion was labelled "The New Georgians": middle-class urbanites moving into dilapidated terraces and doing them up in an archaeologically correct manner. Anachronistic features - rhododendrons, radiators and so on - were out, while obelisks, candlelight, baths with feet and oil-based paints that rubbed off on your jacket were deliciously in.

By and large, the New Georgians have been consigned to the dustbin of history, best remembered as an eccentric rump of the postwar Reconquista which saw the middle classes renounce the suburbs to which their parents had moved and install themselves back in less cosy, more stimulating inner-city areas. Certainly the more passionate and scholarly aspects of 1980s conservationism have given way to something more twee and theatrical. NG commando Dan Cruikshank is now a sort of panto entertainer in the BBC2 heritage slot - and you wouldn't catch Laurence Llewelyn Bowen skimping on the gch. But it was a moment during which strong feelings about architecture were wedded to a passionate, if inevitably rather paternalistic, belief in social engagement: you appreciated the diversity outside your doorstep, and saw yourself as contributing to it.

One of the more ambitious claims made in The New Georgian Handbook was that the fledgling soap EastEnders showed how "the People have survived the modernist experiment". Or, in other words: you knew it was a "real" community because nobody lived in a tower block (it is still the case in the soap that modernist housing is a place where bad and unpredictable things happen, as in the Mel/Dan hostage imbroglio or Steve's Oedipal encounter with his dying mother).

Fast forward 10 years to the mid-1990s, and similarly crunchy neighbourhoods began increasingly to bristle with the latest big idea in urban housing, loft conversions and loft-style developments. These started life as a thrifty option for artists needing a lot of space with no frills - light industrial buildings with exposed steel joists and unplastered internal walls, good for parties and enormous furniture, not so good for fostering traditional domestic feelings of enclosure and protection.

Developers soon realised that such spaces not only enabled them to cut down on their overheads - no need for that early Victorian dado rail - they also held a flattering mirror up to the new breed of young professional. Conspicuous consumption - domestic properties were often priced by the square foot rather than the number of bedrooms - could go hand-in-hand with a sense of modernity and informality, as well as a blurred line between work and play, crucial since the freelance revolution which came in the wake of the early 1990s recession. The market's appetite for loft developments, especially since the onset of the latest price boom, inevitably led to a law of diminishing returns, as the word "loft" began to seem like a means of adding value in itself: one man's loft is another man's bedsit.

Which brings us, finally, to the Hoffman building in Hoxton, joint winner of the Britannia National HomeBuilder Design Award for Best Restoration and Conversion. Built as almshouses by the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers in 1825-27, and designed in a proud Greek Revival style by D R Roper, the building has undergone several enlargements and modifications since. For a century or so it functioned as a furniture design college, a role for which it was ideally situated; the furniture manufacturers in nearby Shoreditch needed a trained workforce, and the notorious slums of Hoxton, Bethnal Green and the Jago were full of youngsters thirsty for education, education and education.

Indeed, with the establishment of Ashbee's Guild and School of Handicraft just around the corner in 1888, the area was a crucible for the aesthetic and political ideas of the Arts & Crafts movement. Its members tended to see craft skills as the way to improve the lot of the deserving poor, much as boxing, football or winning a reality TV show are perceived to be today.

A spicy funk of historical associations hangs over the area. There is some terrific architecture nearby: a church up the road by a pupil of Sir John Soane, a pleasantly ruinous music-hall, several buildings by followers of Norman Shaw, a Passmore Edwards library (now used by ENO) and, just across Kingsland Road, a school by Erno Goldfinger and the Geffrye Museum, once an almshouse itself, now graced by Nigel Coates's nifty brick annexe. A Regency terrace on Buttesland Street to the north was used as a location for the TV movie of the Brinks-Mat robbery, gangland being another rich seam in the district's folklore (although the purist may prefer to buy into the Krays' alma mater, Repton Boys' Club, similarly converted in Bethnal Green a mile or so to the east).

Into this dense architectural and social matrix comes Hoffman Square, a gated bourgeois enclave named after a distinguished Haberdasher of the 19th century, but conveniently also evocative of Josef Hoffman, a founder of the Vienna Secession and a big fan of British designers such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh (and so, maybe, Ashbee). Developers Copthorn Homes and their architects Hunter & Partners have done a beautiful job, restoring the building's classical facade and some of the Arts & Crafts details on the later additions, sensitively incorporating new materials here and there, making any big interventions such as ramps and garages consistent with the existing fabric.

Interiors are clear and lucid, with lots of double-height rooms and galleries, and low partition walls letting plenty of light in from above. Detailing is spare and neutral, with only the ghost of a chimney-breast giving a "period" feel to some of the rooms. Space is used thriftily but not meanly: one virtue made of necessity is a crafty hinged bathroom portal which must make residents think they're scrubbing up on a submarine, but which stops ensuite bathrooms from gobbling up space.

The word Copthorn used when selling these apartments was, needless to say, "lofts". It worked: they've all gone. But that isn't really what they are, even if lots of the spaces are high or open-plan, and the odd girder can be seen inside. The structure reeks of history: a noble facade in a modest neighbourhood, something to do with monasticism (many almshouses were directly modelled on Carthusian monasteries), something to do with a vanished social contract. Solemn and introspective, built round courtyards, it is rather like a tiny Oxbridge college. Certainly it has an ambivalent relationship with its distinctly ungentrified surroundings. One hopes that at least the residents will get on with each other. It might even make a good location for a soap opera.

The Return of the Young Fogey

The term Young Fogey was humorously applied, in British context, to some younger-generation, rather buttoned-down writers and journalists, such as Simon Heffer, Charles Moore and, for a while, A. N. Wilson. The term is attributed to Alan Watkins writing in 1984 in The Spectator.
Young Fogey is still used to describe conservative young men (aged approximately between 15 and 40) who dress in a vintage style (usually that of the 1920's-1950's, also known as the 'Brideshead' look, after the influence of 'Brideshead Revisited', by Evelyn Waugh), and who tend towards erudite, conservative cultural pursuits.
Old, somewhat shabby clothing is preferred, such as heavy tweeds and antique dinner jackets. As well, the favoured mode of transport is the bicycle or Morris Minor. Popular pursuits are classical music, fine wines, pipe smoking, and ecclesiasticana, generally of the High Anglican or Roman Catholic persuasion.
The movement reached its peak in the mid eighties with adherents such as A.N. Wilson and Gavin Stamp. The movement declined in the nineties, but still has a following amongst students at Oxbridge, Durham, Edinburgh, St Andrews and other older universities, as well as in some professions (in particular the antiques and arts dealing world, and the minority classical architecture practices). At Oxbridge, teenage undergraduates can be seen wearing tweed and affecting mannerisms that are reminiscent of a long-gone era; a particular strongholds of Young Fogeys include the Oxford University Conservative Association and Trinity College, Cambridge, but they are also seen elsewhere.
The Young Fogey is sometimes confused with the Sloane Ranger, but this is incorrect; whilst there is some crossover between the two in clothing styles, the Young Fogey tends toward reserved, intellectual and cultured pursuits, and avoids heartiness.
The Young Fogey style of dress also has some surface similarity with the Preppy style, but it is essentially an anglo-centric style, restricted to the United Kingdom and the more anglicised areas of the British Commonwealth such as Australia and New Zealand.
The Chap magazine has revived many aspects of the Young Fogey, albeit in a somewhat boisterous and tongue-in-cheek manner.


It is difficult to define the Young Fogey. The most obvious trait in him however, is that he likes to pretend that the modern age does not exist and that he is living in another era. Any era will do. The Young Fogey knows that such fondness for past times has nothing to do with weakness and little to do with mere nostalgia or escapism. The Young Fogey is tired of consumerism and of the giant shopping mall world; the Young Fogey rebels against the constant search for 'the latest thing'. The Young Fogey believes in Pleasantness, Civility, Music, Art, Literature, gentlemen doffing their hats to ladies... and gentlemen having hats to doff in the first place. The Young Fogey knows the importance of grammar and punctuation; generally dislikes modern architecture, enjoys walking and travelling by train, and laments the difficulty of purchasing good bread, cheese, kippers and sausages (see Alan Watkins' defintion of the Young Fogey for more details).
The Young Fogey knows that a vinyl record is better than a CD, that a book is better than a laptop, and believes that the telephone worth sleeping outside stores for is a 1935 model in deep black - not a small, silver mobile. The Young Fogey has been known to wail: what has happened to the BBC?
The Young Fogey may feel homesick as he watches a period drama or a historical programme be it "Brideshead Revisited", "Pride and Prejudice" or a documentary on Ancient Egypt.
The Young Fogey may read works by William Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Boswell, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy,Charles Dickens,George Gissing, George Eliot, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, E.M Forster, Graham Greene, Marcel Proust, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh (indeed, most Young Fogeys are disciples of Mr Waugh), Anthony Powell, Saki, JRR Tolkien, Kingsley Amis, C.P Snow, James Lees Milne, P.G Wodehouse, Simon Raven, Barbara Pym, Nancy Mitford, George MacDonald Fraser, A.N Wilson, Niall Ferguson, Roger Scruton, Mark Steyn, James Delingpole, Tom Hodgkinson, Eva Rice, Hugh Massingberd, Jonathan Coe...the names stretch into eternity.
The Young Fogey often enjoys the films of Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and Alfred Hitchcock. He never switches off a movie because it's in black and white. The Young Fogey spends long hours deciding who is the better: Mr Fred Astaire or Mr Gene Kelly?
As for music, this varies a lot, of course. So here we discuss pretty much anything from the 1980's back to primitive 'lets dance in grass skirts' BC. Also discussed are are radio programs like Hancock, the Goons, Round the Horne. Poetry is much favoured (well, by some of us,) from Chaucer to Wordsworth to Dylan Thomas to Wendy Cope.
Here at the Young Fogeys Club you can exchange ideas and views with like Fogeyed souls; discuss the revolution that will come as we Young Fogeys prepare to stand up and be counted; as we bewilder the masses with our tweeds and silver hipflasks; with our traffic-stopping hats and perfectly pressed trousers or skirts (sometimes, but not always, depending on the sex of the Young Fogey in question) with our haircuts and homes, with our ability to recite the works of our favourite poets for five solid hours. We are a happy band of brothers (and sisters) confident in the belief that, if we do not rule the world, it is the world's misfortune. And we prize our Freedom and Fogeydom above all else.


A combination of the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton and a Coalition run by public schoolboys has had an interesting side-effect – the return of the Young Fogeys, those young men who wear four-piece tweed suits, read the old Prayer Book and travel around by sit-up-and-beg bicycle, equipped with wicker basket and bicycle clips.

A new society has been set up at Oxford University, called The Young Fogeys of Oxford. They’ve even got their own Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10150138616045696
It’s run by someone called Kelsey Williams at Balliol, who says, “A brief survey of Balliol men and their acquaintances throughout the university suggests that young fogeydom is alive and well and present everywhere, from Duke Humfrey’s to the college dining societies.”

“It’s hardly the most young fogeyish of things to join a Facebook group, but it’s hoped that this one will let isolated young fogeys know they’re not alone and, perhaps, encourage the continued vibrant cultural of young fogeydom in our glorious university.”

It’s an intriguing sociological phenomenon. In 2003, I wrote an article for the Spectator, saying that the Young Fogey had died.

“They’re playing rap music in the jewellery department at Christie’s South Kensington,” I wrote, “In T.M. Lewin, the Jermyn Street shirtmakers, you can dip into a fridge by the cufflinks counter and have a frozen mini-Mars while you are leafing through the chocolate corduroy jackets. Goodbye, braces with old-fashioned fasteners and trouser waistbands strapped perilously close to the nipple line. Farewell, frockcoats cut for long-dead Victorians. No more the endless pairs of black brogues. Hello, suit of modern cut. Hello, moccasins. Hello, loafers.”

It turns out – to quote Evelyn Waugh, a Fogey deity – that I was preaching a panegyric over an empty coffin.

These things go in cycles. The Young Fogey died out in the 2000s – through a combination of a New Labour government, and a tide of international money that obliterated all talk of monocles, wind-up gramophones and discussions over how many buttons you should have on your jacket cuff. The recession, the anarchists on the streets of London, the collapse of the brave new modern world… all of it sends wistful hearts harking back to a supposed golden age of sound, thornproof tweed jackets, stout brogues and a teddy bear stuffed into the armpit.(By Harry Mount, The Telegraph)