12th September 2005
Dear David—it seems a bit odd writing to you in such a formal way given that we are married. But you are now, as you have been every single month at this time for the last ten years, locked away in your study putting the magazine to bed. So I communicate like this or not at all.
I just wanted to remind you that when you had the idea ten years ago of starting a magazine with lots of long articles, I thought it was the worst idea I had ever heard. I think I told you that at the time. Often. No one would read it, I said, it would go out of business and you would have to get a proper job. 115 issues later, I am volunteering to eat my hat, partially, if not entirely.
There is a lot in this magazine that I do find boring, or at least over my head. There is an awful lot that I don't. Prospect is a fantastic achievement. I'm proud of it and you.
Lucy Kellaway
London N5
The London Magazine
6th September 2005
Prospect is to be applauded for its promotion of the short story and support for the new National Short Story prize (September). However, Alexander Linklater made a serious omission in his accompanying article, in which he cited magazines that publish or have published short stories. He forgot the London Magazine, edited by Alan Ross from 1961 until 2001, when he died. Throughout his 40 years at the magazine, Ross always published new fiction, often by unknown writers. Several of the writers whose early work he printed subsequently became celebrated—Hilary Mantel, William Boyd, Graham Swift, Paul Theroux, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, to name a few. Ross also replied at once to all submissions, something almost unheard of nowadays.
Elisa Segrave
London W11
Not Cook's finest hour
30th August 2005
In his tribute to Robin "Cook of the Balkans" (September), Michael Williams describes the 1999 Rambouillet conference as "a determined attempt to avoid war." Nothing could be further from the truth. The then US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and Robin Cook, as Britain's foreign secretary, were determined to fashion at Rambouillet an ultimatum on Kosovo so constructed that the Kosovo Albanians could accept it but the Serbs would be bound to reject it, thus providing a pretext for the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia. Misled by a false analogy between Bosnia and Kosovo, and determined not to repeat what they saw as the west's mistakes in Bosnia, Albright and Cook, supported by Clinton, Blair and some other Nato leaders, deliberately opened the way for the illegal Nato bombing which did not stop but actually accelerated the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo; killed thousands of innocent civilians; did immense damage to the economies of Serbia and other Danube countries; and failed utterly to achieve its political objectives. The eventual settlement, negotiated mainly by the Americans, Germans, Russians and Finns behind the backs of Blair and Cook, discarded all the provisions of the Rambouillet ultimatum that had forced the Serbs to reject it, thereby winning Russian and UN backing which in turn forced the Serbs to accept it. Far from the Nato bombing having compelled the Serbs to swallow the Rambouillet demands, an end to the bombing was a prior condition of the very different UN-approved settlement which eventually allowed Kosovo to be placed under international control with the reluctant acquiescence of the Serbs. There is no reason to suppose that a settlement on those lines could not have been negotiated at Rambouillet, had western diplomacy been more flexible, imaginative—and honest. Not, I'm afraid, Robin Cook's finest hour.
Brian Barder
HM Diplomatic service 1965-94
Parekh on Britishness
30th August 2005
Bhikhu Parekh (August) is right to say that immigrants have a moral obligation to commit themselves to their new community, and to make it their own as far as they can. He refers to the need to "identify with the political community." But in order to identify with the wider community, the immigrant must realise that such a thing exists. Many immigrants come from failed states where corruption is rife, government at all levels hopelessly unreliable and the extended family and good friends the only sources of trust and support. There is no such thing as a wider community for which one might feel respect, let alone a sense of belonging.
I lived in Latin America for many years. One day, one of my friends' sons—a 17 year old called Fernando—was arrested by the police and imprisoned. Immediately, all the family and friends gathered together to achieve one thing: get him out. We checked on who was the chief of police concerned, who the examining magistrate, and found out how we could approach them and how much it would cost. After a few days, and some payment, we got him out and the record was expunged. Then, and only then, did somebody ask Fernando: "What did you do?" Up to that point, his offence (he had stolen a car as a joke) was of no interest.
People who come to live in Britain from, say, Sweden or Germany, find it easy to identify with the country because they come from countries where there is a sense of a political community. They don't have to learn that such a thing exists. We—over hundreds of years—have painfully constructed the community we now live in. We did it by learning to work together, trust each other, and develop a set of common values. They may be flawed in many ways, and change all the time, but they are there.
Nick Shepherd
London E8
English cricket 1
9th September 2005
Geoffrey Wheatcroft says (September) that "English cricket has the flavour of a dying game; the epicentre of the sport is now Asia." What an odd juxtaposition of detail. Is "epicentre or death" the new cry of English cricket supporters? If yes, then English cricket truly is dead. Cricket in England will never attain the following it has in the subcontinent. But for English supporters of the game to console themselves about the shift in epicentre by taking the view that cricket functions in India and Pakistan as "a mark of England" is as absurd as saying that pasta functions in Italy as "a mark of China."
Cricket may have originated in England, but that hardly makes it an English game any more. The beauty of the game does not reside merely in the elegance of its cover drives, but also in its adaptability to different climes, ages and situations. In Pakistan we often play on lifeless pitches that could have made the game impossibly frustrating for pace bowlers, but instead it gave rise to Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, who perfected the art of swinging the ball through the air. In the largest cities of the subcontinent, there are few parks and fields to play on—so street cricket took form and brought with it the scrappier rules of an urban playground (Javed Miandad remains the finest exponent of this kind of cricket). And let's not forget that cricketing legend has it that the difficulty of bowling underarm while wearing long skirts propelled a woman cricketer, Christina Willes, to initiate the practice of overarm bowling. All this is to say that those who feel cricket and tradition must belong in the same box are doing a disservice to the great innovations that the game makes possible.
Incidentally, what is wrong with dressing up as pirates or nuns at a test match? Bandanas and wimples look no more ridiculous than straw boaters. And there has been nothing more wonderful these last weeks than watching a Pakistani innovation adapted so well by England's players in their winning of the Ashes: reverse swing.
Kamila Shamsie
London NW8
English cricket 2
5th September 2005
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's elegy to English cricket ends up expressing puzzlement about its decline. I think I can help. English cricket has been a sport of the shires. This does not necessarily make it rural: coalmining threw up many fine cricketers. But the identity-defining nature of its followers lay with the counties. The administrative as well as the psychological weight of the counties was a stable feature of pre-war England. The clubs could continue to mean something to people who had ties of memory and kinship with the counties, even in imperial London. The brief late summer of postwar cricket could be tied to lingering nostalgia for the Britain that was won in the war and lost to history. The precipitous decline in support for cricket from the 1960s came at the time the counties became a ghostly semi-presence in political and social life; even in small towns, the hyper-urbanism, administrative centralisation and the service sector economy of postwar Britain severed the link with the counties in which they were embedded. Meanwhile, football's support grew as people more easily identified themselves with the impersonal—yet for that reason, inclusive—cities from which football clubs took their names and nature. Wheatcroft intuits this when he suggests that the top five teams in a reconstituted competition be named after the great urban cricket grounds; their appeal would mimic that of football clubs.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Lancaster
Des Hogan's landlady
2nd September 2005
I was interested in Carlo Gébler's article about the Irish writer Des Hogan (September), as Hogan was my tenant for about ten years in my then home in Stanstead Grove, Catford.
There are some inaccuracies in the article. The french windows from the garden to Des's bedroom were not left unlocked when he was out: he bolted them on the inside. And if Des told Gébler that his cat had led him to the house, this was poetic licence: it was only after Des had settled in that he acquired the kitten. He had never had a pet before, and did not know how to look after one. He tried to turn it into a vegetarian—though I explained that, unlike dogs, cats are carnivores, not omnivores.
Sometimes Des would ask me things I was surprised he did not know. For instance, when teaching creative writing, he asked me to explain to him the different usages of a semicolon and a colon. He also got me to type out his applications for literary grants and creative writing courses, as they would look better from my word processor than his old portable typewriter.
Gébler says Des was driven from London by "calamities," but these were all in his mind. Following a minor altercation with a West Indian employee at Catford Tesco's, he imagined he was being pursued by the whole local West Indian populace. So he fled to stay with friends in Hampstead. When I asked him, sardonically, how he could be sure the West Indians would not follow him across the river, he took me seriously, and said it was something that he was worried about.
He then moved away, leaving no forwarding address, and in the end I opened his mail and paid any cheques enclosed into his bank account. His publishers, Faber & Faber, unaware that he had left the house, sent him a box of copies of his new book, Lebanon Lodge. Then my house was partly gutted by fire; I was homeless, and the books was reduced to ashes.
Barbara Smoker
Bromley
