Convenience Big Store: Sentenced to reading the classics

11 September, 2021

Hello,

You have to hand it to the judge who sentenced a white supremacist to reading great works of literature rather than jail. Whether or not he was right, it was certainly an imaginative approach to justice and I rather admire the thinking behind it. As Melvyn Bragg has observed, if you become absorbed by the fate of Elizabeth Bennet or Anna Karenina, you have less time to spend thinking about yourself or fretting about the state of the world. Or, indeed, reading white supremacist propaganda. See below.

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All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Neo-Nazi trial

An illustration from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

Sentenced to reading the classics

The trial last week of a Nazi sympathiser descended into a "book club meeting", says David Woode in the I newspaper. Instead of a 15-year sentence for downloading bomb-making instructions and "preparing an act of terror", 21-year-old Ben John, who owned 70,000 white supremacist documents, received a 24-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, and a weighty reading list of literary classics. "Have you read Dickens? Austen?" asked the judge, Timothy Spencer QC. "Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night." John, described by the judge as "lonely" and "highly susceptible", is to be tested on his knowledge of the books in court by Spencer every four months. The anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate wants the case reviewed because it sends a soft message to white supremacists. It's all "stranger than fiction".

Fat chance of this working, says Amanda Craig in The Sunday Times. Fiction is, as Francis Spufford put it in his memoir The Child That Books Built, "a mood-altering drug", but it is "rarely a mind-altering one". It is intended to entertain, not to convert. Hitler loved Shakespeare, and his top four novels were Uncle Tom's Cabin, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and Don Quixote. Indeed, some of the nastiest people I have ever encountered have been English literature grads and authors. Spite, snobbery and prejudice are all familiar features of those saturated in literature. And as a novelist myself, I should know. "We are not all good people."

I agree it sounds bananas, says Peter Isackson on the American website FairObserver.com. But isn't this eccentric judge on to something? Most telling is his remark that John's internet habits were "repellent… to any right-thinking person". If you want to teach someone to be "right-thinking", start with the classics. Calling in great writers of the past as witnesses of what right-thinking people believe "will at least rob such individuals of the time they would dedicate to reading downloaded extremist literature". Who knows, reading great works from the past may stir his soul: "Instead of engaging in the crime of downloading with intent, he may start uploading with creative ambition."

You might want to take a second glance at this reading list, says Michael Deacon in the Telegraph. If this susceptible Nazi sympathiser reads Dickens's Oliver Twist, he will encounter Fagin, "a nakedly anti-semitic stereotype". In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, he'll find Shylock, who is similarly problematic. For extra credit, he might discover that Evelyn Waugh admired Mussolini, Ezra Pound supported Hitler and WB Yeats approved of eugenics: "Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes". He will find that Philip Larkin wrote a poem urging the government to "kick out the n*s". Frankly, it feels more sensible to send the repulsive young Ben John straight to jail, "tucked up in his bunk with a nice, safe Dan Brown".

🧑⚖️📚 Creative punishments are not uncommon in Ohio, says the I's David Woode, and judge Michael Cicconetti is the master. A man caught with a loaded gun was sent to a morgue to view corpses. Two teenagers who scrawled graffiti on a Nativity figure of Jesus had to lead a donkey through the streets, carrying a sign that said: "Sorry for the jackass offence, but he is soooo cute!" And a man who called police officers "pigs" after being stopped for a driving offence had to stand on a street corner with a 350lb pig and a sign saying: "This is not a police officer."

Life

Before John le Carré became a spy, then a novelist, he was my German teacher at Eton, says Ferdinand Mount in The Oldie. David Cornwell – or Corns, as we called him – was barely 25 and innocuous-looking, "with a mop of corn-coloured hair and a soft, hesitant, slightly insinuating voice as though he means you to read between the lines of what he is saying".

The sixth-form German class was notoriously tough: the previous incumbent "retired hurt to go and teach in a girl's school". But from the start Cornwell was in control, switching on charm or menace at will. "When the yobs at the back start to make trouble, he delivers merciless and exact parodies of their arrogant, languid voices." His end-of-term reports could be scathing.

We struck up a friendship – dinners after school with his wife, rambling conversations about Goethe, debates about Eton's funny hierarchies and uniform rules. I'm not sure why he liked me. Maybe because I was quite good at German. Maybe because my mother had died over the summer holidays and I looked glum. "Looking back, I sometimes wonder why he was just about the only person who could get through to me in my frozen misery, when his own mother had disappeared from his life when he was five years old. But perhaps that was why."

Cornwell left Eton only a term or two after I did. He was going to join the Foreign Office, but somehow word got round that there was more to it. "Corns is going to be a spy," everyone said. "Waste of a good teacher, I think."

Property

THE COTTAGE Gotten Manor, on the Isle of Wight, is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Once a working farm, it's set in five acres, with a pool, a kitchen garden and views of the south coast. The sensitively restored main house has six bedrooms, a country kitchen and a library, and the outbuildings include a two-bedroom milk house and a three-bedroom cart house. £2m.

Podcast

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images

The coffee that saved my life

On 11 September, 2001, I was in Manhattan, on my way to have breakfast at the top of the World Trade Center's north tower before a 9.30am meeting in the south tower, BBC correspondent Stephen Evans told Radio 4's Today. But I popped into a Cuban coffee shop instead. "Coffee and pastries delayed me just enough." As I entered the south tower's lobby at 8.46, the first plane struck the north tower "with an almighty metallic crash". I ran from the dust-filled lobby to see "the gash where the first plane had gone in, flames coming out".

I rang in a live report from a newsagent at the base of the tower, but was kicked out when, at 9.03, a plane struck the south tower. Evacuated from a nearby hotel when the south tower collapsed at 9.59, I found myself in the street as the other tower collapsed half an hour later. "The debris exploded towards me… It was the only moment of true, in your guts, fear." But I outran the dust cloud, jumping into a cab with a Chinese-American woman – who suddenly said she was going into labour, giving me a piece of paper with her husband's number. "I'm ashamed to say I lost the paper in the turmoil."

A few evenings later, I visited my regular pub, a narrow bar on 11th Street. It was dark, packed, but subdued. The barman "clasped both my hands in his and just held them tight". Strangers did that in the days after 9/11. The American flag was flying everywhere, so I bought a Stars and Stripes sweater and puffed out my chest "in defiance and pride". I still stand in solidarity with "a great, mongrel modern city which defied those zealots".

Listen to Evans's story here.

Books

It's easy to hate how popular Sally Rooney is, says Anne Enright in The Guardian. Since 2017 the Irish writer has sold more than three million novels, cracked America and adapted both her books for television – all by the age of 30. No wonder people are jealous. And there's bad news for the Rooney naysayers: her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber £16.99), is just as brilliant.

The story follows four Irish millennials: Eileen, a smart but struggling writer; Simon, her left-wing lover; Felix, a beautiful and moody warehouse worker; and his girlfriend, Alice, a literary superstar who worries she has "only had two good ideas". Alice is a handy vehicle for moaning about fame, but Rooney is at her "coolest" when she's writing about love. These are the best sex scenes around, "with her distinctive choreography of the gaze, and of the breath, and a mighty precision about what-goes-where". The last third, when the four characters meet, is extraordinary. "The dialogue never falters and the prose burns up the page."

I'm not especially moved by this dour tale of "young women with large brains, small bodies and highly developed theories about the exploitative economy", says Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. Standout lines include "I suppose I'm very unhappy" and "It's very difficult". What's more, it's a carbon copy of her last two books. About 50 pages in, "I began wondering if I was reading the first literary novel written by machine intelligence". I imagine her editors sticking books one and two into a shiny new contraption, "pressing a few buttons and producing a third Rooney to order".

On the contrary, this is Rooney's best book yet, says James Marriott in The Times. Everyone calls her a millennial sensation – JD Salinger for the Snapchat generation – but Beautiful World, Where Are You is strikingly old-fashioned. Essentially, the novel is a quiet look at relationships and all the clutter that comes with them. Near the end, two characters embrace at an ugly countryside railway station. They're so enamoured that they don't notice anything around them – not the man sneezing, the billboard turning or the plastic bottle rolling across the platform. It's perfect. "And, you think, the novel would not be beautiful or serious without all those things in it: sincerity, absurdity, love, beauty and the ordinary trash and trivia of everyday life."

Quoted

"Gavin Williamson doesn't turn up in person to Universities UK conference in Newcastle – but uses his video link speech to warn universities to get back to in-person teaching."

Times education editor Nicola Woolcock on Twitter