Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life – review

 

Iris Murdoch

BOOK OF THE DAY

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life – review

Ideas are a little submerged by biography – and soft furnishings – in this account of how Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot sought to refute logical positivism in wartime Oxford

Andrew Anthony

Tue 8 Feb 2022 07.00 GMT

Few people read books about philosophy nowadays, if they ever did, but there is a larger audience for books about philosophers. One of the more successful examples in this flourishing genre was David Edmonds’s and John Eidinow’s Wittgenstein’s Poker, published in 2001, which examined a brief and tense meeting between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper that took place in Cambridge in 1946.

David Simon: 'Treme is a story about how American urban culture defines how we live'

David Simon, creator of The Wire. Photograph: Graham Jepson/

The New Review Q&A

Interview

David Simon: 'Treme is a story about how American urban culture defines how we live'

The creator of The Wire discusses Martin Amis, Baltimore accents and Treme, his upcoming TV show

Andrew Anthony
Sunday 12 February 2010

Tell me about Treme, the show set in New Orleans you're currently producing.

It's a very different piece from The Wire. We're not trying to do a crime story or a political story. This is a story about culture and how American urban culture defines how we live. New Orleans is an extraordinary and unusual culture, but it comes from the same primal forces in American society of immigration and assimilation and non-assimilation and racism and post-racialism that really are the defining characteristics of this melting pot society. What is it about Americans that makes us Americans? The one thing we have unarguably given the world is African-American music. If you walk into a shebeen in South Africa, or whatever version of a bar they have in Kathmandu, if they have a jukebox, you're going to find some Michael Jackson, some Otis Redding, some John Coltrane. It has gone around the world. That is the essential American contribution to worldwide culture. The combination of African rhythms and the pentatonic scale and European instrumentation and arrangement. That collision of the two happened in a 12-square block area of a city called New Orleans that had a near-death experience in 2005.

What shape is New Orleans in now?

Before the storm, the city had the highest ratio population in America of natives, because nobody left. But people have not been able to get back. I would say only about two-thirds have returned. The housing stock is still diminished. The political infrastructure is still dysfunctional – it still has lots of crime problems. But the culture is resurgent and right now the city is ecstatic. Mardi Gras has just finished but also the Super Bowl has brought the city together. There was an allegiance over the Saints march to the Super Bowl that transcended all other arguments over race and class. How long that lasts is another thing. But right now the city's riding a peculiar high that's wonderful to be around.

There were plenty of in-jokes in The Wire, with local figures like the real police commissioner cast in an unlikely role. Do you get up to similar antics in Treme?

Yeah, we do. There are references to locals and some lines that only New Orleanians will get but they won't interfere with the contextual understanding of the scenes as a whole for viewers outside New Orleans. But for people in the music community and in the cuisine culture, these lines are going to be inside jokes. It's one way of saying that we want the show to be written from within rather than without. When you write from the inside, it creates a credibility for the piece for a whole. There were lines in Generation Kill that only a marine would laugh at.

Martin Amis was an early fan of yours. Do you reciprocate that interest?

Before I got together with my current wife, we were co-workers in prior relationships at the Baltimore Sun. One day she came back from interviewing Martin Amis and he had been reading Homicide in preparation for writing Night Train. To her, I'm the ink-stained schnook and she came up to my desk and said: "You're not going to believe this but I've just interviewed Martin Amis and he thinks you're the bee's knees." Because I was so ignorant, I said: "Who's Martin Amis?" She ran through his canon and I got nothing. And she goes, "Kingsley Amis's son?" And I go, "Who's Kingsley Amis?" Last year we went out to dinner with Martin – I've since read a lot of his books – and I told him that story by way of saying, "This is the ignorant unread ass I was and, look, she still married me!"

Your work pays a great deal of attention to authentic detail. It was surprising to discover, therefore, how many British and Irish actors you cast in The Wire.

Sometimes a guy comes in and nails a part in an evocative way and you think he can do it. And when you get a read like that, you hear the accent and the cultural differences and you say, "Well, can we get there?" That's what happened with Dominic [West], Idris [Elba] and Aidan [Gillen]. None of them was able to get a Baltimore accent. But none of the black or white actors from New York or LA was able to get a Baltimore accent. It's the toughest. There are people who tell me it is reminiscent of what you hear in Devon and Cornwall. I went to see War Horse in London last year. When the woman who played the Devon farm wife came out with her first line of dialogue, my son and I turned to each other and we both said: "She's from Baltimore."

Any compromising stories about Dominic West?

His first season in Baltimore seemed to suggest that bacchanalian feats would be legendary and the town would never be the same again. Then Dominic hooked up with his wife midway through our run, and he became as quiet and temperate as a church mouse. The thing is, Dominic is really smart and he hides it. There's a degree from Trinity College there and a lot of book learning and a lot of cultural points that do not elude him. He plays the Jack the Lad character, but he directed for us and he did a good job. I want to use him on Treme if we get a second season.

How do you think Obama is doing?

I'm a little disappointed, but actually what I'm most disappointed in is the Democratic leadership in the Congress. This new administration's own inexperience, coupled with some really ineffectual law-making, have conspired to grind the body politic to a halt. The money interests have managed once again to make us inert.

You've gone from the desert to a flood, a biblical transition. What's next up, pestilence?

Yeah, or frogs, or vermin, or death of the first-born. The next project, in terms of producing, is this mini-series based on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. It was an act of terrorism in war time that shocked the entire nation and it resulted in some very rational immediate reaction on the part of the government and then some other things that were irrational and destructive, right down to military tribunals. It has a lot of parallels to the 9/11 moment.

THE GUARDIAN

The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew O’Hagan – review

Andrew O’Hagan scrutinises a trio of slippery figures in these vivid essays exploring the internet’s effect on our sense of self

Andrew Anthony
Sunday 11 June 2017

T

he internet has changed us, our means of communication, what we believe to be true, our identities and sense of self. That is a statement of such obviousness that we rarely stop to think about what it all actually means. But Andrew O’Hagan explores these themes with great depth and originality in three long essays – originally published in the London Review of Books – that make up his new collection, The Secret Life.

The first, entitled Ghosting, concerns that pathologically divisive figure, Julian Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks is awash with fictional potential. So much so that characters based on him regularly turn up in novels (Jonathan Franzen’s Purity) and TV dramas (Homeland).

O’Hagan, though, was commissioned to write ghostwrite Assange’s autobiography. On the surface, it was an inspired choice of author and subject. O’Hagan, a vivid and meticulous writer, was sympathetic to Assange’s cause, and he has the talent and staying power to draw even the most enigmatic characters out into the open.

But as becomes apparent in the essay, things didn’t go according to plan. This is partly because Assange is an unreliable narrator but a reliable narcissist. It’s also because he’s spent his life hiding in online shadows, where myths grow like fungus.

The Australian is caught between wanting to promote himself and maintain a secretive control of his image. It makes for a fascinating portrait of a prickly character who affects an egalitarian stance while awarding himself exceptional status, in which anything he does, however questionable, is by definition good because he’s the one doing it.

As O’Hagan becomes steadily more disillusioned, he can’t ignore the massive hypocrisy in which Assange indulges. For example, he makes WikiLeak employees sign contracts that threaten them with a £12m lawsuit if they disclose information about the organisation. As O’Hagan writes: “He can’t understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every  time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes.”

O’Hagan’s eyes come in for a lot of exercise as he carefully documents a man whose ego invariably triumphs over his conscience. Gradually, the relationship comes apart as Assange attempts to play everyone off against one another. Although O’Hagan manages to get together a 70,000-word draft, Assange – then wanted for questioning in Sweden on a potential rape charge – thwarts his own book, for which he’s been handsomely paid, by refusing to sign off the manuscript.

Eventually the book comes out as a whole new genre: the “unauthorised autobiography”. This is not a hatchet job, but rather the best and most finely nuanced journalistic profile that this reviewer has read this century.

In the pantheon of internet celebrities Satoshi Nakamoto is not nearly as famous or infamous as Assange, but he is certainly more mysterious. Nakamoto is the inventor of bitcoins, the so-called cryptocurrency that has helped the illicit darknet flourish, and which, now legally traded, could one day prove the end of banks and money markets.

Nakamoto is a pseudonym that was a presence on the net during bitcoin’s development and release in 2009. Then it and its owner disappeared, prompting in their wake a search for the real Nakamoto that has turned him into the abominable snowman of the digital age.

In late 2015, O’Hagan was approached by an intermediary to write the life story of Nakamoto, who he was told was one Craig Steven Wright, another Australian who was about to become a fugitive from justice.

Intrigued but wary, O’Hagan decides to spend as much time as possible with Wright in an effort to get to the elusive truth. But in The Satoshi Affair we see that Wright is a frustratingly complex character who conceals every bit as much as he reveals. He shows O’Hagan a wealth of documentary evidence, much of it extremely technical and layman-unfriendly. Yet he stops short of providing conclusive proof that he is Nakamoto. Is this because he is a conman – he gets involved in a multimillion dollar business venture that is dependent on his being Nakamoto – or because he’s reluctant to give his true self up? The answer to that question remains, like so much that concerns the internet, enticingly out of reach.

Squeezed between these two compelling character studies is a relatively short essay entitled The Invention of Ronald Pinn. This Nabokovian-sounding figure is a dead man of around O’Hagan’s age whom the author reanimates online, creating a series of supporting fake identities on social media.

It’s a strange, slightly haunting voyage into digital life that reads as much like a short story as an essay. It ends with O’Hagan encountering the dead man’s mother. And suddenly, at the core of this excellent collection, we glimpse the unbridgeable difference between the real and the invented.

• The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew O’Hagan is published by Faber (£14.99).

THE GUARDIAN

Rebecca Hall / I was worried everyone would hate me

Rebecca Hall
Photograph by Richard Saker

Rebecca Hall

"I was worried everyone would hate me"

Being the daughter of Britain's best-known theatre director Sir Peter Hall might have had its advantages. But outstanding performances in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Frost/Nixon and C4's upcoming thriller Red Riding prove that Rebecca Hall is not just daddy's girl

Andrew Anthony
Sunday 22 February 2009 00.01 GMT

E

ver since she was a little girl, Rebecca Hall has been identified as a promising talent. The daughter of Sir Peter Hall, who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was director of the National Theatre, and Maria Ewing, the celebrated opera and jazz singer, she had great expectations encoded in her genes.

At 10 she appeared in her father's TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn and also got herself an agent. And though her parents placed her fledgling career on hold for a decade, Hall's first adult appearance on stage, in Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession - again in a production by her father - landed her the Ian Charleson Award.

Rebecca with her father, theatre director Peter Hall, in 2010. Photograph by Dave M Benett

The award is given for the most outstanding classical performance on the British stage by an actor under 30. Hall was 20, fast-tracked from Cambridge University to Cambridge Circus, without any of the bother of drama school or life in provincial rep. Instead, with her lithe beauty and theatrical heritage, she walked straight into magazine lists of newcomers to watch.

Put all of this together, the famous parents, the elite university, the nepotism, the precocious success, and the photogenic bone structure, and 27-year-old Hall could seem like a walking overdose of old-fashioned privilege. From such an assessment, it would be tempting to conclude that her talent was much less about natural promise than predetermined profile.

Or at least it would be if her evident ability was not currently on display in Frost/Nixon, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Channel 4's Red Riding, adapted from David Peace's novels of the same name. She plays, respectively, David Frost's jet-set girlfriend, a neurotic Manhattanite abroad, and a working-class femme fatale, and in each role she is instantly and memorably convincing.

Rebecca Hall

I meet Hall in a café in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from her SoHo apartment. Her agent told me how to spot the actress: "She's tall and very pretty." She didn't take long to find. Dressed in black, she looks like she walked off the cover of a Velvet Underground album. Hall is what is often termed "willowy", meaning that she is tall but she wears her height with style.