The Black General

Brigadier-General Horace Sewell was one of the most distinguished British cavalry officers of the First World War.

In action from the very start of British involvement on the Western Front, he survived the desperate mounted charge with cold steel against artillery and machine guns at Audrigines on 24th August 1914. By March 1915, he had risen to command his regiment, while battlefield bravery won him a DSO in June. A grateful French Republic bestowed the Légion d'honneur the next year. Earning a bar to his DSO at Cambrai in 1917, he was promoted to command the 1st Cavalry Brigade in April 1918, which he led until the war's end - the youngest British cavalry general in the Great War. He was twice wounded, five times mentioned in dispatches, and, after the Armistice, inducted into the noble Order of St Michael and St George. Only a knighthood or a Victoria Cross would have been higher honours.

At first sight, General Sewell appears to have been a conventional hero of a hundred years ago: a younger son of a Victorian gentleman, born in a Welsh mansion and raised in a Gothic castle on the Isle of Wight, he attended Harrow and Cambridge before joining the Army in 1900. On leave in 1916, he married a New York heiress (very much the "in thing" in those days), and after the War, he acquired a medieval manor house in Warwickshire, a coat of arms, and the requisite entry in Burke's Landed Gentry. His son later married a sister of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, co-heiress of the longest noble pedigree in the British Isles.

In World War II, General Sewell was sent to Washington, D.C., to head up the British public-relations campaign in the USA. He became the prototype of the retired general who enlivens the TV news with informed commentary, and took advantage of his posting in America to spend more time at the Jamaican mansion he had inherited from his elder brother.

That last detail conceals a truth that passes without mention in the memoirs of his comrades, and the biographical sketches that grace the pages of family histories and society almanacs.

Horace Sewell was, as his American acquaintances of the 1940s succinctly put it, "black".

The British general was the grandson of a Caribbean slave.

Mary McCrea was the property of Colonel Malcolm, the pious Scottish proprietor of a Jamaican sugar plantation. William Sewell was the Colonel's accountant, a man with a short, pugilistic temper and a physique to match, born apparently in England's tough north-west and bred in London's rough East End.

Jamaican tradition describes the romance of the slave girl and the book-keeper as a love match, and when the pious Colonel insisted that Mr. Sewell needed to marry a white woman or resign his post, he simply walked out. Mary followed, along with their son Henry.

They opened a small store in a village nearby, selling rum and other supplies. It was an unconventional decision for a white man on Jamaica in the 1830s, but perhaps it was the natural response of a mixed-race couple to the sudden transformation of the island's society. The enslaved population won full emancipation in 1838, and most of them promptly left the plantations to settle down in small communities in the backwoods. Without the inhuman social division of slavery, with no way to compel a large labour force to work for low overheads, conventional wisdom said that the days of the great sugar plantations were over.

Colonel Malcolm's heirs moved back to Argyll, and invented the West Highland Terrier.

But now, William Sewell saw an opportunity. The plantation owners were selling out for any price they could get, shifting to bananas or cutting back production; but the accountant and shopkeeper knew that a collapse in the sugar supply would be followed by a sharp rise in demand, and thus in prices and in profits. The story goes that the agent for a group of absentee owners, desperate to sell, offered to loan him the capital he needed to buy them out; he talked it over with Mary, and they took the risk. Another plantation followed, and another. Within twenty years, William Sewell had built up a vast "sugar empire", and moved from his little rum shop to one of the island's grandest mansions.

The Sewells sent their mixed-race son Henry back to England, where he seems to have taken some pride in the scandal of being a "nigger from Jamaica"; he married a respectable English wife, and the family settled in some style at Llanwrin in Wales, where Horace Somerville Sewell, the future general, was born in 1881. Later, giving up Plas Llwyngwern to the Marquis of Londonderry's sister, they moved to the even grander Steephill Castle overlooking the English Channel; but they always tried to spend part of the year in Arcadia, their eighteenth-century mansion on Jamaica - courtesy of the three-masted sugar clipper Vale Royal, which doubled as a family yacht.

Jamaican historians have described Henry Sewell as "structurally white", a man whose economic power made his origins irrelevant. Contemporary writers pass over his mixed-race ancestry in silence, and the family tradition describes Mary McCrea as a mulatto with a white father, even an admiral's daughter - a claim that, her modern descendants have suggested, may be rather whitewashed.

Jamaican history says that she was happy in her widowhood with a little self-sufficient croft, saving her annual revenue from her son's plantations: when one of her granddaughters, Horace's sister, fell in love with a man who Henry regarded as unsuitable, she provided the girl with a handsome dowry and told her to marry the man she loved.

Presumably she spent time with her youngest grandson, too.

This, then, was the background of Brigadier-General H.S. Sewell, CMG, DSO (and bar), commanding officer of the 4th Dragoon Guards and the 1st Cavalry Brigade on the Western Front.

In hindsight, it seems obvious why the General's nickname was "Sambo", but until the truth was known, scholars simply put this down to the arcane logic of the British soldier, perhaps connected to his three-year secondment leading native troops in West Africa before the war, perhaps to some private joke.

Modern historians were nonplussed when the real reason for his nom de guerre emerged.

But what is more remarkable is that no-one mentioned it. Comrades remembered Sewell as a handsome man (as his father had been), wearing civilian riding-breeches to war, brown corduroy in preference to his uniform jodhpurs. They didn't think it was worth mentioning why they called him Sambo.

Such attitudes weren't completely unprecedented: shortly before the War, a major English novellist had created a plucky mixed-race heiress as a memorable literary heroine (and, like the officers of the 4th Dragoon Guards, he didn't bother to spell it out for the reader, either).

To an extent, these omissions were obviously a way of tacitly stepping around conventional prejudices - they may even be a way of negotiating the writers' own prejudices; but even if they were, they also indicate a tacit truth. In the absence of the enforced barriers that had been supposed to embody a black-and-white distinction between one human being and another, that distinction ceased to exist at all.

Old Etonian officers and strapping young troopers from the Home Counties followed the grandson of a Jamaica slave, the man they called Sambo: they followed him willingly, with drawn sabres, into the shrapnel of the Western Front.

It is somewhat sobering to note that Horace Sewell remains the only general officer in the history of the British Army to be identified as "black".

The Secret of the Radcliffe Camera

The Radcliffe Camera stands in central Oxford, a large domed building in the neoclassical style: all columns and squared masonry and decorative swags. Its lead-clad cupola provides a distinctive piece of punctuation in the city’s spire-pinnacled skyline, and the tawny ashlar facade makes a lovely visual centrepiece in a little pedestrianized square.

It’s especially useful as a backdrop for the ITV detective dramas and quirky Holywood movies that like to film in the city. It’s one of the great buildings of England.

The students, of course, know that the "Rad Cam" is a library - although it’s a slightly impractical one, often regarded with a faint sense of irony, as if its ostensible role isn’t quite to be taken seriously.

They’re right about this, with the instinctive awareness that smart young people so often have. The Radcliffe Camera contains the requisite panoply of books, student desks and Bodleian staff, but it isn’t really a library at all; that’s simply what it’s used as, not what it truly is.

It’s actually a Jacobite sight-gag, a massive, bizarrely inappropriate statement of sympathy for a Scottish political movement of the eighteenth century.

No, really. Trust me?

The Jacobites, in case you need a reminder, were those subjects of the British crown who refused to accept the exile of the Stuart royal dynasty in 1688. Many went into exile with their kings, many more involved themselves in repeated civil wars to try and oust the Dutch and German rulers who they saw as usurpers.

Now, there were Irish, English and Welsh Jacobites, but as you would expect for the uncompromising supporters of a Scottish dynasty, Jacobitism was primarily a Scottish movement, with its "heart in the Highlands": when an English regiment was added to the Jacobite army in 1745, they were expected to wear tartan like all the rest.

Unfortunately, by the time the Radcliffe Camera was inaugurated in 1749, the Jacobites were effectively out of business: their last chance of ousting the Hanoverian dynasty had ended three yeers earlier when Bonnie Prince Charlie ran away after Culloden; but Oxford is probably the only place in England that would have built a massive visual homage to a defunct Scottish political movement.

And so they did.

The first key to unlock the true meaning of this Jacobite monument is the unusual architecture: built on a monumental scale, a tall vertical volume beneath a dome, symmetrical in plan and without any flanking ranges or exedrae to disrupt the monolithic form.

Small rotunda buildings of similar design are found in the baroque architecture of Italy, derived from Roman mausoleums: the most famous is Bramante’s Tempietto, a tiny chapel in the courtyard of a monastery’s cloister; and James Gibbs, the architect of the Rad Cam, was certainly a disciple of the Italian baroque school; but the Rad Cam is, as far as I can tell, unique in its scale and non-religious role.

Large secular buildings with a dome over a tall block with a strict radial symmetry and no flanking wings existed only in one place: the Jacobite imagination, particularly in the work of Gibbs’ friend, collaborator and patron the Earl of Mar.

These imagined buildings were fantasy redesigns of the traditional Scottish castle. The tall, battlemented towers that were the prestige statements of the Stuart kingdom’s national architecture, given a neoclassical translation in a series of proposals for rebuilding and homage: an architecture of exile that would be put into action by the supporters of the House of Stuart when they reclaimed the kingdom from which they had been exiled.

Now, let’s look at the Radcliffe Camera again: a bulky, vertical tower, with no flanking ranges to distract from its impact, and sculptural detail firmly subordinated to the geometry of the volume: defined by the “Streight Line without any breaking”, as in Mar’’s language of Jacobite architecture and in the disciplined facades of Scottish castle keeps.

Inside, the ground floor is a brooding, heavily vaulted undercroft that seems almost like an arsenal; it was accessed originally through heavy gates of gridded iron bars: an unconventional sort of doorway for any sort of building in England, but the traditional prestige entrance in Scotland, where they’re known as yetts.

A winding stair takes the visitor up into the main interior space, a huge room lit by windows set in deep embrasures, connected by passages in the massive depth between the inner and outer walls, and covered by a plasterwork vault: a Scottish great hall, deconstructed into the architectural language of Vitruvius in the form of an annular collonade around a circular central space. The white stucco decoration on the vault evokes the flamboyant interiors of seventeenth-century Scottish exemplars (though in a bizarre twist, much of the Rad Cam’s “stucco” was actually carved stone disguised as plasterwork).

The mezzanine galleries also have a place in the Jacobites’ castle-derived classicism, but I suspect their true meaning is more complicated and more sophisticated than an over-extended homage to the late-medieval entresol: the circular open space between the gallery balustrades, and indeed the circular opening that unites the main space with the vaulted dome above, represent an adaption of the oubliette, the central lightwell that Mar introduced into the Jacobite architectural grammar, derived from the thirteenth century via his ancestral donjon at Kildrummy.

The abstract monumentality of the building and the baroque guise of the detailing have transformed this gothic detail beyond all sense of practicality, but the architectural language is all the more distinctively Jacobite for that.

And, surmounting the whole composition: an encircling battlement, and a caphouse, originally intended to be stone-flagged, but eventually finished in an equally appropriate covering of lead sheeting. These baroque battlements are accessed from indoors by a separate stair, firmly disconnected from the main entrance flight, and modestly concealed behind a doorway.

It may be circular. It may be neoclassical in every detail of its architecture. It may be pretending to be a library, and located in central Oxford.

But the Radcliffe Camera is actually a Scottish castle.

And having commissioned a Jacobite architect to build this Jacobite building, the University proceeded to top it out with a ceremony that proves they knew exactly what they were doing. The centrepiece of the inauguration was an extended double entendre in Latin, delivered to a packed audience in the Sheldonian Theatre: ostensibly a conventional oration about how the new library symbolized a restoration of ancient virtue and wisdom at the expense of corrupt modern values; but really a political speech calling for the return of the Stuart dynasty.

It was, by all accounts, very well received.

It’s hard to know how serious this Jacobite statement was meant to be three years after Culloden; how much the funerary aesthetic of the rotunda model was a tacit acknowledgment that the Stuarts were a lost cause, or if the contrasting emphases of mourning and hope were intended as part of a paradoxical but coherent statement.

Regardless, we shouldn’t underestimate the intellectual and political sophistication of early modern Oxford - in 1683, they had impounded a new edition of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and made a bonfire of it in the Bodleain Library quad; the idea of a book-burning might have unpleasant connotations from more recent history, but this was one where everyone stood around singing cheerfully, warming themselves and (I think, though I can’t find a source for it right now) roasting chestnuts. It was, in short, an elegant disproval of Hobbes’ cynical ideology: a statement of the ability of ordinary human beings to organize themselves as a community and have some innocent fun, with no need for a powerful, controlling state to tell them what to do.

Of course, like many of the best jokes (such as Belgium), part of the fun of the Radcliffe Camera is that its architects don’t explain what they’re doing.

The building stands as an emphatically impressive public monument, a sculptural form and a statement on the skyline; but the underlying meaning is only visible to the cognoscenti, those who possess the deeper cultural perspectives that enable them to understand what’s going on -- or those who, in later ages, stumble piece by piece upon details that reveal a glimpse of the true story: Oxford’s silent tribute (and majestic statement) in honour of the Jacobite cause.

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The images used in this piece are sourced from Wikipedia, where they were authored by User:Supergolden and Newton2 respectively, and made available for reproduction under the Gnu Free Documentation License, which by my understanding governs their use here and all other reproduction, right?

Random Movie Week #4: Coriolanus

My plan to see Coriolanus on Thursday went awry, but I managed to catch it this afternoon; and I'm glad I did, because it's an excellent film.

It's also a very different film from the other three I've caught this week, far more austere: this is a low-budget independent movie, so it just has a cast of A-list actors led by the stars of The English Patient and Machine Gun Preacher, an army of real Main Battle Tanks and Humvees, and a script by William Shakespeare.

Do you need anything else?

Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's less-well-known plays, although no less an authority than T.S. Eliot thought it was his best. It tells the story of the Roman general Coriolanus, a man of inflexible strength, and the betrayal that turned him against his city.

This is regarded as a difficult play; but it's also one that has resonated down the centuries, fitting unexpectedly in every new context: to Beethoven, it was about the spiritual isolation of the romantic hero; Eliot saw in it an image of the rise of fascism, a deadly farce; to Brecht, it was a Marxist parable; and today, in the hands of Ralph Fiennes - director, producer and lead actor - it serves as a mirror for our fragmented, photo-manipulated, tribally sophisticated society.

This film updates the action from the fifth century B.C. into a modern Balkan landscape, where characters like General Martius and the hill-country tribal warlord Aufidius fit effortlessly; to add to the effect, there are some odd incongruities - the Romans retain their classical paganism, but the iconography of the rival Volsces is Christian, perhaps specifically Catholic like the Croats: the result is a story that defies time and place while remaining rooted in the visceral realities of belief and nationalism, and the way they unravel in war; needless to say, the play also finds very contemporary resonance in the events of the Arab Spring.

The production also modernizes by making the story interact with the rhythms of the media age, slicing the script into soundbites, overlapping sections of dialogue and intercutting different scenes, as arguments interrupt speeches and broadcasts silence conversations: the interplay between screen and audience, inherent in any movie, appears in diverse and effective ways. The script isn't afraid to make dramatic edits, either - one character, who survives in Shakespeare's play, commits a Roman suicide in this version. Blood from slit wrists dribbles from smart white shirt cuffs; there's no sense of incongruity in the combination of ancient and contemporary elements, nor in the violent change to the narrative. It's only with hindsight that I realise how disparate the well-integrated the components of this film are: the setting they combine to create is completely believable.

Not every juxtaposition is completely successful, of course: there's a coyness to the opening, which seems a little shy to introduce the unfamiliar cadences of Renaissance dialogue alongside its harshly-framed news-camera images; but thankfully, this problem quickly resolves itself, and after the first ten or twenty minutes, there's only the occasional stumble on the poetic rhythms of the dialogue.

It seems churlish to say that Fiennes, who is almost single-handedly responsible for this movie and its triumph, suffers most from this in the opening scenes: perhaps because he was directing himself for the first time, perhaps because his jagged, abrasive interpretation of the character is deliberately biting at his own poetry; perhaps because his interpretation of his character seemed most at odds with the reading that Shakespeare's words suggest to me. But there's no question that this is a terrific performance: this proud, disciplined soldier is by turns savage, shell-shocked, tender, lost, and vengeful, both adamantine hero and all-too-knowing cynic.

Gerard Butler's Aufidius has some similar moments of strangeness, though this conveys an appropriate, ambiguous depth, with hints of a NCO's flatness under the fine words of the resistance General. The supporting performances are roundly excellent: Brian Cox as the amiable moderate Menenius, probably the moral core of the play, or at least the most likeable character; Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus' iron-willed mother; and as John Hannah the populist leader Brutus.

Impressively, one of the best performances was from the Balkan actor playing Aufidius' second-in-command: not only did he perform his lines flawlessly, but he did it with a Scottish accent; how many British stars could do the same in Serbo-Croat?

Another unexpected voice was that of Channel 4 News anchorman John Snow. His first newsflash provoked a loud, happy laugh from the audience, but he immediately silenced his critics, because his performance was excellent, effortlessly blending the metre of the script with his familiar newsroom rhythms to create something at once familiar and exotic, and giving the play an extra level of reality and strangeness that intensified its existing strengths.

But, just as important as the acting, this stripped version gives the energy and thrust of the play itself new emphasis.

To take one slow-burning example that's only really consummated in the final frames, the film draws out the homoerotic subtext in the dance of mutual obsession between Coriolanus and his opponent-turned-ally Aufidius; this is something that's definitely present in Shakespeare's original text, and it's presented as a natural development of their clash of physicality, ego and emotion, rather than being overplayed or thrust into the story for any sort of shock value. That sort of detail is truly striking, and gives this play an unexpected, almost shocking modernity.

That same modernity is evident in Shakespeare's candid take on politics - and particularly, on democratic politics. A conservative minority regime is holding power. Menenius, both liked and distrusted by everyone, candidly challenges the leaders of the populist opposition that they are only interested in their own ambitions; they respond by proving him right, and proceed to destroy a good man - and almost imperil their country. The electorate are portrayed in a way that rings true - a mix of cowardice and courage, confidence and weakness, at once sovereign and enslaved, driven above all else by their desire for freedom, and their fear of consequences: at once babel voices, and ultimate arbiters.

Not for nothing is Coriolanus one of the few works of literature that modern liberal democracies have banned.

But it's Coriolanus who is the centre of the film, and a particularly modern centre, his motives opaque, his actions a psychological puzzle. Perhaps he embodies Roman - and Renaissance - ideas of virtue, but these are undermined by his defection, and by the integrity he retains afterwards; he could be seen as a tragic protagonist, but it's hard to say whether he really has a fatal flaw, or if his disgrace is simply the result of opportunistic political dirty tricks - and hard, eventually, to feel pity for him. Instead, what we're given is a compelling, convincing portrait of a man, a certain type of man, his strengths locked up with his weaknesses, his emotions and his self-discipline inseparable; and it's a portrait that depicts its subject without trying to distill his complexity into explanations.

This film is a considerable triumph for Fiennes, his actors, and his largely Serbian team behind the camera; kudos also goes to screenwriter John Logan, whose eclectic resumé includes the CGI animated comedy Rango, Scorsese's Oscar-nominated fantasy Hugo, Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai, the dire final movie of the pre-reboot Star Trek franchise, the next James Bond movie and - perhaps most significantly of all - extensive rewrite work on Gladiator.

That last credit, which I found out about after writiing this review, is perhaps a little disappointing: Gladiator contains the same key themes we find here: jealous rivalry between generals, in an Ancient Rome where the parallels to modern mass-media and political culture are clearly drawn. The connection feels a little too knowing, a little too Hollywood.

Nonetheless, I don't think any of that is absent from the Shakespeare play; I don't think it takes away from the success of this film. And so I'll stick with my original conclusion.

This is a truly splendid movie, and one which brings alive a truly splendid work of literature, reiterating what connoisseurs have known for a long time; "Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success", in the words of perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century. And it still has everything to say to us today.

Random Movie Week #3: Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows

A triumph! Guy Ritchie's second Sherlock Holmes movie, A Game of Shadows is an unadulterated triumph, and an uncomplicated joy. There's no question that it's also a very silly film, but none the worse for that.

A Game of Shadows is a very loose adaptation of The Final Problem, in which the Great Detective pursues the criminal mastermind Moriarty to a showdown on the Reichenbach Falls; as such, it shares its central conceit with the latest installment in the BBC's ultra-cool "modern-dress" retelling of the canon; but it avoids the knowing postmodernism that most respectable Holmes adaptations go for these days. Instead, we get set-piece scenes involving CPR and sub-machine-guns in 1891. In fact, it's not even that important that it's a Sherlock Holmes movie; it's really the successor of 1960s period romps like Royal Flash and The Assassination Bureau.

It is, in other words, the sort of film they're not supposed to make any more.

And it's great fun.

The inherent silliness of the film is expressed throughout in Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of the title character: this is a vainglorious Sherlock Holmes, as flawed and fallible as he is brilliant and bold; as vocal with his complaints as with his enthusiasms, a childish ubermensch.

The zesty implausibility is also bound up in the plot, and in the way that Holmes' abilities are presented here - not just razor-sharp senses, perfect memory and stimulant-fuelled analysis, but a pretenatural facility to extrapolate beyond these rational powers and predict the next move; this provides the driving force of the story, as the hero hurries from one clue to the next, in a race that has to keep up with the villains, and ahead of the audience's suspension of disbelief.

Yet at the same time, all this absurdity has a logical integrity within the character: his cross-dressing showiness and manic cogitations, his odd neuroses and his loud complaints, are the actions of a man who probably has to behave like this to keep the incipient insanity at bay; he's also far more fallible than he lets on - he makes a whole series of mistakes in this film, each of them quite literally fatal for some member of the cast, all of them reflecting a difficulty with incorporating the human factor in his brilliant problem-solving; and this Holmes is, however absurd he purports to be, a gentleman, with a great deal more going on in his head than we're allowed to see on-screen.

The sight of a volubly insecure Sherlock Holmes bouncing along on a Shetland pony is certainly a new take on the character. It's also, perhaps more importantly, laugh-out-loud funny.

The same mix of the silly and the serious is seen in Holmes' relationship with his elder brother Mycroft (a scene-stealing Stephen Fry); the running spat between "Mikey" and "Shirley" is huge fun, another light-hearted strand of comedy; yet at the same time, this dysfunctional sibling rivalry also provides further insights into Sherlock's vulnerability and attention-seeking - bear in mind that Mycroft, several years older and many pounds heavier, has inherited their father's castle and butler, while Sherlock is rootless in rented lodgings in 221B Baker Street.

The way that Downey plays Holmes also makes for an interesting contrast with the modern-day interpretation in BBC series; in both versions, the title character appears to be deeply needy, but whereas the BBC's version is driven by a very modern psychological angst, this big-screen Holmes is in no particular pursuit of a resolution for his personal issues (whatever he implies to Watson); his erratic behaviour is simply a way to keep things interesting.

On the surface, Jude Law's Watson seems more serious: bluff, tweedy, and unhesitatingly deadly with a gun; but his straight-man dignity is stretched well beyond the point of unacknowledged absurdity - and Holmes is constantly poking against it, which produces a lot of the spark in their relationship, while also calling attention to Watson's own strengths and motivations. There's no question that this is silly stuff - the dialogue between the characters is deadpan comedy worthy of Peter Cook and/or Chris Morris - but it's also satisfyingly well-constructed as a character piece, with a Campbellian underpinning that makes the chase about more than just stopping the bad guys.

And whereas the two previous films I caught this week had female assassins as their protagonists, this is resolutely old-fashioned in its use of relatively uncomplicated male heroes. True, they're joined by Noomi Rapace's knife-throwing Romany heroine, who shows that she's the equal of the boys, but she's not the fetishized centre of attention like the female leads of Haywire and Underworld: Awakening. And now I come to think about it, there's no question of any romance between her and either of the male leads, nor does there need to be. That, in itself, is refreshingly original.

This is a romantic film, of course - but not in the sense we understand it these days; it's romantic in the sense of a swashbuckler, and in the sense of striving to escape the constraints of modern conventionality, in its vistas of untamed mountains and gaslit alleyways.

And, with that in mind, you could make a case that the real star of this movie is the confidently-realized Victorian setting, with its velvet brocade curtains and its opulent Pugin wallpapers, its tailcoated butlers and its gleaming silver teapots, and tigerskin rugs casually thrown over chairs, its unashamed empires and its Ruritanian forests; and if you think those details aren't the sort of thing that the audience should be noticing in a popcorn movie, then it's certainly the sort of thing that Sherlock Holmes would notice, especially this Holmes, and the sort of thing that will lodge in the average audience member's subconscious, to create a rich and compelling sense of place.

The action begins, of course, in London, in the full pomp of its Imperial confidence, with its polite dining rooms and raucous gambling dens, a city populated by English gentlemen and immigrants from the four corners of the British Empire; then the film moves by steam train and paddle steamer to Paris - in the days when you could still tell a man's nationality by the cut of his suit - and finds room to frame every single iconic Belle Epoque landmark on the skyline, subtly reminding the viewer that this was the age when the iconic cityscape was created; from there, the story moves to the anonymous wharves and factories and marshaling yards of a German industrial town, and finally to the inevitable climactic confrontation above a crashing waterfall in the Swiss Alps.

This is a world full of bright, bold characters, with its Romany encampments, Anarchist dens, Cossack assassins, and colourful uniforms everywhere. It's a little surprising to find that it's also a world with CPR and cosmetic surgery: while the details are light-heartedly anachronistic, a quick bit of research reveals that 1891, the year in which the film is set, has a genuine claim to be the year that both techniques went mainstream. Either the scriptwriters pulled those details out of some obscure list of things that happened in 1891, or they got very lucky indeed.

To my relief, this is also a sequel that eschews the fashionable fantasy elements that were present in its precursor. As to the array of weapons, which have attracted some comment online, I'll get on to them in a moment. The main point is that this is a vision of 1891, however stylized and excessive, that takes its cues from the unexpected and authentic reality.

It doesn't matter that there's no neo-medieval castle-hotel straddling the Reichenbach Falls in the real world, because the dramatic, anachronistic ambition of the architecture is just right for the end of the nineteenth century: designed to look like a grander re-imagining of something from an older and perhaps better age, designed so that the snow can swirl in through the carved cloister arches and the spray can leap up from the waterfall below. This is a setting that perfectly evokes the spirit and beauty and meaning of the world in which it's set - yes, meaning.

Because, in the crux of the plot, in the pivot of the mystery that Sherlock Holmes is chasing, the joy and glory of this lost past is being put up against the brutal industrial murder of the twentieth century.

In provincial Strasbourg, a quiet cathedral square is torn apart by the abrupt violence of a terrorist bomb; another atrocity ravages the dining room of a grand hotel; travelling gypsies find themselves stopped against the barbed-wire fences and uniformed guards of the modern state: yet this is a world where there are still open roads through the perfect forests and across the perfect mountains, and where there are still heroes, committed to defending all that's good in it. When one of those heroes describes the plot as a "threat to Western civilization", it's a cliché - yet, at the same time, fantastically, it actually means something in this movie.

And in the sequence where the real threat is revealed, those same heroes are put to flight by the indiscriminate violence of modern war: machine-guns, heavy artillery, and a scene of slaughter out of August 1914. It's the sort of action sequence that communicates a visceral impact to the audience, and there's no question that it's played for thrills - big guns are sexy, the film seems to say, as it fetishizes the mechanical process that it takes to fire one, and portrays the impact in stylized slow-motion; but it also displays in graphic detail the deadly reality of the threat that the heroes are fighting against.

In other words, this is a film that sets out to entertain the audience with set-piece action scenes, but in stark contrast to Underworld: Awakening, it somehow manages to use its own crowd-pleasing instincts to tell a fantastic story, too.

This is where the guns come in: the Mauser semi-automatic pistol is the perfect symbol of the devastating firepower that industrial technology can give to a half-trained man, and the point is made on-screen in a way that's not exactly subtle. True, history records that it was designed in 1893, but that's a forgivable anachronism, and within the frame of the movie, it's easy enough to imagine that the designers took a job in Oberndorf after the violent closure of the fictional Meinhart arms factory in nearby Heilbronn. In the real world, the comparable Borchardt seems to have been looking for a manufacturer in 1891, but perhaps the production team felt that this unusual weapon looked a little too sci-fi for the setting?

There's also a sub-machine-gun that shows up in one scene, but this is far less outrageous than it seems - it closely resembles the Madsen family of lightweight machine guns and automatic rifles from Denmark, prototyped in the 1880s and put into front-line use by 1896; the brass water-cooling jacket on the barrel looks more like it belongs on a Maxim gun, but that's certainly right for the period, and there are some references indicating that water-cooled variants of the Madsen existed, so even this may be authentic. Even if the exact combination of design details is unique to the movie, the concept and technology are just right.

In short, the unexpectedly modern firepower that shows up in this movie represents the real cutting edge of 1891. But, devastating as this rapid-fire barbarism is, naive as the hands that wield it might be, it's only part of a wider, more profoundly human threat: and it has, at the back and centre of it, the villainous intent of Professor James Moriarty.

Moriarty is a monster of unfettered sadism prowling behind the mask of a respectable society figure, channeling his aggression through the fashionable sport of boxing, espousing a mathematical nihilism that expresses contempt for the old order... but which really only serves to disguise and legitimize his real motivation - a twisted pleasure in the suffering of others; he's the perfect embodiment of modern villainy. In contrast with the BBC adaptation, this is a Moriarty who's clearly differentiated from Holmes - they're as different as a waltz and a machine-gun nest - and the film is none the worse for it.

In other words, this is a film that makes truly splendid use of its magnificent setting - not to comment on society, not to argue about right and wrong, but to make it the spring of the plot; it's the perfect example of "show, don't tell".

Another particularly classy detail was the use of music in this film - one terrorist bombing is choreographed to the climax of Mozart's Don Giovanni; a gruesome torture is set to Schubert'sTrout; and everyone dances a Strauss waltz where a Strauss waltz should be danced. There's also an extended borrowing from Ennio Morricone, which is used for comical effect, but makes a remarkably intelligent connection between the displaced outcasts of the older world that's under threat in this film and the socialist revolutionaries of the modern age - and I think I heard a bit of Wagner buried just where a bit of Wagner should be buried: the first notes of Siegfrieds Trauermarsch reverberate amid the harsh noise of mechanical battle as a German gun-crew fire the first awful salvo of industrial war: a leitmotiv that suggests the coming, inevitable Gotterdamerüng of World War I.

If, as some of the PR makes out, this was largely a movie that Guy Ritchie and and Robert Downey Jr. improvised during the filming process, then it's a spectacular triumph. And if what they did was strip an intelligent script down to the Maxim-gun essentials and amp up the Holywood colour, then it's no worse for that, either.

So, to sum up: this is a flawless, brilliant, wonderful film, gorgeous to look at and based around a plot that's driven by the fundamental tensions of human civilization - and that achieves it all with an easy, populist and effortless unpretentiousness. It may be the greatest popcorn movie ever made.

Yes, it really is that good. And if you can't see that, you need to push your inner Moriarty off a waterfall.

Random Movie Week #2: Underworld: Awakening

Another day, another movie, and today, it's Underworld: Awakening, the fourth in a series of vampire-vs.-werewolves popcorn movies. I enjoyed the first two of these, with their essentially sci-fi take on the monsters of Central European mythology, and their stylized setting - ruthlessly elegant vampires and grungy disgruntled werewolves, framed in the moody, anonymous modernity of cityscapes and wastelands, though I have to admit that I skipped on the third film, a critically-panned but reasonably profitable medieval prequel.

The biggest thing this series has going for it is Kate Beckinsale as the werwolf-hunting vampire Selene - she looks incredibly good in a rubber catsuit, whether she's crouching, fighting, putting on a coat, or being thrown into a wall - I suspect she'd also look good in that outfit if she was asked to fry an egg or replace a car exhaust, though sadly this film doesn't ask her to do those things; equally importantly, she can also put a good deal of emotion and poetry into her performance, even though she's unlikely to be taking this role terribly seriously - but then again, she married the man behind the series and became his muse, so you never know.

Either way, this is never going to be Shakespeare, but Beckinsale lifts this movie a long way past what it would be without her.

Alongside our heroine, there's top-drawer support from Charles Dance as a vampire nobleman, replacing Bill Nighy's Viktor from the previous movies - they've run out of flashbacks they can use him in, and I suspect he's too expensive these days. Dance brings nobility, dignity and paradoxical strength to the role of a character who's basically a coward or a quisling, without the overdose of theatrical absurdity (however appropriate it might be) that he's displayed in some of his previous roles. Like Beckinsale, he's a real pleasure to watch.

It's to these two actors' credit that they kept this movie interesting (and an honourable mention also goes to the underrated, untypecast Michael Ealy). Awakening retains the stylistic mood of its precursors, but it has an odd abstraction about it that I didn't notice before - the high-rise cityscape and references to the "feds" suggest America, but the film is set in a country with Russian attack helicopters, European cars, and foreign numberplates; certain details, like the old-model Volvos on the streets and the boxy computer monitors in the police station, even give the setting a slightly 1990s feel, which only adds to the sense of artificiality.

In fact, the stylization of the setting resembles a computer game, and the plot, such as it is, reinforces that impression: this movie is structured as a series of shoot-'em-up levels, in which our heroine uses her array of guns and blades and martial-arts moves to fight through cadres of generic dumb-mob NPCs - fascistic security guards; werewolves; more werwolves; and fascistic security guards who turn into werewolves: three of the four acts - or rather, levels - take place in the sort of moodily generic corridors-and-chambers settings you'd expect in a shooter, and they're paced by what are essentially cutscenes that push the plot along. The climactic action sequence eventually involves four protagonists fighting a mix of bosses and expendable NPCs, but perhaps the scriptwriters were playing Call of Duty the day they faxed that in.

It doesn't help that the unconvincing CGI on the werwolves would have been more in-keeping in a movie from the 1990s or a multiplayer gameplay sequence - and the cartoonish fate of exploding werwolves doesn't match the unflinchingly visceral way that some of the non-CGI characters are slaughtered earlier in the movie.

It doesn't help that the werwolf boss-character in his human form looks a lot like Chris Martin from Coldplay, either.

Awakening is also the first movie I've seen in 3D, and I have to admit that I wasn't impressed. Perhaps it's just my eyes or where I was sitting in the cinema, but fast-moving figures came over blurry, and the background often seemed distractingly prominent - and it was hard to see the point of any of it. True, 3D CGI can do attention-catching things with glass, smoke, air bubbles, bullets under water, but I suspect that I'd have enjoyed the movie more if I'd not had the distraction.

The emphasis on each individual visual sequence as a stylistic tableau might work in a computer game - the focus on specific 3D elements in each scene reminds me of the little bits of full animation in the cutscenes of ancient games like Myst and TIE FIghter - but a series of disparate and attention-seeking VFX tricks doesn't make for a coherent visual experience, and suggests that the film-makers either have a low opinion of the viewers' attention span, or a limited sense of storytelling coherence themselves.

To work as part of a joined-up visual narrative, 3D sequences would require a level of visual consistency and abstraction pushed far beyond the fetishized sci-fi baroque of this series - and that's saying a lot: it makes me think that the discipline involved is probably easier to obtain with anime or stylized CGI than live action.

In the final analysis, the 3D is disappointing and annoying, but not so much so that its failure takes over the film - it's simply something you have to work through in certain scenes; that's a conclusion that probably doesn't reflect terribly highly on the success of 3D technology, but it means the film survives it more-or-less intact.

So, overall, this is an okay film - the mediocre quality of certain aspects of the production doesn't sink it, and the central performances elevate it to the point at which it's actually worth watching. Given the strong box-office opening in the USA, a fifth instalment seems likely; let's hope they ditch the 3D cameras, revamp the CGI werewolves, and script some fight sequences that feel less like they were written for a generic XBox shooter.

After all, Kate Beckinsale kicking ass in a rubber catsuit, and acting rather well afterwards, is a winning combination.

Random Movie Week #1: Haywire

There are a lot of movies out right now that I want to see, so I've decided to take in a week of early-afternoon showings, thanks to a decent-sized cinema a short walk from the library where I'm currently doing some research.

If all goes to plan, I'll be watching (and reviewing) the Kate Beckinsale vampire sequel Underworld: Awakening, the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes pastiche Game of Shadows, Ralph Fiennes' Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus, and just possibly Spielberg's War Horse - though not, sadly, the new George Lucas film Red Tails, which is having trouble finding a distributor. Apparently, the studios can't work out how to market a straightforward war film starring actors who co-starred in Jerry Maguire and Iron Man (hint: it's a straightforward war film, like Captain America or War Horse; is the studios' problem even worth dignifying with an explanation?).

Anyway, largely because it starts a little later than the other afternoon shows and I could push up the hill to catch it in time today, I began with Haywire... which I wanted to see largely on the basis of a kick-ass trailer showcasing a quality cast.

A woman walks into a snow-girt roadside diner in upstate New York; she's met by a guy with a gun under his puffer jacket who looks a little like Brad Pitt; when he attempts to get her to come not-so-quietly, she leaves him broken on the floor, and carjacks a hapless small-town geek who looks a little like Shia LaBeouf; as they speed away, she begins to explain the reason she's on the run.

It's a complicated explanation; the woman, endowed with the hard-boiled name Mallory Kane, is an ex-Marine working as a security "contractor" for various employers; her story involves a lot of A-list Holywood talent: her boss and ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), U.S. government intelligence hierarch Koblenz (Michael Douglas), his Spanish counterpart Rodriguez (Antonio Banderas), and Anglo-Irish hitman Paul (Michael Fassbender). For the next two hours, we follow her recounting her betrayal, escaping her pursuers, and getting revenge on the people who sold her out.

Overall, this film has a lot going for it, but there are two comments that need to qualify that statement: firstly, it's not the frenetically-paced rally of fast-cut action and sharp twists that the trailer would suggest - it's something altogether more classy and considered; but at the same time, it's let down a little for me by a slightly flat third act and an abrupt climax.

Mallory Kane is played by a female martial-arts champion named Gina Carano, who I'd never heard of before the trailer; I'm not sure she's ever going to play a Shakespeare villainess, but she's used with very good effect in this movie, being required to fight, move, make professional preparations for her next mission, and engage in the sort of shallow small-talk that everyone involved knows is fake. In one of the best of many good scenes, she winds down between hits with a glass of red wine and some cleaning of her pistols.

Carano's casting suits the mood of the film, with its unblinking lens taking in a cynical, commercialized world where everything is for sale and taking a life costs nothing, all concealed under the outward veneer of fashionable consumerism and professional business-speak. When Mallory and Paul are impersonating a couple, their thoroughly professional interaction echoes the familiar rhythms of a "successful" relationship, right down to the unromantic physicality of the fight that follows their evening out. Even the title is a meaningless piece of branding, chosen purely for marketing purposes.

But, on the other hand, Mallory's motivation for turning on her bosses isn't outrage or emotional angst - it's that old-fashioned, unfashionable sense of patriotism and duty that you'd expect of a U.S. Marine, allied perhaps to some finely-honed kill-or-be-killed instincts. She could be John Wayne's daughter. Not that this film would do anything so crude as to make any of that explicit. It's left to sneak up on you as you think it through.

This isn't a particularly deep film, but it's a well-realized and superior action movie, one that takes its own limitations and does something interesting and satisfying with them.

That ability to make things interesting extends to the camerawork. There's some very nice use of colour and tone and composition - yellow highlights in an apartment decorated in muted monochrome, or the way that the fugitive heroine's leather jacket and grey knit hat become camouflage against the urban roofscape of red brick and vent ducting. These stylized visuals are used to define a sense of place, with shifts between them marking the passage of time, and thus they give visual structure to the narrative - contrasting with another aspect of the cinematography, the way the screen frames printed words, architectural space and human movement to develop a silent subtext about sexuality, violence, internationalization and consumerism.

This is also a film that isn't afraid to use long cuts, especially for the fight sequences. One thing that didn't work so well was the intrusive, insistent music, which I suspected was imposed by the studio to jazz up a film they didn't quite understand, but which turns out to be from the director's regular collaborator - so it must be designed to lay a deliberate dissonance over the well-composed visuals.

I was surprised, after writing the bulk of the review, to find that the director was Stephen Sondebergh, his name concealed - perhaps deliberately - in the blink immediately after the final hard cut; his anonymous-sounding cinematographer and editor are his own pseudonyms; that explains the quality of the visual composition, and the integrity of the aesthetic choices, and for once, it makes me think I'm not making it up when I see a lot of depth in what I'm watching.

The plot, too, is satisfying, intricate without being too complicated - as Mallory recounts the backstory, she gets her hostage to recite back names and details to her, to make sure the audience remembers them; it's hard to know if this is simply functional storytelling, or a deliberately postmodern trick, but it's effective regardless. There's also a rather satisfying ambiguity about the storyline, since it's unclear whether Mallory really gets her revenge, or whether she's simply manipulated into becoming a full-time assassin for the top bad guy.

So, this is a good film, but it's let down by the ending, which failed to add anything to what had come before, and thus failed to keep building up the pace.

This problem first appears in the lead-in to Act III, in which a chase sequence that fails to build enough tension is ended by a left-field twist so bizarre that I burst out laughing. I'm not sure if the jarring absurdity is deliberate or not. The main action of the third act was functional, very nicely shot in night-time greys overlaid by shadows, and in the concluding scenes, clear skies, stone backdrops and crisp lighting served to weave disparate elements of plot and place into an outwardly satisfying narrative; but for all that skill, the finale didn't provide any emotional payoff, and nor did it resolve anything physically or aesthetically, eschewing the impact of a final punch to the face - though that fits right in with the heroine's motivations and the ambiguity of the plotline, and I suspect it may even be a lead-in for a projected sequel.

And if that's the case, I don't think it's a bad thing at all.

Michael Forsyth... romantic nationalist!?

A rather surprising statement from Lord Forsyth, the former Scottish Secretary - a man generally regarded in his homeland as a loyal ally of the English.

Anyway, the one-time cheerleader of the Poll Tax has claimed that something would be the "greatest political error since Bonnie Prince Charlie turned back at Derby" - when, having outflanked their English opponents, and with the road to London open in front of them, the Jacobite army opted instead to turn around, hurry back to Scotland, and fight a losing campaign for all the wrong reasons.

Does this mean that Lord Forsyth would have rather the Jacobites had won, that in his heart of hearts, he'd rather see an independent and victorious nation, a beaten England, and the heirs of Hanover sent packing to Germany and America...?

In the body of this most true-blue of pro-sassenach Conservative-and-Unionists, does the brave heart of a romantic nationalist still beat...?

Another thing worth noting is that the Jacobite retreat in 1746 was provoked in no small way by the misinformation of a Hanoverian spy named Dudley Bradstreet. A third thing that needs to be mentioned is that the Jacobites subsequently won the Battle of Falkirk, and still had an effective army in the aftermath of their defeat at Culloden, while the Hanoverian forces were out-of-position, rather knocked about, and rather short on supplies; even after Culloden, the initiative was there to be taken: it was Bonnie Prince Charlie's decision to flee for the Hebrides and tell his men to shift for themselves that cost them the campaign.

Or, as another general said, in another war: "A battle won is a battle in which you have not admitted defeat."

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...

The radio is playing Geoffrey Burgon's Nunc Dimittis, which reminds me that I saw the trailer for the new film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy yesterday, even though the two have nothing in common.

Well, what links them is that the Burgon Nunc Dimittis was used as the end credits music for the 1979 BBC adaptation of the John Le Carre novel, on which the new film is based. But whereas the music fitted perfectly to the TV series and the novel, it wouldn't work at all with this new film.

The new trailer is certainly nervy and tenses. As a snarky website says, it suggests a film "so intense that even a shot of someone in goofy optometrist trial frames is super intense". It looks stylized, self-consciously edgy in mood and pace, and it's aggressively pushing that vibe to sell itself.

That little piece of music, in contrast, expresses everything that the TV version and the novel managed, in their understated way, to convey - the methodical intelligence, the sense of place and time and timelessness, the immense unspoken subtlety, and out of all that was the simmering tension and drama of the story created.

I think there's a difference there.

And, for me, the memory of the old series made the new trailer feel very awkward indeed; the camerawork was almost self-consciously different (probably because the Swedish director and Dutch cinematographer have never seen the original), but the dialogue constantly, inevitably evoked the key scenes of the TV series.

There's no question that this new film looks like a high-quality production with a top-line cast and crew, but this non-remake sums up everything that's awkward about modern Britain -- in a way I'm pretty sure isn't deliberate, and which certainly doesn't seem very satisfying.

The Meaning of Golf

I've been hoping for something to write about that doesn't involve Scotland, religion, or constitutional history, and now I've found it. Rory McIlroy, aged 22, has just won the U.S. Open.

The media, understandably, has focused on the personal story: the son of a clubhouse barman, when he was twelve, his parents held down something like six jobs between them, to turn their back garden into an all-weather putting green where he could practice his short game.

And what a game. There's something delightful in the way he makes it look so easy. No question, he's worked hard at it, but what he's worked at is finding the natural line, the natural rhythm; developing his innate talent to the point at which, when it all clicks together, every shot is beautiful.

For years, I've struggled to convince more informed golfers with my lack of enthusiasm for Tiger Woods' game. I've struggled to explain what I think is missing in his list of course records and major titles. Now, I have an answer. I can just point to the way the lad from Holywood does it.

Or let's put it another way. The Tiger, for all his new sexual notoriety, was essentially an intensely-engineered machine, designed and built to win major titles, and to act as a walking advertisement for sponsored sportswear, luxury goods, management consultants, and Buicks. When he equaled one of Jack Nicklaus' course records, one of the old veterans quietly remarked that Jack had been playing with a considerable hangover the day he set that record. You don't really see the Tiger playing like that. The commercial sponsors who paid him a billion dollars (so they could make many billions more) wouldn't like it.

But the first thing young Rory did with the U.S. Open trophy was take it to the bar, fill it with Guinness, and use it as a very very large flagon of the black stuff.

Win.

Scott of the... Aegean?!

I've always been a big fan of displays of proud Scottish lunacy, particularly of a battlefield variety.

I've been thinking of writing something about Lord Bernard Stewart, who led a hundred Scottish knights to conquer most of western Europe at the end of the fifteenth century - notably ending the independence of England in 1485, since when it has been ruled by a succession of Welshmen, Scotsmen, and minor German princes.

Or Colonel Jack Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar, who decided to be Scottish mainly as a matter of style, and used his claymore very effectively during the Salerno landings in World War II (he was also the last English soldier to kill enemies with a longbow during the retreat to Dunkirk).

But today, I discovered Captain George Scott and the frigate James, so I'm going to try and tell you a story that no-one's told in print from end to end before.

Origins: 1643-1645

For reasons lost to history, he came to Inverness in 1643 with some shipwrights from the south, and began to build a very large ship: "for bulk and burden, non such ever seen in our north seas", recalled the local writer John Fraser; as an awestruck schoolboy, he had followed her creation - his family probably oversaw the cutting of the wood for her hull, he would have watched her take shape on the slipway every day, and he even managed to spend some time aboard her as she prepared for her first voyage.

This great ship was called the James, and Captain Scott told the locals that he was building her as a merchant ship, but soon enough, she became a battleship - and she was one of the mightiest of the age.

In 1646, she carried forty-five guns, a potent armament by the standards of the 1640s, although her crew of 70 men was more suited for a trading voyage. By 1649, fully fitted out for war, she is said to have mounted 70 guns, which would make her one of the most powerful warships anywhere in the world.

Much depends on the weight of the roundshot fired, but a ship of 70 guns would only be equalled or surpassed by the Royal Navy's two gigantic "ships royal", the brand new HMS Sovereign of the Seas (100) and the newly-rebuilt HMS Royal Prince (70), which between them embodied all the ambition of a seventeenth-century great power; there only seem to have been around half-a-dozen more warships carrying above 45 guns in 1645, the national flagships of the other major navies.

In short, the little Highland burgh of Inverness seems to have produced something genuinely, inexplicably world-class.

By either estimate, she seems to have been the largest ship built in Scotland since the legendary Great Michael of 1512, and I don't think anything else comparable was launched north of the Border until after 1750 or even into the early nineteenth century; when she sailed into the Mediterranean, she may have been the largest fighting ship between Gibraltar and Odessa.

Perhaps we even have a picture of her, a mid-seventeenth-century portrait of a Scottish warship pierced for sixty-two guns - no other ship that served under the Scottish flag seems to have come close to this armament until the 1690s.

It's just not quite clear what she was for.

Captain Scott may have been a relative of Sir John Scott of Scotstarvit, who had made a tidy profit by financing a successful commerce-raiding frigate in the 1620s; he may have been a relative of Sir James Scott of Rossie, a soldier-of-fortune who had fought for the Venetians a few years earlier, and who would have known that the Serene Republic paid handsomely for fighting ships from northern waters.

Perhaps he simply knew about James IV's unaccomplished plan to take the Great Michael on Crusade against the Turks, and decided to fulfill the king's vow 130 years later.

Or he may have just been a merchant skipper who ended up in a military career by accident.

It's equally unclear why he built the James at Inverness. Presumably, part of the idea was that the forests of the Lovat lordship offered solid oak for hull timbers without the wartime disturbances of England, and tall fir trees for masts without the hassle of importing them from the Baltic. Perhaps he was attracted by the potential of Cromarty Bay - always underused, always recognized as the best harbour on Great Britain's North Sea coast.

Perhaps he'd heard, as scholars began to rediscover the medieval chronicles of Matthew Paris, that one of the largest ships of the medieval Crusades had been built there; perhaps he wanted to find somewhere quiet, away from the various hostile governments in Edinburgh, London, Oxford and Kilkenny, to build a big ship without the wrong people asking questions.

I don't know. After more than 360 years, I don't know if we can know. The simple story is that a man came unexpectedly to Inverness and built himself a huge battleship there, and it really speaks for itself.

And, appropriately enough, she went to sea against a backdrop of gunfire and battle.

From Inverness to the Dardanelles - 1645-1649

By April 1645, the James was ready for sea: she was anchored off the Moray coast, probably still in civilian rig, and proving quite a sensation with the locals. She was due to depart on 9th May, but while she made ready to weigh anchor that morning, two armies appeared on the misty shoreline.

Along the coast road came the Army of the Covenant, well-drilled professional regiments with pikes and muskets, fresh from the pivotal victory of the English Civil War at Marston Moor; company by company, they detached themselves down to the water's edge, firing professional salutes across the tideline to clean out their guns before the battle, then moved up in battle order towards the little town of Auldearn.

Around the old castle hill, there waited an outnumbered insurgent force of mounted knights in medieval armour, and Highland clansmen in kilts.

The passengers aboard the James - mostly supporters of the Covenant, it seems - watched the Battle of Auldearn from the main deck; they watched as the hopelessly outnumbered forces of Scottish anachronism absolutely annihilated the best modern soldiers of the era.

It's not entirely clear which side Captain Scott was on, but that afternoon, the big ship hauled up her anchor, set sail, and departed on a swift course for the south.

It seems probable that most of her seventy crewmen were local sailors: there's no mention of the James's captain bringing hands up with him from the south, and with Irish and Dutch pirates roaming the seas, the herring fisheries and the coastal trade had probably been badly disrupted. Warfare, political violence, and the threat of conscription might also make local landsmen look to the ocean for escape.

Even so, they would probably be a polyglot lot, speaking what were effectively four separate languages - the strangely accentless English of the Black Isle coast, the broad Scots of the Moray burghs, the sing-song Gaelic of the Sutherland fisher-folk, and the Dansk - the gruff old Viking dialect of Caithness and the Northern Isles.

We next hear of Captain Scott and the James on 14th August 1646, when they were officially accepted into the Venetian Navy. The seafaring Republic was anxiously building up a fleet of broadside sailing ships for a war against the Turkish Empire, and by now, the ship from Inverness was armed for battle.

It's possible that the James was already in the Mediterranean by this date, but it's not quite clear that she was. Fraser says that Captain Scott sailed south "to the Straits", and it may be that she was the Scottish frigate which subsequently appeared among the royalist privateers in the English Channel. She may equally be the James of Wemyss, which became the Covenanters' flagship in 1647 - this James certainly seems to have been a large fighting ship, an adequate replacement for the big Dutch-built raider Golden Lion, which had previously been the best ship that they had.

Presumably, she wasn't both, but I wouldn't quite rule it out.

But eventually, she certainly made her way south into the Mediterranean, and hoisted the lion of St Mark alongside the saltire cross of St Andrew.

I'll leave the explanation of what followed to Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, another wild Scottish hero - whether in the battlefield or in the dirty business of writing maths textbooks; in his Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel, an anthemic handbook to the general brilliance of crazy Scotsmen, he wrote a proud eulogium for Captain Scott (even if he does get his name slightly wrong):

Nor can I well forget that sea-captain, Captain William Scot, whose martiall atchievements in the defence of that State against the Turks, may very well admit him to be ranked amongst the colonels; he was vice-admiral to the Venetian Fleet, and the onely renowned bane and terror of Mahometan navigators ; whether they had galleys, galeoons, galiegrosses, or huge war ships, it was all one to him; he set upon all alike, saying still, The more they were, the manyer he would kill; and the stronger that the encounter should happen to be, the greater would be his honour, and his prise the richer. He oftentimes so cleared the Archipelago of the Mussulmans, that the Ottoman family at the very gates of Constantinople would quake at the report of his victories; and did so ferret them out of all the creeks of the Adriatick gulph, and so shrewdly put them to it, that sometimes they did not know in what part of the Mediterranean they might best shelter themselves from the fury of his blows. Many of their mariners turned land-souldiers for fear of him; and of their maritime officers, several took charge of caravans to escape his hand, which for many yeers together lay so heavy upon them, that he was cryed up for another Don Jean d' Austria, or Duke d' Orea, by the enemies of that Scythian generation; in spight of which, and the rancour of all their unchristian hearts, he dyed but some eighteen moneths ago in his bed, of a feaver, in the Isle of Candia.

Like most of Sir Thomas Urquhart's spectacular claims of Scottish brilliance, this is not actually all that inaccurate at all. The Venetian campaign drove the Turks from the Aegean in 1646 and subsequently bottled their fleet up behind the Dardanelles, and Captain Scott and the James played a major role in the war - not least in the first great Venetian victory.

The James against the Turkish Navy - 12th May 1649

In 1649, the Turkish navy slipped past the blockade, in calm weather where their oared galleys and galleasses could outpace the Venetian galleons and great ships; but the soldiers aboard the Turkish ships objected to the idea of a sea battle, and insisted on taking up a defensive position on the coastline; perhaps, as Urquhart said, the James had put them off serving as marines.

They moved to the ancient fortified harbour of Phocaea, on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and awaited their opponents.

On 12th May, the Venetian fleet found them; but their admiral, Giacomo di Riva, had problems of his own.

The Dutch ships which formed the main strength of his fleet refused to fight unless they could take out insurance, and most of them gave little help in the battle even when they got it; the English ship Experience left the fleet without so much as an apology, one of the Italian ships surrendered before the battle began, and a French one managed to sail straight into the beach.

That left the Venetians with an effective squadron of just four real ships of war, plus one small scout; they were facing a Turkish force of eleven galleons, ten galleasses, and seventy-two galleys, occupying a strong defended position.

But one of their four ships was the James, with Captain Scott and his crew of seventy brave men from Inverness; and it was the Scots that led the advance into the fortified harbour.

The official reports of their contribution to the battle are written in raptures, but they ring true even in Italian: Captain Scott "strenuously performed every duty that could be desired of him", and his ship "performed the most marvelous feats of valour and skill".

She set herself in the thick of the fighting; she sent crippling broadsides into the Turkish flagship, sank one enemy galleass, captured another, and fought off a determined boarding attack by a third; at this point, the admiring Venetian admiral diverted his flagship to force the Turkish attacker off; and all the while, the Scottish ship's boats were rowing back and forward through the battle, rescuing the shackled galley slaves from amid the wreckage and the broadsides.

It was a dramatic victory, leaving the Turks with just one ship and six light galleasses, while their galley fleet had scattered and fled; but it also left the James dismasted and hulled below the waterline. She reached a safe anchorage at the pirate island of Andros, but on the night of 23rd May, she began to take on water through her battle-damaged timbers, and settled at the bottom of the harbour.

Two days earlier, the disgruntled Turkish janissaries had returned to Istanbul, and promptly murdered their prime minister. They disposed of the next one the next year, when he tried to send them back into another naval campaign. Meanwhile, the senior officer who remained with the fleet had refused an admiral's flag and transferred to a shore assignment. I'm not sure if he took up camel driving, but Urquhart is, again, broadly right.

Aftermath: 1649-1652

Captain Scott may have returned briefly to home waters - a frigate called the Scott appears in the royalist fleet later in the year, big, fast and heavily-armed; he certainly took advantage of the insurance cover that the Admiral had grudgingly given to the Dutch, to ask the Venetian government for 35,000 reals in compensation for the loss of the James: but if he did leave the Venetian fleet for a while, he soon returned to it.

The Turks had acquired a new navy of Barbary pirates and English Roundheads, and Captain George Scott died in the defense of the great Venetian fortress base at Candia on Crete, of a fever that seems to have been brought on by his military exertions - Fraser says it was in 1652, while Urquhart implies a date in 1651.

The Venetians were so impressed by the sacrifice and heroism of this Scottish adventurer and his big ship from Inverness that they erected a monument in their honour; a marble statue of the brave George Scott, standing proudly on the banks of the Grand Canal.

And beneath the warm blue waters of Andros harbour, overlooked by the bright while buildings of a little Greek village, the Mediterranean clay holds buried fir and oak hewn down in Glenmoriston, and wrought into a ship on the shores of the Beaulay Firth - a corner of a foreign port, that is forever Scotland.

Heavendrift...

It's another snowy day in Edinburgh.

Several inches of frosted snow cover the ground, with the bright, crystaline solidity of a thick layer of icing sugar. The air is bracingly cold, and the open sky is a perfect, cloudless blue. Beneath the blankets of snow, there is an impressive hardness, a geological pattern of stone and wood and icy water.

Every day seems different, though. Today, we have clear skies and there's a wintry stillness to the settled snow; tomorrow, a hint of pink cloud suggests we may be in for a blizzard; and that's just the start of it - sending me searching for words to describe this marvelous weather. Sitting with a big dictionary and a warm fire, I've been exploring the language of snow, something that we seem to have almost lost in recent decades.

Over the weekend, we had big, soft snowflakes - or flichts or flocks, as they're called in Scots, catching the etymological connection with flight that's been rather lost in standard English. You know the type - the light, feathery, fragile-seeming kind, which ride slowly from the sky like eiderdown.

There's also flindrikin snow, which is thin and light and fluttery - either like butterfly wings or white lace, the dictionary isn't sure; but either way, the word seems very appropriate.

First, though, there was a type of snow that the weather professionals refer to by the German name graupel, a name which seems to mean "barley-like". This is created when snow passes through moisture in the air, and the water vapour freezes around each snowflake, turning them into fragile pellets - hence the rather misleading name of "soft hail".

But it's not really satisfying to use a loan-word auf Deutsch or the underwhelming "soft hail", and there's no evidence of an English nauralization like "grapple". So what do we call this?!

There's one dictionary reference to "bullets" as a Scots term for "frozen snow" in 1914, but the nearest word in regular use is "moor", which describes a heavy fall of powdery snow. The graupel was certainly "mooring", to use the verbal form that seems rather more common than the noun - coming heavy and fast, in drifts through the sky.

I went for a walk in a blizzard a few days ago, and detoured into the Botanic Gardens. The cafes were shut, but the art gallery in Inverleith House was open, and the paths had been cleared with a little snow-plough - seemingly the only one in Edinburgh that actually works. And as I walked, I watched the snow come mooring through the trees in a tumbling whirl, to add to the deep snow already fast on the ground.

But "moor" isn't quite mainstream Scots - it belongs to the Viking dialect of the Northern Isles, which sit at the intersection of Atlantic and North Sea weather systems. I've seen driving snowstorms and shirt-sleeve summer sunshine alternate in five-minute intervals on Orkney, so this is probably a good place for the unusual combination of cloud levels that produces graupel.

In Edinburgh, however, I suspect the cause was the vapour trails from planes at the airport. It certainly disappeared when the snow shut down the runways. So "moor" doesn't seem quite appropriate for this post-modern snow.

But while I'm still looking for a better word than graupel, Scots has another word for the dramatic way this snow was falling: "yowdendrift".

In contrast to an "erdrift", an 'earth-drift' or normal snowdrift, a "yowdendrift" is a heavy, blown fall of snow that's swept down out of the sky like a snowdrift from on high. This is another word that confuses the specialists, with the Scots National Dictionary suggesting it derives from our language's equivalent of 'yielded', which doesn't make much sense.

I prefer an alternative kenning of my own, based on the earliest recorded form, ewindrift (c. 1650), the only citation before the last years of the eighteenth century; this looks like 'heaven-drift' (Older Scots "hewin"), and as such, it seems to fit in a pair with "erdrift", gives an accurate sense of how the snow comes billowing in from on high... and is quite simply a rather lovely word.

We Shall Remember Them

Today was Remembrance Sunday, the day the British people stand in silence in front of their TV sets, to remember the sacrifices of the war dead. The rhythms of the morning service are familiar. The Queen, wreaths of poppies, soldiers at the Cenotaph, the Bishop of London in his white cassock and red-and-black choir hood.

But before all that, two minutes' silence. The bells of Big Ben tolled eleven times.

As the bells fell silent, I looked back in my mind's eye, imagining the soldiers of World War I, black-and-white in their steel hats and gaiters, faces grainy with stubble or mud or just exhaustion.

I remember them.

"Ere, can I have a cigarette?" The voice is from a soldier on my right, with the definite twang of East End London. I turn, not quite meeting his eye, and fumble in my left top pocket for a fag. (It does not occur to me that I do not smoke, have only had six ciggies in my life, never carried a packet of fags.)

I hesitate, uncertain. A part of me feels a single ciggy is a paltry gift for a man in his position. A part of me worries about breaking the barriers of class and situation. Reality trembles on the edge of my perception.

The pack of fags I find in my hand is modern, its colors standing out against the muted palate of the vision (the colours of the Bishop of London's robes) but it feels right to hand over. I've smoked a little less than a third of them.

Now the past resumes. I walk along the trench, seeing the way the parapet sways a little to the left ahead of me, out into no-man's land. (The sky is blue above the mud, the clear hazy colour the French call horizon gray, and which Earl Haig described in his war diary on the last day of the War.)

I will only remember those details later.

Perhaps there is a tree on the horizon, or a brave hawk fluttering above.

I look down.

My revolver is in my right hand now, a heavy service Webbley with a green rope lanyard on the end. I see the scalloped trim on my left sleeve, and the three diamond buttons of my cuffs, the lighter fabric of my best-uniform breeches contrasting with the khaki jacket.

The past ends. Later, I will realise that the next sound should be the whistles, the echoing, piping signal to send the army over the top, into No Man's Land, towards the barbed wire and the Germans.

They say you wake up when you die in your dreams.

In the real world, the Two Minutes' Silence continues in crisp modern colour; I have seen the Cenotaph in tree-lined Westminster, three military flags with gilded victors' wreaths; I watch the Household Cavalry in their plumes and cloaks. A gun sounds across a London park, and the buglers blow Reveille.

It is 11:02 am.

Edinburgh Art Festival - Modern Art Gallery

What you see is where you’re at—Part 3
(Modern Art Gallery, until 12th December and after)

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art was fifty years old on Friday, and to celebrate, it gave away free cake and balloons all day. This populist, feel-good moment fits perfectly with the mood of the Gallery in its anniversary year, with its defining commission from Turner Prize winner Martin Creed—a bright neon inscription that transforms the strict classical pediment of the entrance, Everything Is Going To Be Alright.

The collection inside is also a lot of fun—the third phase of the year-long What you see is where you’re at project that has taken over the entire SNGMA for its jubilee year, showing off the gallery space and displaying diverse elements of the collection with real wit and intelligence. The central hall opposite the entrance has been given over to a set of dramatically oversized kitchen furniture – a towering table and chairs, paradoxically childlike in their robust proportions.

At once ubiquitously ordinary and monumentally sculptural, this work by American artist Robert Therrien fits unexpectedly well into the distinctly Scottish space of the gallery, juxtaposed dramatically with the dining-room formality of the tall windows, high ceiling, and grey stone fireplace.

This is the latest of the Artists Rooms, showpieces from the seminal collection sold to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate by London gallery owner Anthony d’Offay. The simple shapes and their glossy black finish also reflect one of the key themes that recurs in this year’s Art Festival—an emphasis on flat, bright shiny surfaces, a visual simplicity this work emphasises by being ironically named No Title.

In the south wing, you can find something even better, arguably the best of the current displays—a room full of Russian abstract art from a century ago, centred on a series of Kandinsky prints. These have a modernism that is still fresh and exciting—the freshness of a brand-new visual language, its lines not yet fixed into predictable patterns by familiarity. The Gallery is worth a visit for these alone.

Juxtaposed with them in the corridor is a series of small paintings by the Scottish Colourists. These date from the same era as the Kandinskys, and they are pretty in their way, but distinctly conservative in contrast with what was going on in Czarist Russia at the time—although I was nicely surprised by a subtly surrealist early offering from Alberto Morrocco, sneaked in among them. The south wing is rounded off by a small room devoted to the still life, combining realist works with some abstract pieces to provide an engaging narrative; conceptual art done well, by actually building it around real content, and showing that content in a new way—this sums up the sense of fun and lightly-held knowledge that pervades the revamped gallery.

The north wing is showing important new work by the Boyle family, based on detailed surveys of the landscape and the elements on a beach on the isle of Barra, planned since the 1970s and created over a span of eighteen years. It’s all very professional and conceptual, but for me, it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Nonetheless, precisely beause there seemed to be something missing, I found this reproduction of reality unexpectedly exciting. I couldn’t see anything here beyond critical theory and scientific reproduction, and that made me intimately aware of the necessity of expressing something else, making this an inspiring – unintended? – statement of What Art Is Really All About.

Next door, it’s great to see Duane Hanson’s Tourists back where they belong—long-term fans will known them as the loud American couple who used to stand in the corner of the main gallery space. They’re offset by John de Andrea’s Model in Repose, a superrealist nude that was intended to embody timeless beauty, and has also become a subtle—unintended?—meditation on the passage of time.

Upstairs, the themes repeat. An Artists Rooms exhibtion by Gilbert and George is a riot of glossy colour – I found it unoffensive rather than inspiring, reprising the fashions of this year’s Festival, and also comparable to the safe prettiness of the Colourists; but it’s something the media and tourists up from London for the Festival will recognize. Elsewhere on this floor, you can find an iconic Ray Liechenstein, a superb Bonnard, and two more conceptual rooms, like the still life gallery downstairs—one explores the use of texture, while the other investigates the deceptive simplicity of white paint.

Also upstairs, there is an exhibition of paintings chosen by Elizabeth Blackadder—continuing a season in which major figures in Scottish art make personal selections of work from the Gallery collection. Essentially, this is a homage by an artist to her mentors and heroes, a biographical retrospective of her own artistic influences—a “who’s who” of Scottish and European painting over the past century.

On a purely visual level, I found this less exciting than the earlier selection by Callum Innes, but it hints at the quiet emotions of unspoken memories, and the visual narrative is enlivened by unexpected choices – such as a youthful Futurist foray by Stanley Cursiter, better known to me as an artist of watercolour landscapes and Establishment portraits.

Compared with the “greatest hits” collection of surrealism in the Dean Gallery across the road, the SNGMA’s latest exhibits are more varied—for my taste, there are even a few genuine duds here; but that diversity represents Art in Scotland, and the wide audience that this exhibition is open to. The sheer variety on offer here demands a visit.

The cake in the cafe is also excellent—along with the Douglas Gordon in the stairwell.

A Layman's Guide, part 1: The Lord's Prayer

This is intended as the first in a series of sketch posts exploring the basic texts and tenets of Christianity. These are designed mainly to help me set my own thoughts in order.

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Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

(For thine is the kingdom,
(and the power, and the glory,
)for ever and ever.)

Amen.

This short and simple prayer is perhaps the most basic and ancient text of Christianity, shared universally among almost every congregation. It is known from its first line as the Our Father or Pater Noster, and also as the Lord's Prayer, reflecting that it is identified in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and in the liturgy of the Church, as being taught by Jesus Himself.

It begins as an address to God that proclaims the holiness and authority of the Creator, and then becomes a prayer for "us", paired with a reminder to be kind and generous to others. In so doing, it serves to express the two Great Commandments - to love and honour God, and to our neighbours as ourselves (Mark 12.18-34, Matt. 22.34-40). In its simplicity, it seems straightforward and economical.

Yet if you look closely, there is a depth of complexity in this short, familiar prayer. The most obvious question is why there's a section I've printed in brackets - this is a type of prayer coda, known as the doxology (Gk. doxologos, "statement of glory"). It represents a very early textual variant in the text of Matthew, but it leads into wider topics about the development of the New Testament, which I want to discuss more in a later sketch - so for now, it's simply enough to note that the Lord's Prayer was used in diverse ways from a very early date: some Christians integrated the concluding doxology, while others didn't use it at all.

There are also two very hard-to-translate words in the underlying Greek text: firstly, the word usually rendered as "daily", which in Greek is epiousion, a very unusual word that means literally "more than immediate"; it is not wrong to understand this as "daily", but there is something more here, a mysteriousness that is sensed but not fully explained - something that is captured in the technical Latin translation, supersubstantialem. This is a word that reminds us that God's presence in reality is more than we can understand or define, and anticipates the mysterious reality of Christ's presence in the bread of the Sacrament.

The second unusual choice of words is the references to "trespasses", which would be more accurately translated "debts" or "legal obligations". Luke, but not Matthew or the liturgical version, has a different word for our own "trespasses", meaning more explicitly "faults" or "sins", but there is an unexpected emphasis here on freeing people from obligations, rather than on the simple forgiveness of wrongs.

I suspect that this can be better understood by comparing the Lord's Prayer with the dedication prayer said by King Solomon at the consecration of the Temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 8.15-61, 2 Chronicles 6.14-42). This is a far longer text, but the essence covers the same topics: it proclaims the majesty of the God of Heaven, and establishes the Temple as a place of justice for those accused of trespass against their neighbours, and as a place of redemption for the people's sins, which might otherwise lead them into hunger and captivity.

So, the Lord's Prayer looks back to the Old Testament - but there is also an important change in emphasis. By accepting this prayer from Jesus, we implicitly proclaim his identity as the Christ, the successor of David and Solomon - renewing the relationship between God and man that was embodied in the Temple in Jerusalem.

But the Lord's Prayer is not simply about renewal - it is also about transformation. While Solomon spoke his prayer alone, we are in a sense praying alongside Jesus, here. "Our Father", in these words, is both the heavenly Father of the divine Son, and the universal Father of all.

As such, as a prayer to be said regularly by everyone, the Lord's Prayer reflects an important change, the move from the Temple and its ritual obligations and law codes, to the community of believers, the new teaching of Jesus, and forgiveness through love and grace.

In this sense, indeed, the conceptual joining of the forgiveness of sins and the freedom from ritual obligations becomes very central indeed.

In this short, simple prayer, there is, in short, an expression of all the basic precepts of Christianity. It is close to the basis of the heritage shared by all Christians, in ways far beyond the simple fact of its early position in our canon.