“One Day You’ll Scale Mount Everest.”

Good morning! Jason Arday, the black academic who seems to have plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation and lied about academic appointments—and who made many other outlandish claims—has resigned his Cambridge professorship after the school announced it would investigate him. Here’s a snippet from his resignation letter:

While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. . . . For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away.

Cambridge has said that it will continue with the investigation and that it will also review “the appointment process for senior academic roles.”

Simon & Schuster has decided to move forward with the publication of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, for which they paid—according to Arday, so perhaps take this with a grain of salt—“1.4 million” pounds or dollars (it’s unclear). Leaf Arbuthnot and Janet Eastham review the book for the Telegraph:

One striking feature is that the book is suspiciously stingy on detail: years, ages and last names are often withheld. Much of the kind of information, in short, that journalists and suspicious academics might have liked to be able to check is not included. The amount of money that Arday has raised for charity over the years, for instance, is kept ambiguous. Instead, the reader is fed platitudes such as “It was ingrained in me to devote myself to charity work whenever I could”, and “I’d taken part in all kinds of fundraising drives”.

This vagueness is not consistently applied, however. While much is made of the fact that Arday was unable to speak until he was 11, he is nonetheless able to recall incidents before that age in strangely crystalline detail. When he is around seven, for instance, he remembers being taken by his mother to a Stephen Lawrence march. “The air was thick with tension, rage and grief,” Arday writes evocatively. The crowd around him is “demanding the CPS bring murder charges” and chanting in unison: “No justice, no peace… stop killing our young.”

Quite how the young, mute Arday was able to grasp the crowd’s desire for Crown Prosecution Service murder charges is not elucidated. And we are informed that the Stephen Lawrence protest was just one of many protests that he attended with his mother. Yet throughout the book, the severity of his autism is also stressed: Arday cannot tolerate “loud noises”, even the sound of a fork “scraping on a plate”. Nonetheless, we are expected to believe that his mother routinely subjected him to the cacophony of protests, and also that he understood the import of these protests despite being apparently unable to wield words.

More:

Characters in the book, by and large, fall into two camps: the evil idiots who are cruel to Arday and fail to grasp his potential, and the angels who help him, mentor him, and express their ardent certainty that he is extraordinary.

This division of the cast into angels and enemies is established early on, when Arday’s mother, Giff, is treated to a powerful prophecy by the South Asian midwife who has delivered him. “This boy is destined for great things,” the midwife tells Arday’s mother, looking into her eyes. “You hear? You take care of this child.”

Something similar happens when Arday is 21, and on what he describes vaguely as a “relief mission in Brazil, working with an organisation installing water pumps in poor communities”. A local aid worker watches Arday as he bends down to help a child. She then tells him “quietly, almost to herself but loudly enough for me to hear: ‘You have a very beautiful heart’”. Nor does she stop there. “I can tell you’re destined to do great things,” she says. “But I also believe you’re destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”

These moments of piercing aperçus, on the essential nobility and uniqueness of Arday’s character, come thick and fast throughout the book. Even Arday’s first girlfriend, Debbie, who teaches him to read and write, seems to regard him as a kind of messiah: when her father objects to their relationship, she defends it on the grounds that Arday is ineffably different. “There’s something about him that’s so special. I can’t put my finger on it. One day he’s gonna do something, and the whole world will see.”

Lest we be in doubt about Debbie’s “unwavering belief” in him, we are told that she writes him “over a hundred handwritten cards”, all bearing the same message: “You’re going to be great. You’re going to do something, and everyone will see.”

Perhaps the most painful moment in which a character expresses their conviction that Arday is superior to the hoi polloi comes when Arday gets a job at Sainsbury’s, and becomes friendly with a fellow worker named Sam. “Jason, I want you to listen to me,” Sam tells him. “I see something in you: you’re fearless. Yes, you’re having to do this job now, but one day you’ll scale Mount Everest, whether anyone thinks you can or not.” This truth duly truth-bombed, Sam conveniently melts away, never to be heard from again.

In other news, when C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture was published, John F. Kennedy hailed it, like most people, as “one of the most provocative discussions that I have ever read of the intellectual dilemma.” The English critic and professor F. R. Leavis did not. In a response to Snow nearly three years after Snow’s original lecture, Leavis doesn’t only take aim at Snow’s ideas. He takes aim at Snow. Why?

Leavis promptly informed his audience that Snow ‘is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be’, an ‘intellectual nullity’, and ‘portentously ignorant’. While outraged Cantabrigians angrily quit the hall, Leavis barrelled on imperviously: ‘Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist.’ It was not just that he was a deficient writer, ‘for as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.’ On and on, Leavis torched his target. Snow’s lecture was distinguished by ‘a show of knowledgeableness’ that Leavis claimed he wouldn’t permit in a group discussion, ‘let alone a pupil’s essay’. Snow’s ‘unconsciousness is an essential characteristic’; ‘a mind to be argued with – that is not there.’ Then the speaker paused to assure his audience, quite unconvincingly: ‘Don’t, I beg, suppose that I am enjoying a slaughterous field-day.’

Leavis’s invective yanked the focus of the debate from the nature of intellectual life in postwar Britain to an examination into precisely how stupid the roundheaded nonentity from Leicester really was. Pretty much everybody, on both sides of the Atlantic, was appalled by Leavis’s cruelty, by the searing petulance so unexpectedly served up in the hallowed halls of an ancient university. The English writer Hilary Corke, after allowing that Snow’s lecture was ‘not very original’, spoke for many startled onlookers when he wrote that ‘there is really not the slightest reason why the thought of the good Snow should bring blood-flecked froth to the mouth.’

But froth Leavis did. Why? Because, for Leavis, Snow had become a symbol of the times, the primary example of its vacuity, its thoughtlessness, its bloodlessness. The point is that for Snow to be considered a ‘sage’ – and he was – then something very wrong had happened to intellectual life. As Leavis says, it was the fact that prospective students of Downing College, Cambridge continued to reference Snow’s lecture in their applications that set him off – as if Snow was anything like the ‘great English novelists’ that he once enumerated with typical definitiveness (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad). In a world attuned to the values of great literature, Snow would’ve been laughed into annihilation; instead, he was crowned a leader of thought. So, in taking down Snow, Leavis meant to take down the whole soulless system that had raised him up in the first place.

D. J. Taylor writes about the rise of the editor in the latest issue of Portico:

The editor came late to British publishing. Until well after the end of the Second World War, the man—and it usually was a man—who examined manuscripts sent in by prospective authors, wrote reports on them, and ultimately recommended whether they should be accepted or turned down was known as a “publisher’s reader.” Generally speaking, this functionary’s status was not high. He regularly operated from home or came into the office part-time. There were occasions when he worked simultaneously for several different firms, and in most cases his comments on the material he had to inspect were vestigial in the extreme. Evelyn Waugh’s older brother, Alec, employed by his father’s firm Chapman & Hall in the 1920s, remembered simply scrawling the acronym “NBG” (“No bloody good”) on the title page of anything that seemed conspicuously devoid of merit.

There were several reasons for this lack of a forensic interest in the text. One of them was that publishing in those far-off days generally moved at a faster pace. The yearlong gap that now tends to separate a novel’s acceptance and its publication would have seemed superfluous to interwar-era publishing titans such as Victor Gollancz and Charles Evans. Anthony Powell, who worked for the firm of Gerald Duckworth between 1926 and 1936, recalled that an author who sent in his manuscript in August was not thought especially demanding if he wanted to see it on bookshelves come October. Another reason was that writers were expected to know their business, to produce marketable work that could be finessed into print with minimal intervention. Waugh, again, reflecting on his early days on Grub Street, noted that if you had asked Arnold Bennett, author of Riceyman Steps (1923), who his editor was, he would not have known what you meant.

Christopher Caldwell reviews Peter Ackroyd’s Auden biography:

There have been a lot of books about Auden in the half-century since his death in 1973. The prolific English novelist, historian, and biographer, Peter Ackroyd, has now added another. Magnificent though Auden is, it is hard to know what to think of him. He kept picking up lives and dropping them. He was the grandson of two clergymen, and never wholly abandoned the Christianity of his youth—but he embraced high Anglicanism (Anglo-Catholicism) with a fervor in his 30s and practiced it for the rest of his life. He was a leftist—though not a Communist Party member—as a young man. Just as he was winning fame in England, he uprooted himself and moved to the United States, where he would be a fixture in both the East Village and Ann Arbor. And he led his whole life as a homosexual in a variety of environments—sometimes wholesomely at the heart of bourgeois institutions, but often at society’s tawdry and violent edge.

Ackroyd’s life is less complete than Humphrey Carpenter’s standard biography, his readings of Auden’s poems more superficial than those in Edward Mendelson’s great two-volume study. But this is a book with real strengths, the greatest of which is Ackroyd’s skepticism about Auden’s early poetry.

In praise of narrative poetry: “Narrative poetry shouldn’t need justification. Its roots are as deep as literature itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a poem, as are the Iliad and Odyssey, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The great works of tragic and comic drama in both antiquity and the Renaissance, as well as Japanese Noh drama, are written in verse. For much of human history, storytelling was a poetic art. Rhapsode, bard, skald, griot, and balladeer all told stories via song, chant, refrain, rhyme, and meter.”

Medieval revivalism in contemporary art:

Malo Chapuy is the latest avatar of medieval revivalism. Born in 1995 in northeastern France, he studied philosophy before turning to art history at the Sorbonne, and then to studio art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At art school, Chapuy resisted pressure from his advisor to “paint like Rothko,” gravitating to late 13th- and early 14th-century art. He obsessed over ancient techniques, probing manuals by famous conservationists and counterfeiters. He learned how to not only paint like the Old Masters but also make his surfaces look faded and cracked. For his thesis exhibition in 2022, he produced an illuminated manuscript, several small paintings in egg tempera, and a tapestry of faux stained glass made from Covid-19 face shields.

Today he paints religious scenes, altarpieces, and early Renaissance-style portraits that look like museum artifacts save for the proliferation of wind turbines, water towers, astronauts, and spaceships. Since graduating, Chapuy has seen his work included in the 2024 Lyon Biennale and in the thematic group show “Gothiques” at the Louvre-Lens last year. When we met, he had just returned from Bogota, where his gallery, Mor Charpentier, had organized a solo show of recent work.

Chapuy isn’t his gallery’s only medieval revivalist. Sacha Cambier de Montravel, a Belgian artist also born in 1995, whose studio is located across the courtyard from Chapuy’s, contributed dark diptychs and triptychs evocative of Hieronymus Bosch to the “Gothiques” exhibition. These appeared alongside works by their contemporaries Alison Flora and Emilie Pitoiset. Clearly, there is a movement—a new neogothic revival—to which Chapuy belongs.

Nic Rowan revisits Muriel Spark’s children’s book The Very Fine Clock: “Muriel Spark and children’s literature may seem like an odd pairing, but one morning in the mid-1960s, the Scottish novelist tossed off three such stories in a London hotel room. . . . Two of the stories, ‘The French Window’ and ‘The Small Telephone,’ would be published together in 1993 in a limited run of less than 200 copies. The third, The Very Fine Clock, received a wide release in 1968, the same year Spark published The Public Image.”

Tarot was a card game popular among the aristocracy. How did it become a tool for mediums?

Around 1442, the Duke of Milan gave his daughter a deluxe set of handcrafted playing cards for the courtly game of tarot.

The cards, featuring meticulously illustrated figures like Death, the Chariot and the Emperor on gold- and silver-leaf backgrounds, were created by a renowned Renaissance workshop. They cost about 1,500 ducats, 10 times the annual salary of an average courtier.

Before its use in spiritual divination, tarot was a card game played by Italian nobility — mostly women — and each card was a hand-held work of art.

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York is presenting surviving cards from that tradition in Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions.

The show explores the 600-year evolution of tarot from a game to an occult practice and popular entertainment, from those early gilded exemplars through decks made by artists including Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington and the contemporary British painter Chris Ofili.

A festival of traditional Irish music brings Belfast together:

The streets of central Belfast heaved with revelers as the sound of spirited jigs streamed from open pub doors. Buskers played reels as bystanders tapped their feet. And on the main stage in front of City Hall, a young singer encouraged the crowd to join her in a traditional Irish-language song of welcome.

The world’s biggest annual celebration of Irish music and culture, the Fleadh Cheoil (pronounced “flah KYOL,” Irish for “Festival of Music”), had come to town, taking over the heart of a city where such a celebration would once have been unthinkable. The music, dancing and Irish language on display have long been signifiers of the region’s mostly Catholic Irish nationalist community, though in recent years that has shifted.

It was a sign of just how far Belfast has come, a generation after the bloody sectarian conflict known as “the Troubles” engulfed Northern Ireland from the late 1960s through the 1990s and shaped the world’s view of the territory.

“If anyone had told us in those days that this would be happening here, it would have been a fairy tale,” said Maggie Smith, 66, who has lived in Belfast since her college days. “We wouldn’t have believed them.”

Known here simply as the Fleadh, the annual Irish festival and competition is run by a nonprofit that promotes traditional Irish music, dance and language on the island. It usually takes place in the Republic of Ireland.

Andrew Stuttaford reviews a new history of the Nobel family:

There is symmetry to the tale of the Nobel family in Russia. It starts with Immanuel Nobel’s arrival in St. Petersburg in 1838 after narrowly avoiding debtors’ prison in his native Sweden. It ends 80 years later when his grandson Emanuel, the head of the family business, flees the new Bolshevik regime. He was lucky to escape.

The Soviets wrote the Nobels out of Russian history, bar the occasional sneer. The family’s extraordinary accomplishments were compelling evidence that the Bolshevik takeover was a break from something far more promising than the rotten autocracy of Soviet legend. In The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel, Douglas Brunt aims to restore the Nobels “to their rightful place in world history.”

John Podhoretz reviews Tony, a new biopic of Anthony Bourdain, in the Washington Free Beacon: “Matt Johnson has arrived. Take my word for it; this movie will be nominated for a bunch of Oscars, including for Johnson as writer and director. Just as Blackberry reinvented the business movie, Tony is a reinvention of the biopic. It is a snapshot of a famous person’s life set over the course of three months in the summer of 1975—and it proves not only to be a masterful character study of a problematic man but a vivid portrait (like Blackberry) of the inner workings of a functioning business.”