Category Book and movies

Delving into the history of modern Australia

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There have been dozens of books written about the history of modern Australia since the arrival of the first fleet of English convicts to Sydney Cove in 1788.

The latest book hot off the shelves is Australia A History by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

I haven’t read it yet but have been delving into the story of European settlement via a much older book, which I bought for $2 at a book sale at the Athenaeum Library on Collins Street in the Melbourne CBD.

Seeped in history (the Athenaeum Library is one of Melbourne oldest cultural institutions), it seemed an appropriate place to pick up a copy of The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia by the late historian John Molony.

Published in 1987, it traces the 200 years (199 to be exact) since the arrival of the first fleet and finishes with the prime ministership of Bob Hawke and the success of Paul Hogan‘s Crocodile Dundee.

While it obviously misses out on everything that happened in Australia from 1988 onwards, I found it to be a really good summary – in less than 400 pages – of the key events that shaped the fledgling nation since those first majestic-looking e ships, laden with convicts, sailed through the Sydney Heads towards what is now Circular Quay.

Molony, who wrote many history books, was Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University. He died in 2018 at the ripe old age of 91, meaning he was alive for 61 of the 200 years encapsulated in the book.

Interestingly, I was midway through the book, when I happened to be in Sydney and visiting Gap Park in Watson’s Bay. Here you can stand at the edge of a cliff face that plunges into the turbulent Tasman Sea below (an infamous Sydney suicide spot) and look out over the Sydney Heads, the series of headlands that market the entrance to Sydney Harbour.

It is through this 2km wide entrance that the 11 ships carrying 732 convicts sailed through and made anchor at Sydney Cove, now known as Circular Quay.

As Molony describes it rather movingly in the opening chapter of his book:

High summer saw a fleet of eleven ships take up moorings at a small cove in a noble and extensive harbour on the eastern coastline of the southern continent. A few dark-skinned people of the Cadigal band, whose ancestral home that place had been for age upon age, watched closely from nearby scrub. The date was 26 January 1788 and the newcomers called the cove after an English public servant named Sydney…The modern history of the world’s oldest continent had commenced with the coming of a new people.

(In fact, as Molony’s book explains, the fleet first made shore first at what is now Botany Bay (where Sydney Airport is) but due to the “infertility of the soil” and a lack of fresh water, it was quickly discarded, and the weary travellers travelled a few miles to the north to the “finest harbour in the world”

237 years later, as I looked out over the Heads towards the sparkling Sydney skyline, I was filled with a sense of awe imagining these wooden ships, laden with their weary human cargo, making their way into a vast and primitive land, with not a single structure in sight.

And what did the weary English convicts, after a gruelling eight-month voyage from the docks of Portsmouth, make of what would be for most their permanent home?

No doubt they were filled with dread and fear (as were their aboriginal onlookers) and a longing to return the urban environment of England; the busy streets filled with people and buildings.

Gap Park, with a spectacular view over the Sydney Heads

Over the next 406 pages, Molony tells the story of the birth of modern, mostly white Australia. There’s a lot to get through, but he does a good job describing in an entertaining, easy-to-read manner the key events and colonial personalities that shaped what became the Australia we are familiar with today.

Looking out over the ocean towards a city of some 5.5 million people, with the Manhattan skyline of its Central Business District, the modern wonders of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House and the densely populated suburbs around the harbour, it is a stunning visual reminder of the pace of development that occurred over a relatively short period of time.

And to think that nothing was here, not a single building was standing 237 years ago, whilst Europe and the colonial parent (the British empire) were full of teeming metropolises.

In many respects it’s a miracle that Australia thrived at all. As Molony describes it, the early years of the colony of New South Wales was full of great hardship and suffering: starvation loomed as crops failed and desperate convicts dreamt of escape. In one instance, a group of convicts headed off into the bush, believing they could walk to China. For nearly all Australia would be a life sentence.

At first it was a primitive existence, with public hangings becoming a common occurrence. The first person hanged in the colony was a 17-year-old boy named Thomas Barrett, for stealing.

But slowly, as Molony describes it, an agricultural-based economy is established, centred around the production of fine wool and wheat (a sector which still thrives to this day). Amid the search for arable farmland, the colony expanded into Parramatta and then other regions of the country. Tasmania developed a whaling industry, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide were founded and settlers travelled west to establish Perth.

Then came a momentous event: the Victorian Gold rush, which turned Melbourne into “Marvelous Melbourne” and brought settlers from all over the colony, and abroad to make their fortune. This included the Chinese, who were the subject of a well-entrenched colonial racism. At its height- as I learnt – Victoria accounted for 40% of the world’s gold production.

Another defining moment, and one where Australia lost its innocence, was the Great War in which thousands of young Australian men lost their lives or came back injured and shell shock. The horrific, but courageous battle of Gallipoli that left nearly 9,000 diggers dead.

Molony writes of the end of the war:

It was Anzac Day, 25 April, the day of the landing at Gallipoli, that overshadowed memory and made all new and vital in significance for it was seen as the day on which the nation had shaken off the bonds of subservience and Australians had come to know themselves. [Prime minister] Billy Hughes saw it a little differently. To him victory in the war meant national safety, liberty and the safeguarding of the White Australia policy. Despite some signs to the contrary, Hughes was still convinced that Australians were ‘more British than the people of Great Britain’.

This long adherence to the White Australia policy, one borne out of British racism and fear of invasion from the East, is remarkable given how Australia changed into a successful, and vibrant multi-cultural society (notwithstanding the recent re-emergence of a wave of anti-immigrant feeling fuelled by a cost of living and housing crisis).

For so long Australia had been a land only for Europeans, and it took visionaries like Gough Whitlam to dismantle its final elements and welcome Asian and people of colour to our shores. Even so, by the 1980s, after nearly 200 years of European settlement, “the new nation [of about 16 million] was still predominantly white, spoke mainly English of the Australian variety, owed allegiance to the English Queen and observed laws derived from British sources”.

What I wanted to get out of the book, was a well-rounded understanding of the making of Australia, and Molony’s did a good job of that.

While it impossible to include in detail everything that happened over 200 years, I felt the story he told captured all the important elements without too much politicising, and with some sympathy for the plight of the aboriginal people, whose suffering was immense.

Most striking is his portrayal of the pace of development, how Australia so quickly build up its cities and towns, established a civil and well-functioning society that very early on and to this day, is among the greatest places to live in a troubled world.

It may be an old book, but the Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia is a great place to start for anyone wanting to learn the history of the country of their birth or – as in my case – of their adopted homeland.

Culture clash: Reading David Lodge’s wonderful campus novel: ‘Nice Work’

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I loved reading David Lodge’s Nice Work, the third of his so-called “University Campus Trilogy” series of novels.

Published in 1988, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost out to Australian author Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. Lodge passed away in January this year, less than a month shy of his 90th birthday.

Nice Work is set in the fictional town of Rummidge, a large, industrial town in the north of England modelled somewhat on Birmingham.

The plot of the novel is centred around two characters, attractive and ambitious English lecturer and feminist Dr Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox, the grumpy, unhappily married managing director of a struggling steel parts manufacturing company.

The protagonists’ paths cross when Penrose, who is desperately trying to land a permanent job at the University of Rummidge agrees to take part in the “Shadow Scheme” a program devised to bridge the divide between elitisit world of academia and giant cogs of commerce and industry.

Every Wednesday, Penrose must drive to the offices of J.Pringle & Sons and shadow Wilcox as he goes about his day.

The novel is a modern and comic take on Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South, about a woman who moves from the rural south of England to the industrialised north where she witnesses, in the fictional industrial town of Milton, the clashes between factory owners and workers amidst the industrial revolution.

In Lodge’s novel, Robyn Penrose – who ironically lectures on the industrial novel in English Literature but has never seen the inside of a factory – is appalled by the repetitive, menial work of men working in the cold and soulless J. Pringle & Sons factory she has been shown round.

Later, sitting in on a management meeting where she is only meant to be an observer, she starts arguing with Wilcox and his management team over plans to engineer the firing of a worker who is struggling to do his job.

“Excuse me,” said Robyn.

“Yes, what is it,” said Wilcox, looking up impatiently from his spreadsheet.

“Do I understand correctly that you are proposing to pressure a man into making mistakes so that you can sack him?”

Wilcox stared at Robyn. There was a long silence, such as falls over a saloon bar in a Western at moments of confrontation. Not only did the other men not speak; they did not move. They did not appear to even breathe. Robyn herself was breathing rather fast, in short, shallow pants.

“I don’t think it’s any of your business, Dr Penrose,” said Wilcox at last.

“Oh, but it is,” said Robyn hotly. “It’s the business of anyone who cares about truth and justice.”

David Lodge

And so, Lodge, sets up the ideological battle between his two chief protagonists which plays out amidst the grim shadows of machinery, blue-collar men and cold and soulless sheds and the bustling corridors, hallowed lecture theatres and academic politics of Rummidge University.

It’s a delightfully funny battle full of exasperation and sexual tension as well as education as Wilcox teaches Penrose about the dirty world of industrial dealing and backstabbing, whilst Penrose expands his narrow view of the world and removes his stigma about the world of academia and learning.

And to spice things up, unhappily married Wilcox finds himself growing increasingly attracted to his younger shadow. (An early comic episode in the novel is Wilcox’s confusion when he finds his shadow is a woman and not a man, a fault partly due to the misspelling of Robyn’s name with the more masculine “Robin”).

One of the reasons the novel is so enjoyable is that both protagonists are likeable, basically decent and willing to shift their attitudes. Lodge also has plenty to say about the importance of education and commerce, theoretical points of view versus practical reality and the way one’s behaviours are shaped by the uncertainty of one’s lives: Wilcox’s job security is under threat from strikes, dwindling profit margins and cheaper competitor’s while likewise Penrose has only a temporary position at the university while older, less capable men have the power to deny her a permanent role.

Set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s education cuts and her battle to reduce the power of the trade unions, Nice Work is ultimately an uplifting novel about how people from vastly different backgrounds can come to understand a vastly different point of view – and end up not just friends, but perhaps, even for a time… a bit more than that.

And it’s a real pleasure to read. Lodge is a wonderful comic writer.

(Nice Work was made into a four-episode BBC min-series, which aired in 1989. I found all of the episodes on YouTube. I haven’t yet watched it myself).

‘Treasure’ vs ‘Too Many Men’: how a mediocre movie butchered Lily Brett’s great novel

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It’s incredible just how much of Lily Brett‘s wonderful novel Too Many Men director and co-screenwriter Julia von Heinz changed in her movie adaption. This included changing the title to Treasure, removing a key character and adding unnecessary elements to the story and its main protagonists.

To summarise briefly, the book and movie tell the story of fortysomething Jewess Ruth Rothwax who accompanies her elderly, but sprightly father Edek on a trip around Poland, where he grew up, to learn about his childhood and that of her late mother Rooshka before the war and the terrible events that followed, including being forced into the Lodz ghetto and then sent to Auschwitz.

The pair love each other but spend a large part of their time together in Poland annoyed at their travelling companion’s strange habits and obsessions. Edek complains that Ruth eats “like a bird” and needs to find a husband, while she worries about his unhealthy eating choices and propensity to run everywhere. While Edek has an overarching cheerfulness about his personality, despite everything he has endured, Ruther is frequently anxious and easily upset.

I watched the movie after reading the book and really wished I hadn’t.

Perversely, people who haven’t read the book will probably enjoy the movie more than those that have read it given there is less to be disappointed about.

Strangely, the author, Lily Brett, who based a large part of the novel on her own life, is a fan of the movie, unless she was just being nice or doing her bit to promote it.

“I do feel happy with it. I think it’s a beautiful movie,” she told The Australian Jewish News in July 2024

While the basics of the plot have been retained – in both the movie and the book, Ruth and Edek travel around Poland visiting old landmarks and dealing with each other’s eccentricities – so many elements that seem important to me and you would think to Brett (given so much of the novel is autobiographical) have been unnecessarily changed.

The literary Ruth (like the author Brett) is an Australian expat living in New York while her father Edek lives alone in Melbourne. In the book, he travels halfway around the world to meet his daughter to accompany her on her Poland trip.

In the movie, both Ruth and Edek are Americans living in New York. Their Australianness is completely removed despite it being the place where Lily Brett’s parents moved to after the war and where they made a new life.

In the novel, Ruth is a successful businesswoman who runs a professional writing service in Manhattan. This comes up frequently in the novel as she contemplates how she should compose various letters, whilst taking calls from her assistant Max at all hours of the night. In the movie, Ruth is simply a journalist eking out a living. In the book, Ruth has endless amounts of money, in the movie she is not quite so wealthy.

In the novel, food is such an important element: Edek stacks his plate high at breakfast buffets, he eat Perogi and Polish pastries and they dine out an awful “Jewish-themed” restaurant in Krakow. In the movie virtually none of this is retained. Instead, Ruth travels around Poland with a suitcase full of muesli-like ingredients which she brings to every meal. In the book, she merely chooses the healthiest options from the buffet.

Heinz also embellishes Ruth’s character with unnecessary eccentricities: she has a penchant for privately guzzling chocolate, is a secret smoker and has an odd need to self-mutilate. None of these behaviours are in the book.

I realise novels have to be condensed into a relatively short period time, but why change important details like this? It removes a lot of authenticity from the film, which is not assisted by the leaden and plodding acting of Lena Dunham who is sadly badly miscast in the film. Stephen Fry is surprisingly good as Edek.

Another major disappointment was the omissions of a character that appears to Ruth whilst she is in Poland. It’s a brilliant piece of magical realism – Ruth hears the voice of a famous old Nazi stuck in purgatory. She then begins conversing with him (in her head) whilst walking the streets of Warsaw and Lodz. She naturally despises him, whilst he tries to justify his actions as merely following orders. Why this aspect of the novel was left out of the film leaves me gobsmacked.

There are some elements of the book the movie does well mostly visual: the grainy, grey and depressing depiction of Poland in the early 1990s is just as I imagined it in the book as are the gaudy interiors of hotels, apartments and airports.

But pivotal moments in the novel (which depict Brett’s own travels with her father) such as the visit to Auschwitz, which should have been given great prominence in the movie are reduced to a few short scenes with very little emotional power. And there is virtually no explanation given to the great climax of the novel: the dig in the backyard of Edek’s childhood apartment block to find a buried memento.

I was incredibly moved by Brett’s wonderful autobiographical novel, but deeply disappointed by the film adaption. Perhaps it should never have been made.

The butterfly effect: Reading Penelope Lively’s ‘How it all Began’

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How it All Began by Penelope Lively begins violently with the mugging of retired and widowed schoolteacher Charlotte Rainford on a London street and then follows the lives of the people impacted by this random event: those both close to Charlotte like her adult daughter Rose and people she has never met like Marion, an interior designer and Jeremy, an antiques dealer.

Forced to recuperate at her daughter’s house, Charlotte introduces Anton, an Eastern European migrant into Rose’s life when she agrees to tutor him at her temporary home. Caught in a loveless marriage to dull Gerry, Rose develops strong feelings for Anton, who is funny, charming and sincere.

Meanwhile, in another part of London, the lives of retired diplomat and historian Lord Peters and his niece, Marion, are set on different courses by the mugging of Charlotte.

Rose works as the personal secretary to Lord Henry Peters. When she is unable to accompany him to give a lecture in Manchester because she has to take her mother to a doctor’s appoint, he asks his niece Marion to accompany him instead.

Without Rose by his side, Lord Peters forgets his lecture notes, and he gives an embarrassing performance that has him questioning his own relevance and embarking on a bizarre television project. Marion finds herself seated next to a charming, wealthy businessman, who at first seems to be the saviour of her struggling interior design business, but who turns out to be a conman.

Charlotte’s mugging also exposes an affair Marion is having with Jeremy, a self-centred married man who runs his own failing antiques business. Marion sends Jeremy at text message to say she cannot make a rendezvous, but it ends up being read by Jeremy’s wife, Stella. Stella engages a lawyer and files for divorce.

While this may sound like the makings of a rather gimmicky work of fiction, Lively, who is now well into her nineties and is a Booker Prize winner (1987 for Moon Tiger), does a great job of elegantly orchestrating events and drawing the reader into the heads of the characters as they navigate the unexpected challenges they must now navigate. The novel moves almost cinematically from one storyline to the next added by Lively’s beautiful prose and well-rounded characters.

Reading the book made me think of my own life and how random events that seemed inconsequential at the time, have had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life. An unexpected conversation, a chance encounter, a phone call missed or answered, an opportunity taken or not taken. All these things have set our lives on unplanned pathways. But more so, they have impacted the lives of others, people we know and those we will never know.

While I have not read any of her other books, I have read that the role of chance and “haphazard what-might-have-beens” (to quote a New York Times review) is a theme explored in other novels by Penelope Lively.

“Thus have various lives collided,” Lively writes in How it all Began, “the human version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes is miles away now, impervious, offstage, enjoying a fry-up at the next service station. Just as our mugger does not come into this story, not now, anyway — job done, damage complete, he (or she) is now superfluous.”

The butterfly effect, the notion that seemingly trivial events can set off chain reactions and generate unexpected consequences is a powerful concept and explored to great effect in How it All Began.

(It would also make a rather excellent television series, if well adapted.)

John Thaw: the story of the angry, brilliant actor behind Inspector Morse

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Sheila Hancock’s wonderful memoir The Two of Us gives excellent insights into the personality and demons of the brilliant late actor John Thaw, who famously played Inspector Morse in one my favourite television series of all time.

The event that had such a devastating impact on Thaw’s life, as told by Hancock, was the day his mother Dorothy (or Dolly as everyone called her) walked out on the family, leaving the seven-year-old John and his younger brother Jack deprived of a maternal figure they adored.

This profound loss was the underlying force behind the intensity of his acting (he was utterly dedicated to the craft, though never comfortable with being a celebrity). But his mother’s disappearance from his life also fuelled a great anger and rage that turned Thaw into a heavy drinker and a verbally and emotionally abusive husband.

Hancock is incredibly honest about the challenges of her marriage to Thaw, which was unbearable at times. But she also writes of the later years of their marriage when Thaw stopped drinking and their relationship found an even, and very loving and devoted keel.

However, the great tragedy of it all was that after all the years of heartache, the splits and re-unitings, Thaw should fall very ill with cancer just as they were truly happy together.

Hancock, herself a celebrated actor of the stage and screen (now 92, I last saw her in a small role in the excellent cold case series Unforgotten) was married to John Thaw for nearly 30 tumultuous years and was with him the day he died in 2002 after battling cancer.

Hancock, was left utterly devastated by John Thaw’s death, despite their very volatile marriage.

No doubt a cathartic experience, she published the memoir in 2004 – just two years after he passed away from cancer and just four years after the final episode of Inspector Morse, The Remorseful Day, aired.

It’s quite an unusual book because it’s both an autobiography of Hancock’s life – who was made a Dame in 2011 for services to drama and charity work – and a biography of John Thaw, who shunned the celebrity life, and would probably never have written an autobiography.

It retells their family histories – Hancock was born on the Isle of Wight in 1933 and grew up living above pubs including in the rough and tumble of King’s Cross, London, while Thaw, nine years younger than her, spent his youth in the working-class suburbs of Manchester.

She writes about their first marriages, the trajectories of their acting careers (her close friends include the Carry On actor Kenneth Williams) and how intimidated she was when she first met Thaw when they began acting together on the West End play, “So What About Love?” in 1969.

John Thaw with Sheila Hancock

“The first week of rehearsal of So What about Love? was an unmitigated disaster. I always approach a new role convinced that I cannot play it and on the few occasions that John Thaw looked up from his script, his expression of contempt implied that he agreed,” Hancock writes of their first encounter.

But Thaw quickly warmed to Hancock, and she to him, as he – like his great detective character Inspector Morse – revealed his love for classical music, art and fine wine.

They married in a registry office in 1974. While initially things went well, Thaw’s drinking and depression worsened, and their marriage deteriorated. Hancock paints a quite different picture of their marriage to the one described by Thaw on an episode of the famous BBC series (now a podcast) Desert Island Discs recorded in 1990. On it, he suggests that they had sorted out their problems (mostly to do with his acting commitments), whereas the truth of the situation was a lot darker – as recounted by Hancock in her book.

“By 1990, both Morse and Home to Roost [a sitcom Thaw starred in] were in the Top 10 of the ratings. John was at the height of his popularity but off-screen he was fighting profound depression.”

It would take another five years for Thaw to seek professional help, quit drinking and reunite permanently with Hancock. From then on, they lived blissfully.

John Thaw with his mother, Dolly

After his death – her recounting of Thaw’s final days in diary entries is so very moving – she took a keen interest in learning more about her late husband’s mother, to understand why she had made such a devastating decision to leave her children.

To her great credit, Hancock does not demonise Dolly even though she caused Thaw so much pain, and in turn herself through their turbulent marriage.

“I will attempt to get inside Dolly’s skin, as if I was going to play her and try to understand what John never could or would.”

Alongside Hancock’s wonderful writing, The Two of Us is full of many great photographs, both professional and personal. Perhaps the most interesting and saddest of all is a faded and crumpled picture of Thaw taken with his mum on a rare union.

Hancock captioned it by saying: “It was found in her (Dolly’s) bag when she died.”

Her interest in the forces that moulded her husband – both good and terrible – make this a marvellous memoir. Any fan of John Thaw and Hancock (who is far too self-deprecating in her writing) will enjoy reading it, as I did.

Reading “Too Many Men” and remembering my own trip to Auschwitz

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I’m nearing the end of Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical novel Too Many Men, or as it has been re-titled Treasure in keeping with the movie adaption starring Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham.

It’s the story of Ruth Rothwax (Lily Brett), a 43-year-old thrice-divorced owner of a letter writing business who travels from her home in Manhattan to meet her 81-year-old father Edek (Max), a holocaust survivor to accompany her on a trip around Poland visiting the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow and culminating in a trip to Auschwitz and the nearby death camp of Birkenau.

Edek, who survived the hells of the Lodz ghetto and Birkenau has travelled from Melbourne where he lives alone. His wife Rooshka, an Auschwitz survivor, died in her sixties from cancer. Ruth moved to New York many years ago.

The pair are close but frequently argue. Ruth is wracked with guilt and worry about her father (Is this trip too much for him?) while Edek, who has an enormous appetite, berates her for “eating like a bird” and being rude to Poles they meet on their travels.

Having visited the Lodz apartment where Edek and Rooshka lived before being march to the ghetto, they make their way to Krakow and then to Auschwitz. Here, Ruth becomes physically sick after they visit the very barracks where Edek “lived” during his barbaric imprisonment. The whole visit is a terrible ordeal for her as she struggles to comes to terms with the suffering of so many people and the fact that her own parents were subject to the degradation and humiliation within the grounds she walks. On her arrival she weeps as she sees the famous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work makes you free”) that tricked arrivals into thinking they were being sent to a work camp. Ruth is enraged by a group of school kids eating snacks and fighting with each other, and in the taxi ride from Krakow to the Auschwitz she repeatedly corrects the cab driver for referring to their destination as the “Auschwitz Museum”.

‘It’s a death camp,” she tells the taxi driver over and over again.

Ruth is angered by the cleanliness and order of Auschwitz, the huge numbers of tourists and the lack of a visceral sense of the horrendous suffering enduring within its walls.

Ruth wished the visitors to these blocks could experience something of the atmosphere of degradation and humiliation and inhumanity that had existed. How could you feel people’s anguish and terror in centrally heated, newly painted barracks? But maybe nothing could ever replicate a fraction of the atmosphere, a fraction of the events that took place.

Nobody would come here, she thought, if this place was still covered in shit and piss and lice and rats and vomit and ash and decomposing corpses. The car park wouldn’t be full of tourists coaches. People wouldn’t be looking at the photographs and other exhibits on display in these rooms. These renovations were probably necessary. She had to stop being so judgemental, she told herself.

Ruth and Edek’s trip to Auschwitz made me think back to my own visit in May 2010, as part of a round-the-world backpacking trip I did with my wife after we got married.

I remembered the small minivan we took from Krakow to the death camp, a journey of about an hour through pretty countryside. I remember wandering the grounds of Auschwitz and seeing the rooms with the giant piles of shoes, glasses, hair and artificial limbs behind glass. I remember thinking I should feel more, or should be in shock, but perhaps like Ruth, I found it all too “neat” and “cleaned up”, too much like a museum rather than the remains of a slaughterhouse that treated people like insects to be squashed underfoot.

Then I decided to re-read the blog entry I wrote from the day of our visit, which I posted on our online travel journal.

How does one describe a visit to Auschwitz? A journey to the gates of hell perhaps? A place of unimaginable suffering and brutality? Probably all are insufficent. Yesterday we spent the day visiting Auschwitz and the nearby camp of Birkenau (Auschwitz 2). It’s a little over an hour by bus from Krakow. We travelled in this strange mini-van, posing as a municipal bus, which picked up people along the route so that by the time we reached the little town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis. Incredibly, the town now bares the inscription, Oswiecim: city of peace) it was packed to capacity and stifling hot. It was a pretty unpleasant ride, (despite the very pretty Polish countryside we passed), but it did make me think of all these people crammed into those windowless cattle cars and though nothing at all like the horror of those cramped conditions, it felt quite appropriate to not be comfortable.

The two camps are joined by a free bus service. We first went to Birkenau. Beyond the famous main entrance and watch tower, through which the trains passed, the most overwhelming thing is the sheer size. It’s enormous. At its peak there were 100,000 people living here under the most appalling conditions. Each of the barracks housed as many as 1,000 people. We listened to a guide tell a tour group that the prisoners were only allowed to go to the toilet twice a day and because there were so many, they only had about 40 seconds to use the latrine. Just one of many awful stories.

(In the scene from the book, Ruth and Edek examine the crude toilet block comprised of concrete benches in parallel lines with holes cut out of them the size of dinner plates. Thirty-four circles, inches apart from each other so that the prisoners could not help but touch each other while they urinated and defecated. Everyone sick with diarrhea, the holes below filling up almost to the top, the stench unimaginable. Then she starts vomiting down one of these holes and cannot stop.)

My blog entry continues:

A lot of the barracks are still standing (where they are not, you can see the foundations so it is easy to get a sense of the scale). At the far end of the camp, at the end of the railway line, are the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. They were blown up by the Nazis just before the camp was liberated. Despite the heaps of rubble, you can see the steps down which prisoners were led, the changing room where they were forced to strip before being led into the “showers”.,

Auschwitz main camp houses the museum in the brick barracks (it was formerly Polish army barracks) where prisoners were held. Unlike Dachau, where the museum assaulted you with information, here it is relatively succinct, leaving you to take in the exhibits. One of the barracks contains huge displays of what was taken from those before they were gassed: mountains of hair shaved off prisoners (the Nazis sold the hair to textile firms), spectacles, shoes, toothbrushes, and artificial limbs. There are piles and piles of these things, and this probably just a fraction of what was found.

The walls of the barracks were lined with photos of prisoners admitted to Auschwitz including their date of arrival and death. Some lived only a few days, some a few months and some more than a year or two. How to survive such a hell hole for a day let alone a year, I just cannot fathom.

(In the book, Ruth and Edek visit Auschwitz on a “dull, grey wet day” and is relieved not to visit it in the sunshine. But we were there in Spring…}

It turned out to be a very sunny day. There were purple and yellow flowers growing among the grass and shady trees that offered respite. But the overwhelming sensation for me was incomprehension, sadness and anger. Though as many of you may know I am not a practicing Jew, I did feel a strong connection with all those who were lost.

At one point I found myself humming the tunes of Jewish songs we sang at King David High School, songs that I had forgotten or buried deep in my memory. Then I remembered we had a school teacher, Dr Yageel, who was a holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and had a tattoo on his shoulder bearing his prisoner number. I remember him to be a short man, with a beard and a lined face. I think he may have taught our class on a few occasions. I never really thought about what he went through or took the time to chat to him. I recall thinking of him as a survivor as if he were an ex-football player or someone who had climbed a mountain. What I mean is, I don’t recall me or anyone else at school for that matter paying him the kind of respect he deserved. I wish now I could shake his hand.

The Joy of ‘reading’ Inspector Morse

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What an absolute joy and pleasure it is to read the Inspector Morse novels written by the late, great Colin Dexter.

I absolutely adored the television series and the wonderful portrayal of the curmudgeonly chief inspector by the imperial John Thaw, but the novels are marvelous in their own right.

I read three in quick succession starting with The Daughters of Cain (1994) followed by The Jewel That Was Ours (first published in 1989) and Last Bus to Woodstock, the very first of the Inspector Morse novels, published in 1975.

(In 2016, I read my first Inspector Morse novel The Wench is Dead (the eighth book in the series), a rather unusual book as Morse is recovering in hospital and spends his time solving a Victorian murder mystery dating back to 1859. You can read my review here).

Having first watched the TV series and then delved into the books (it really should have been the other way round), it’s impossible not to imagine John Thaw as Morse and Kevin Whateley as his lanky, Geordie crime-solving sidekick Seargeant Robbie Lewis.

In the Daughters of Cain, Morse and Lewis investigate the murder of Oxford academic Dr Felix McClure, found stabbed to death in his North Oxford flat, the murder weapon nowhere to be found. Suspicion falls on three woman – his wife, his stepdaughter and his wife’s friend (all with motive) – and it’s up to Morse and Lewis to correctly identify the killer.

In the Jewel that Was Ours, American tourist Lauran Stratton is found dead of an apparent heart attack in her unlocked room at the Randolph Hotel. Later a precious jewel that she was to donate to an Oxford museum is found missing from her handbag. Stratton is part of a tour group of American retirees visiting historic cities of England. It falls to Morse and Lewis to unearth who among the group of unmerry travellers committed the robbery and why.

Interestingly, The Jewel that Was Ours is the only one of 13 Morse novels, which was first a Colin Dexter screenplay (filmed with the title The Wolvercote Tongue) and then later novelised.

In Last Bus to Woodstock a young woman is found murdered in the parking lot of the Black Prince, a pub on the outskirts of Oxford, after accepting a ride from a stranger. Suspicion falls on the young, devious man who discovered the body and a philandering Oxford don. Amid his investigations, Morse falls in love with a young nurse and gets to know, admire and berate Seargeant Lewis.

I loved the slowly unravelling pace of the feature length TV episodes – a much more realistic depiction of how crimes are solved in real life I suspect – and this kind of meticulous unravelling of characters and motives occurs in a similar fashion in the books.

Of course, Dexter throws in plenty of red herrings – and even the great Inspector Morse comes to the wrong conclusions from time to time. In The Jewel that was Ours, Morse is convinced he has identified the killer, who he arrests at a train station and drags into an interrogation room, only to realise that he has made a blunder.

I love the fact that he is both a brilliant man, but also far from perfect. He is easily seduced by a beautiful woman, frequently drinks too much, can fly into a rage with little provocation, but is also compassionate, kind and empathetic. He is also very funny, in a mostly cynical way:

In this comic scene from The Daughters of Cain, Morse is talking to Ellie, a young woman he has become infatuated with).

“Don’t you ever eat?” demanded Ellie, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse, and draining her third glass of red wine.
“Not very often, at meal-times no.”
“A fella needs his calories, though. Got to keep his strength up – if you know what I mean.”
“I usually take my calories in liquid form at lunchtime.”
“Funny, isn’t it? You bein’ a copper and all that – and then drinking all the beer you do.”
“Don’t worry I am the only person in Oxford who gets more sober the more he drinks.”
“How do you manage that?”
“Years of practice. I don’t recommend it though.”

All three novels were adapted into episodes for the television series, but I could only vaguely remember the plot twists, and so the identity murderer came as a complete surprise in each book.

But even if I had remembered the plots, the great thing about the Morse novels is the wonderful writing of Dexter. He really is a joy to read.

Dexter is master of delving into the personalities of his main suspects and of taking us into the mind of the brilliant Morse and the not-to-be-underestimated Lewis. He is also brilliant at his meticulous descriptions of crime scenes, painting vivid pictures in the mind of the reader.

“The body had been found in a hunched-up, foetal posture, with both hands clutching the lower abdomen and the eyes screwed tightly closed as if McClure had died in the throes of some excruciating pain,” is how Dexter describes the deceased murder victim in The Daughters of Cain.

Interestingly, there is very little physical description of Morse in the first novel. Instead, he comes to light through his personality and mannerisms.

Morse makes his first ever appearance on page 15 of Last Bus to Woodstock after he arrives at the crime scene in the courtyard of the pub.

“Five minutes later, a second police car arrived, and eyes turned to the lightly built, dark-haired man who alighted.”

The hard-working Lewis is already there, having arrived with “commendable promptitude”,

“[Morse] knew Sergeant Lewis only slightly but soon found himself pleasurably impressed by the man’s level-headed competence.”

“‘Lewis, I want you to work with me on this case,’ the Seargeant looked straight at Morse and into the hard, grey eyes. He heard himself say he would be delighted.”

And so, begins one of the great fictional crime-solving partnerships, one that would spawn another 12 novels (published from 1975 to 1999), a television series of 33 feature length episodes (from 1987 to 2000) and two TV spin-offs, Lewis (42 feature-length episodes from 2006 to 2015) and Endeavour, featuring the young Inspector Morse (36 feature-length episodes from 2012 to 2023).

(I have watched every episode of Lewis and thought it an excellent sequel to Inspector Morse, but I have not watched any Endeavour, though I hear it is possibly the best of the three.)

That’s an incredible amount of television viewing created out of a rather old-fashioned, curmudgeonly, middle-aged detective,

Colin Dexter, who makes a Hitchcockian cameo in almost every episode of Morse (he died in 2017) began writing mystery novels during a family holiday in 1972 after a career as a classics teacher was cut short by the onset of deafness

He claims that when he first started writing the crime novels, he had little idea of what Morse was actually like. “I’ve never had a very good visual imagination. I never had anyone in mind,” he said in an interview with The Strand Magazine in 2013.

“The only thing that was really important to me about Morse was that he was very sensitive and rather vulnerable,”

Dexter also revealed that much of the things that bring pleasure to his otherwise grumpy detective hero, are things that Dexter himself enjoyed: classic English literature, classical music, cryptic crossword puzzles and real ale.

“People don’t realise this. The greatest things in [Morse’s] life were [A.E] Houseman and Wagner. These were the things he would go home and listen to and talk about and that was me I suppose, but that’s about as far as it went. I never even wrote plots for my books. I always made sure that before I started writing a story I knew exactly how it was going to end. I never had any idea about what was going to happen in the middle but I knew where it was heading,” Dexter said.

While each of the four novels I have read so far are classics of British crime fiction, with meticulously clever plots and sub-plots and wonderfully engaging characters, it is Morse himself who is central to everything. Brilliant, sad, hilarious and tragic, he is a marvel.

Now to find and read the remaining Morse novels (they are devilishly hard to find!)

The sad hope, but lucky life of Michael J. Fox

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Towards the end of his brilliant 2002 memoir Lucky Man, legendary actor Michael J. Fox recounts the testimony he gave to a Senate hearing in Washington in September 1999 as part of efforts to raise money to find a cure for Parkinson’s Disease.

“Scientists testifying after me stressed that a cure could come within 10 years, but only if there is sufficient financial commitment to the effort,” he writes. In footage you can find online, Fox talks about a “winnable war” and finishes by saying that in his 50s, “I will be dancing at my children’s weddings.”.

Twenty five years since that Senate committee appearance and whilst successfully raising tens of millions of dollars to fund research, it appears scientists aren’t any closer to finding a cure to Parkinson’s Disease.

“Parkinson’s disease can’t be cured, but medicines can help control the symptoms,” the revered Mayo Clinic says on its website.

“There’s currently no cure for Parkinson’s disease, but treatments are available to help relieve the symptoms and maintain your quality of life,” says Britain’s National Health Service, with a hint of optimism.

But while Michael J. Fox was unable to dance at any of his children’s weddings, he has remained a defiant, hopeful and inspiring figure to those suffering from Parkinson’s or any other incurable disease – as anyone who has watched his most recent Apple TV documentary ‘Still’ or seen any of his recent interviews will attest.

Indeed he has embraced his “Lucky” life, and made it a truly remarkable one.

He’s also an excellent writer and storyteller, who raises the often tedious celebrity memoir to a much higher plain.

While we often just want celebrities to “get to the bit where they were discovered” or to discuss the making of a certain movie, show or album, for Fox, remembering the key moments in his childhood is not just about nostalgia, but about piecing together the puzzle of his adult persona: how he became the talented actor, performer and later spokesperson for his cruel disease.

Re-watching home movies shot by his father – William Fox, a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Army Signal Corps – Fox at first finds confirmation of the notion that “I became a performer because I craved love and attention” but on closer inspection of him as a young boy taking a garter snake he had captured “on an involuntary bike tour of the backyard” he comes to the realisation that “all these antics were done for nobody’s benefit but my own. First and foremost I am a boy out to entertain myself, completely undisturbed by the presence of the lens”.

This level of self-analysis is not to be found in your standard Hollywood name-dropping memoir, and as reader one feels like we are joining Fox on his journey of self-discovery. It is also evident the deep affection Fox feels towards his family, especially his clairvoyant nana “someone whom I loved, whose voice, touch and laughter were as familiar as my own” and who had a “rock solid belief” in his bright future.

While a naturally gifted performer, the title of the book is a testament to the very real “luck” he enjoyed along the way to fame and fortune. As he tells it, he came very close to packing it all in after ending up flat broke in Hollywood, where he set out to find fame and fortune following some early television success in his native Canada.

His big break came with hit 1980s sitcom Family Ties about a hippy left-wing couple where he played their uptight Ronald Reagan-loving Republican son, Alex P. Keaton. This is a show I vividly remember watching as a kid growing up alongside such staples as Growing Pains and The Cosby Show.

Before landing the part that changed his life, Fox was barely surviving in a tiny, litter-strewn, filthy apartment in Hollywood, where his nutrition came courtesy of Ronald McDonald. He was broke and on the verge of heading back to Canada when the role on the sitcom came up.

He only got the role after a series very fortuitous events, but it turned him into one of the biggest stars in the world, and earned him roles in the iconic Back to the Future series and a huge personal fortune.

Having this wealth, high profile and amazing support network (including the love and devotion of wife Tracey Pollard, an actress he met on the set of Family Ties) helped enormously in his personal battle with Parkinson’s and his efforts to raise money to tackle the disease through the The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

And while getting early onset Parkinson’s Disease at just 30 years of age was a terrible bit of misfortune, he has – after a long struggle within himself – come to realise just how lucky his life has been.

His gratitude for the live he has lived – and still lives – comes shining through in this exceptionally well-written memoir. I highly recommend it.

Name dropper extraordinaire: Richard E Grant’s daft obsession with celebrities

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Without a doubt one of the most ludicrous episodes in Richard E. Grant’s entertaining, sometimes very moving but ultimately disappointing memoir “A Pocketful of Happiness” occurs when the author is having lunch with the legendary actress Sally Field at a brasserie in Philadelphia, in 2019.

His phone pings, and whilst at first he is reluctant to answer it – “I can’t, Sally, it’s rude to look at your phone when eating” – he eventually does on the insistence of his dining companion.

After reading the text message, Grant slaps a $100 bill on the table, tells Sally (whom he invited to lunch) that he has to go (“Will call and explain’). Then he sprints to the nearest Amtrak train station a dozen blocks away to catch a train back to New York. A phone call to Trudie Styler (Sting’s wife) and he’s soon in a helicopter on his way to Donna Karan’s estate in the Hamptons for the screening of a new Julianne Moore movie.

And why all this madness (and rudeness): “…because Barbra Streisand is the guest of honour”.

A little while later, he’s unashamedly attached himself to Streisand and her husband, the actor James Brolin, bringing food to the former diva and chatting to her for 90 minutes straight (apart from a brief interruption from Brooke Shields who declares: “This man [Richard E. Grant] is brilliant.”)

This scene in a nutshell encapsulates three of the great themes in Grant’s life and this memoir: his obsession with singer and actress Barbra Streisand (he has a bust of her in his garden), his endless fascination with celebrities (despite becoming one himself) and his incessant and unrepentant name dropping.

Incredibly, the book is not really about anything of these things. It is an ode to his wife.

It’s title, “A pocketful of happiness” refers to the instructions his wife Joan Washington, a celebrated dialects coach, gave him shortly before she passed away from cancer.

“You’re going to be all right,” Joan told her husband, “Try to find a pocketful of happiness in every single day.” (In this mission he appears to have succeeded judging by the relentless posting of his daily exploits on Instagram, in which Grant is always grinning broadly and his blue eyes twinkling madly).

While the book shift back in time to scenes from Grant’s penniless days waiting tables at Covent Garden and even further back to his childhood in Swaziland, the nine months from Joan’s diagnosis with stage 4 cancer in January 2021 to her death in September of that year is the central arch of the memoir.

In this respect, Grant does a wonderful, but sad job documenting the very sharp decline in Joan’s life as their universe shrinks to their London home and holiday cottage in the countryside, then just to their home and finally to Joan’s bedroom as she succumbs to her illness.

“Lie next to Joan as she sleeps. Listening to every breath she takes. Overwhelmed with longing. Longing that she won’t have to suffer. Longing that none of this is actually happening to us. L o n g i n g….” he writes in an entry from June 2021.

The pain he feels at the prospect of losing his lifelong companion and best friend is evoked tenderly across many of his diary entries, as he ferries Joan to her hospital appointments, has Zoom calls with Joan’s doctors, nurses and carers and keeps wishing it was all a terrible nightmare he would just wake up from.

Sunday, 14 February 2021
Valentine’s Day – could it be our final one after thirty-eight years together? Hard to compute. Impossible to imagine. Not being a unit, pair, partnership, union, marriage. None of which we discuss out loud and, on the evidence of her ebullience today, clearly not something she is dwelling on, or even thinking about.

But the name dropping in this book is on another level and suggests Grant lives in a cocoon of celebrity love and adoration from people notorious for their fickleness and fakery.

I’m not the only one whose taken issue with the appearance of a celebrity on every second page. Guardian’s Rachel Cooke felt similarly uncomfortable about it.

“Even as I admired Grant for his obvious devotion to, and care for, his wife at the end, I was uneasy: suspicious, you might say. Is it unfair to call a man with so many well-known friends a name-dropper? Isn’t he only describing his world? This is a question I’m still unable to answer,” Cooke wrote in her review in 2022.

As a reader, one is left with the strong impression that Grant is still completed intoxicated with fame and celebrity, and that he has never quite gotten over the fact that a gangly lad from Swaziland (now called Eswatini) made it onto the big stage.

During the course of the memoir Rupert Everett, Emma Thompson, Gabriel Byrne, Prince (now King) Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall (now Queen Camilla) all drop by for tea or lunch (His majestys brings mangoes). Grant’s diary entries are also peppered with anecdotes about meetings with Owen Wilson, Nigella Lawson, Tom Hiddleston, Martin Short and on and on.

“Meet Owen Wilson, who speaks in his signature wow voice, all convoluted vowels and ‘hehehe’ charm, like someone dope-dropped in from another planet…Instantly bonded.

All of these celebs – without exception – are delightful, warm, funny and charming and they invariably feel the same way about Grant. It’s all a bit much.

By stark contrast, Grant’s late wife found his obsession with famous people insufferable and avoided celebrity events with as much fervour as her husband rushed to them with open arms. This was no doubt one of the disappointing aspects – for Grant – of an otherwise happy marriage. You can almost here Grant groan aloud when Joan decided not to accompany him to award ceremonies after he received Bafta, Oscar, Golden Globe and numerous other nominations for his role as Jack Hock in the 2018 comedy-drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? alongside Melissa McCarthy (who is also given supreme name-dropping treatment in the memoir).

I have been a huge fan of Richard E. Grant since I saw him in Withnail & I at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa in about 1992. I also had the pleasure of seeing him live onstage at Sydney’s Orpheum Picture Palace in about 2006 where he was in conversation with the film critic Margaret Pomeranz after releasing his autobiographical directorial debut: Wah Wah (which I thought was great).

I also enjoyed his first memoir: “With Nails: the Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant” which as the title suggests is a collection of his diary entries written while making Withnail & I, the cult film that gave him his start in showbiz and subsequent films such as LA Story, The Player and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Yes, there is a lot of name dropping too in this book, but these are film diaries after all!

Reading Harry Potter at 50: should we cancel JK Rowling?

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It’s been a couple of months since – aged 50 – I finished reading the Harry Potter series, and I have been meaning to jot down some thoughts ever since.

The reminder to put pen to paper, if you can forgive that rather useless and inappropriate cliché, came from an unlikely source: the columnist and writer, Clementine Ford.

Scrolling through my Instagram feed, I came across a three-year-old post from Ford in which she attempted to tear JK Rowling to shreds. Ford labelled her books “badly written” fiction and attacked “Joanne” for making her hero a boy wizard, where a girl (Hermione) does mostly all his homework for him, but gets no credit for it. Even more outrageous, Ford says, Hermione has no female friends, is overshadowed by all the boy characters and that all the female characters are “parodies of womanhood”.

Ford then gets stuck into her real issue with JK Rowling, the author’s controversial views on transgender people. Ford calls Rowling a “fucking scumbug” for harassing transwoman and suggests “Joanne” open up her “stupid fucking” castle and invite all her transphobic friends to live with her inside.

Ford’s disgust builds to a crescendo where she wonders how in the space of 25 years Rowling went from charming children’s worldwide to become one of her most sinister fictional character’s the cruel, toad-like Minister for Magic Dolores Umbridge who torments and tortures Harry Potter at Hogwarts.

This reference to one of JK Rowling’s most famous characters (and in my opinion one of the best written and fiendish across the series) made me wonder if Ford, who had just turned 40 at the time of the post, had not secretly enjoyed reading the books when she was younger, before finding herself disgusted by the controversy over Rowling’s views on womanhood and her alleged attacks against the transgender community.

Did JK Rowling become a bad writer and the Harry Potter story an unworthy cultural phenomenon because the author launched herself into the culture wars via posts on social media?

The answer is obviously no. JK Rowling is not a bad writer and her holding abhorrent views (to some) does not make her one.

Of course you may decide to boycott her books because of the things she says online, but it would be hard to argue that Harry Potter is not a great deal of fun to read. These are books that have entertained and delighted readers of all ages since the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in 1997.

Reading all seven books as I approached turning 50 and really enjoying them was something I had not expected.

I started reading the series because my daughter, Edie (12) was huge fan of all things Harry Potter and I thought it would be a great way for us to bond. After I finished each book, we’d watch the corresponding movie and discuss our thoughts of the big screen adaptation, the actors chosen to play the fictional characters, the bits in the books the films left out but that should have been kept in, the way the filmmakers had created the magical scenes and if the movies were any good. Mostly I enjoyed the films, but they were not a patch on the books (And there is now a HBO TV series in the works that we are told will be a more faithful rendition of the novels, with a full season devoted to each book).

For someone who reads “serious fiction’ and hardly anything in the fantasy genre, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the novels. Whatever you think of Rowling’s views on gender, only a cynic would argue that Rowling is not a fabulous storyteller with the ability conjure up a complete magical world with a huge cast of living and breathing characters that have become cultural icons in their own right: Harry, Hermione, Ron, Hagrid, Malfoy, Professors Dumbledore, McGonagall and Snape (to name just few).

I also loved how the novels shifted between the fabulous wizarding world with its potions, ancient books and magic spells and the mundane “muggle” (human/non-magic) world inhabited by the wonderfully awful Dursleys (Harry’s relatives and tormentors).

But rather than write a lengthy review of each Harry Potter book – who needs another one of those? – my thoughts turned to the author and the culture wars she has sparked with her views on transgender issues and her strident defense of womanhood.

The controversy started back in 2020, when Rowling (rather petulantly in my view) took issue with an online article on Devex (a news organisation covering global development) about menstruation that did not in its opening pars mention woman, but instead used the gender neutral “people”. Later it refers to the 1.8 billion people who menstruate as “girls, women, and gender non-binary persons”.

Rowling responded to the controversy by saying: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth,” she tweeted.

Rowling argues that she has been empathetic to trans people “for decades” and that feeling kinship for woman and believing that sex (or gender) is real, does not translate into hate for the transgender community.

She goes on to say: “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.”

Following the avalanche of abuse she suffered because of her social media posts, Rowling penned an article on her website explaining in great detail her position, her concerns for young people who may regret transitioning, her affection and acceptance of transgender people and her views on trans activists. whom she says are “doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class”.

“I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces,” she writes.

As a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, Rowling ask that the empathy for trans people “be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse”.

However, she has received the harshest condemnation from some in the trans community for suggesting that some people, especially younger people may be “persuaded” to transition to “escape womanhood” or to find a more caring community, rather than because they suffer from gender dysphoria, a medical condition referring to the distress a person feels at one’s biological or assigned gender at birth.

“The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition,” Rowling writes. “The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”

Any position that questions the validity of a trans person’s existence will be condemned by many in that community, regardless of the reasons or concerns of those stating that opinion. It is, for many, a cardinal, unforgivable sin.

For her views, Rowling has been labelled by some a TERF’ – an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, implying hostility towards transgender people, a label she vehemently rejects.

“I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.” she writes.

What triggered her speaking out she says, was the Scottish government proceeding with its “controversial gender recognition plans, which removed the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria as a requirement to change gender legally and fast tracked the process for changing gender. For Rowling, this bill – which was passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022, but vetoed by the British government in January 2023 – put woman’s lives at risk (allowing in her view a man to call himself a woman and walk into a female-assigned toilet) and was a “destroyer of women’s rights”.

“I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand,” Rowling says.

Despite, these attacks, she has refused to back down, donating money to campaigns opposed to the stalled Scottish gender recognition Bill. She’s also dared authorities in Scotland to arrest her after calling a number of transgender women “men” – in apparent defiance of a new Scottish Hate Crime law which came into effect in April this year and which creates a “new crime of stirring up hatred against someone based on their disability, race, religion, sexual orientation transgender identity. (No action was taken against Rowling).

Has Rowling been treated harshly? Or has she deserved the condemnation she has endured by many?

Weighing things up in my mind, I would argue that she is not transphobic (as she has publicly stated) but certainly opposed to some forms of trans-activism where, in Rowling’s view it erases the idea of womanhood.

I feel she is entitled to this view and don’t feel there is as any legitimate reason to cancel Rowling or to stop encouraging young and old people to read her books.

You may feel the need to analyse the characters in her novels and their motives in light of her views on gender, and come to all sorts of conclusions about the author’s motivations or alleged prejudices, but let’s be honest, Harry Potter is not high-brow fiction. I don’t actually think its worthy of deep analysis. These are not books that need to be studying at University in the way that I studied the novels of Margaret Atwood or JM Coetzee or EM Forster.

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books are simply brilliant adventure and fantasy stories and can be enjoyed as such without the need to read the subtext.

Reflecting on the all the controversy reminded me think of another famous children’s author, who has been vilified, partially re-written but thankfully never cancelled for their controversial views.

I’m referring Roald Dahl, who sold 300 million books and wrote some of the most beloved stories of all time: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, Matilda and Fantastic Mr Fox to name just a few.

These books entertained and delighted me as a child and have been enjoyed with glee by my kids, both in the original written form and as movie and TV adaptations.

On the scale of unpalatable views, Dahl certainly trumps Rowling by some distance.

He was a well known and unapologetic anti-Semite who in an interview in 1983 said there is a “trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews”.

In 2020, Dahl’s own family apologised for his anti-semitism, but thankfully did not call for his books to be banned or burned.

That – in my opinion – is as it should be. And the same goes for the composer Richard Wagner (another anti-semite), or Pablo Picasso (a monstrous misogynist).

We do not have to love the artist to love and admire their art.

Rowling and Dahl inspire the imagination. They delight their readers. They celebrate bravery in the face of evil. They encourage adventure. And yes, you can take great offence in some of the characters in their books, or the motivations for creating them, but that should always be a personal choice, not a movement.

After all, you can always stop reading.