Category: Britain

How Englishness Developed

(p. C12) . . . , “The English and Their History” by Robert Tombs, takes the reader through the entirety of English history–from the Angles and Saxons to the present day. Remarkably, Mr. Tombs limns over a millennia of history without putting you to sleep. And lurking throughout is a fascinating and timely concept: how Englishness as an identity developed through the centuries.

For Vance’s full book recommendations, see:
J.D. Vance. “12 Months of Reading.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 7, 2016, and has the title “J.D. Vance on an epic history of England.”)

The book recommended, is:
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Never Say Die

(p. A7) LONDON — During the last months of her life, a terminally ill 14-year-old British girl made a final wish. Instead of being buried, she asked to be frozen so that she could be “woken up” in the future when a cure was found — even if that was hundreds of years later.
“I want to have this chance,” the teenager wrote in a letter to a judge asking that she be cryogenically preserved. She died on Oct. 17 from a rare form of cancer. “I don’t want to be buried underground,” she wrote.
The girl’s parents, who are divorced, disagreed about the procedure. The teenager had asked the court to designate that her mother, who supported her daughter’s wishes, should decide how to handle her remains.
The judge, Peter Jackson, ruled in her favor. Local news reports said he was impressed by the “valiant way in which she was facing her predicament.” He said she had chosen the most basic preservation option, which costs about £37,000, or nearly $46,000, an amount reportedly raised by her grandparents.
“I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up,” the teenager wrote in her letter to the judge. Local reports said she had told a relative: “I’m dying, but I’m going to come back again in 200 years.”
. . .
“The scientific theory underlying cryonics is speculative and controversial, and there is considerable debate about its ethical implications,” the judge said in a statement.
“On the other hand, cryopreservation, the preservation of cells and tissues by freezing, is now a well-known process in certain branches of medicine, for example the preservation of sperm and embryos as part of fertility treatment,” the statement said. “Cryonics is cryopreservation taken to its extreme.”
Zoe Fleetwood, the girl’s lawyer, said her client had called Judge Jackson a “hero” after being told of the court’s decision shortly before her death. “By Oct. 6, the girl knew that her wishes were going to be followed,” Ms. Fleetwood told BBC Radio 4. “That gave her great comfort.”

For the full story, see:
KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA. “Wish of Girl, 14, to Be Frozen, Is Granted by British Judge.” The New York Times (Sat., NOV. 19, 2016): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 18, 2016, and has the title “Last Wish of Dying Girl, 14, to Be Frozen, Is Granted by Judge.”)

Oxford Ranked as Best University in World

OxfordRankedFirstTable2016-09-30.png

Source of table: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) The University of Oxford, the oldest in the English-speaking world, took the top spot in the latest World University Rankings, released annually by Times Higher Education. The English university dating to 1096 dethroned the California Institute of Technology, a small, private school in Pasadena that had ranked No. 1 for five-straight years, according to Times Higher Education, a London magazine that tracks higher education.

This is the first time a university outside the U.S. is No. 1 in the list’s 13-year history.

For the full story, see:
BECKIE STRUM. “U.S. Loses Top School Ranking to U.K.’s Oxford.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Sept. 22, 2016): A3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “Oxford Tops List of World’s Best Universities.”)

Lack of Control at Job Causes Stress, Leading to Cardiovascular Disease

(p. 6) Allostasis is not about preserving constancy; it is about calibrating the body’s functions in response to external as well as internal conditions. The body doesn’t so much defend a particular set point as allow it to fluctuate in response to changing demands, including those of one’s social circumstances. Allostasis is, in that sense, a politically sophisticated theory of human physiology. Indeed, because of its sensitivity to social circumstances, allostasis is in many ways better than homeostasis for explaining modern chronic diseases.
Consider hypertension. Seventy million adults in the United States have it. For more than 90 percent of them, we don’t know the cause. However, we do have some clues. Hypertension disproportionately affects blacks, especially in poor communities.
. . .
Peter Sterling, a neurobiologist and a proponent of allostasis, has written that hypertension in these communities is a normal response to “chronic arousal” (or stress).
. . .
Allostasis is attractive because it puts psychosocial factors front and center in how we think about health problems. In one of his papers, Dr. Sterling talks about how, while canvassing in poor neighborhoods in Cleveland in the 1960s, he would frequently come across black men with limps and drooping faces, results of stroke. He was shocked, but today it is well established that poverty and racism are associated with stroke and poor cardiovascular health.
These associations also hold true in white communities. One example comes from the Whitehall study of almost 30,000 Civil Service workers in Britain over the past several decades. Mortality and poor health were found to increase stepwise from the highest to the lowest levels in the occupational hierarchy: Messengers and porters, for example, had nearly twice the death rate of administrators, even after accounting for differences in smoking and alcohol consumption. Researchers concluded that stress — from financial instability, time pressures or a general lack of job control — was driving much of the difference in survival.

For the full commentary, see:
SANDEEP JAUHAR. “When Blood Pressure Is Political.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., AUG. 7, 2016): 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date AUG. 6, 2016.)

The commentary quoted above is distantly related to Jauhar’s book:
Jauhar, Sandeep. Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Monopolist Ede & Ravenscroft Had 98% of Legal Wigs Market

(p. A1) British barristers and judges have worn wigs since Charles II Imported the idea from France in the 1670s. A London company, Ede & Ravenscroft Ltd., today claims 98% of the market for legal wigs in the United Kingdom. The wigs distinguish barristers from solicitors, lawyers who ordinarily don’t appear In court.
Ede & Ravenscroft, 300 years old, pursues its monopoly from a narrow London shop whose carved mahogany paneling, brass rails and chest-high counters hark back to the Victorian era.
. . .
(p. A7) In a stuffy loft two floors above, six women fabricate about 1,000 wigs a year on pockmarked wooden blocks resembling shrunken skulls. The wigmakers attach rows
of tightly rolled curls and a pair of ponytails with painful hand stitching, using 12-yard lengths of bleached curls made from horses’ tails and manes.
They strictly follow a pattern conceived by Humphrey Ravenscroft in 1822 when he invented the “modern” horsehair wig with fixed curls. It replaced ones made of goat hair, which had to be powdered and dressed with scented ointment every day to conceal the filth.

For the full story, see:
Lublin, Joann S. “Who Has Means and Motive to Steal in Halls of Justice?; British Barristers, It Seems, Can’t Resist Purloining Each Other’s Ratty Wigs.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Oct. 4, 1989): A1 & A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

King Henry I Might “Have Liked Being Buried Under a Car Park”

(p. A4) LONDON — Looking for a dead medieval king? You might want to check under a parking lot.
That theory, at least, is on the minds of archaeologists and historians in Reading, about 40 miles west of London, who this week will begin searching for the high altar of the abbey founded by King Henry I. They believe that the altar — and, they hope, the king’s remains — could be under the parking lot of a local prison, near the abbey ruins. The area around a nearby nursery school will also be searched.
Nearly four years ago, archaeologists discovered King Richard III’s grave under a parking lot in Leicester, about 100 miles northwest of London, on the site of a former monastery.
. . .
John Mullaney, a historian who is part of the team undertaking the search, said that archaeologists knew “within a few yards” where Henry was probably buried. He said the team would use ground-penetrating radar to search the area around the prison, and around a nearby nursery school.
. . .
As to whether a former monarch would roll in his grave at the prospect of spending eternity under a parking lot, Mr. Mullaney was philosophical.
“I’m afraid that England is a nation of car drivers,” he said. “We are a small country and most people travel by cars, so we need lots of car parks. Henry was a reforming king and would have been fascinated by the idea of cars and transport, and may well have liked being buried under a car park.”

For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “The Search Is On for King Henry I, Who May Be Buried Under a Parking Lot.” The New York Times (Tues., JUNE 14, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 13, 2016, and has the title “Search Is On for King Henry I, Who May Be Buried Under a Parking Lot.”)

EU Regulations Frustrate Innovation

(p. A13) The EU is a supranational government run in a fundamentally undemocratic, indeed antidemocratic, way. It has four presidents, none of them elected. Power to initiate legislation rests entirely with an unelected commission. Its court can overrule our Parliament.
. . .
. . . today, Britain–the most outward-facing of the major European economies–will thrive if it leaves. . . .
This is because the EU’s obsession with harmonization (of currency and rules) frustrates innovation. Using as an excuse the precautionary principle or the need to get 28 countries to agree, the EU gets in the way of the new. “Technological progress is often hindered or almost impossible in Europe,” says Markus Beyrer, director general of BusinessEurope, a confederation of industry groups. Consequently, we’ve been left behind in digital technology: There are no digital giants in Europe to rival Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook.
The EU is also against free trade. It says it isn’t, but its actions speak louder. The EU has an external tariff that deters African farmers from exporting their produce to us, helping to perpetuate poverty there, while raising prices in Europe. The EU confiscated Britain’s right to sign trade agreements–though we were the nation that pioneered the idea of unilateral free trade in the 1840s. All the trade agreements that the EU has signed are smaller, as measured by the trading partners’ GDP, than the agreements made by Chile, Singapore or Switzerland. Those the EU has signed usually exclude services, Britain’s strongest sector, and are more about regulations to suit big companies than the dismantling of barriers.
Even worse than in Westminster or Washington, the corridors of Brussels are crawling with lobbyists for big companies, big banks and big environmental pressure groups seeking rules that work as barriers to entry for smaller firms and newer ideas. The Volkswagen emissions scandal came from a big company bullying the EU into rules that suited it and poisoned us. The anti-vaping rules in the latest Tobacco Products Directive, which will slow the decline of smoking, came from lobbying by big pharmaceutical companies trying to defend the market share of their nicotine patches and gums. The de facto ban on genetically modified organisms is at the behest of big green groups, many of which receive huge grants from Brussels.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “The Business Case for Brexit; Britain will thrive outside the EU, free from Brussels’ regulation and empowered to cut its own trade deals.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., JUNE 22, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JUNE 21, 2016.)

Edgar Speyer Was Entrepreneur Who Created Innovative London Tube Infrastructure

(p. A13) Before World War I, Edgar Speyer headed the London branch of the German-based Speyer banking conglomerate. Among other things, he was a great lover of music. His mansion on Grosvenor Square was a cynosure for composers– Debussy, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg–all of whom availed themselves of the luxuries of the house, playing or conducting their work in private performances. “We live even more elegantly than kings and emperors,” Grieg wrote, referring to the mansion’s suite of rooms for visitors.
Not all of Edgar Speyer’s interests were so ethereal. The British Speyer branch was a key source of railroad finance, and Edgar himself was best known for creating–in partnership with Charles Yerkes, a Chicago entrepreneur–the London tube system, with its innovative “deep-tube” design. Edgar persisted in expanding the system despite its precarious finances and for many years functioned as its chief executive.
. . .
The Speyer bank, Mr. Liebmann tells us, had roots going back to the 14th century, at the threshold of a long surge in international commerce. New forms of paper–bills of exchange, letters of credit and much else–allowed traders to leverage up their businesses quite remarkably. Over time, houses like those of Baring, Rothschild and Speyer shifted out of their traditional-goods trading for the higher volumes and higher fees available from trading just the paper claims. The Speyers were known as the leading investment and trading house in Frankfurt, Germany, usually ranked just behind the Rothschilds in the Jewish financial imperium.

For the full review, see:

CHARLES R. MORRIS. “BOOKSHELF; Second Only to the Rothschilds; Speyer banks funded the London underground, placed the first Union Civil War bonds in Europe and built the Madeira-Mamore railroad.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Jan. 26, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 25, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Liebmann, George W. The Fall of the House of Speyer: The Story of a Banking Dynasty. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2015.

Franklin Was Appalled by the Boston Tea Party, But Was More Appalled by British Arrogance

(p. A13) When George III assumed the throne in 1760, Franklin was full of praise for his “virtue” and “steadiness.” Many American associates considered him somewhat sycophantic.
Mr. Goodwin’s assessment is gentler. “Franklin was a proud Briton, but he was not starry-eyed.” By 1770 he was frustrated by Britain’s “treatment of her American colonies as one giant farm and forest of raw materials.” His relations with Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies, became venomous. Lord North, the prime minister, icily ignored him. Franklin began to produce anonymous satires rebuking British attitudes toward America.
The nadir came in December 1773, when word reached London of the Boston Tea Party. Incensed, the king’s Privy Council summoned Franklin to Westminster. He was already in bad odor for having leaked impolitic correspondence from the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. The Privy Council chamber was, on this occasion, packed with counselors and curious members of the public. Other than Edmund Burke, they were hostile. Franklin stood grimly motionless as the solicitor general pounded the table and subjected him to “an hour-long verbal assault.” The council roared approval as he accused Franklin of acting for “the most malignant purposes.” The American had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men.”
The humiliation of Benjamin Franklin gratified the grandees of George III’s government, but the episode epitomized their arrogant maladministration. Franklin was hardly an anti-British zealot. He favored reconciliation and might have been an effective mediator had he been respected and trusted. Franklin was so appalled by the Boston Tea Party that he offered to personally repay the East India Co. That this rather Anglophilic colonial served as the Privy Council’s whipping boy demonstrates how obdurate the government had become.
Franklin’s revenge was served hot. He left England in March of 1775 under threat of arrest. Twenty months later he arrived in France, where his diplomacy would deliver a mortal blow to Britain’s American empire.

For the full review, see:
JEFFREY COLLINS. “BOOKSHELF; A Revolutionary Loyal to Britain; Franklin’s years in France resulted in military aid and recognition of American independence. His time in London? Slightly less successful.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 11, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 10, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Goodwin, George. Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

Utilities Shifting Back to Fossil Fuels to Reduce Electricity Prices

(p. B1) KEADBY, England — A wind farm here, along the River Trent, cranks out enough clean electricity to power as many as 57,000 homes. Monitored remotely, the windmills, 34 turbines each about 400 feet high, require little attention or maintenance and are expected to produce electricity for decades to come.
“They’re very well behaved,” said Sam Cunningham, the wind farm’s manager, as she drove around the almost three-square-mile site.
The owner of the wind farm, the British electricity company SSE, has been betting big on turbines as well as other renewables for years, with multibillion-dollar investments that have made the utility the country’s leading provider of clean power. In theory, last year’s United Nations climate accord in Paris should have been a global validation of the company’s business strategy.
But instead of doubling down, the utility is rethinking its energy mix, reconsidering plans for large wind farms and even restarting a mothballed power plant that runs on fossil fuel.
The moves reflect the existential debate faced by many major power companies, as they grapple with real-world energy economics and shifts in government policy. The calculus for fossil fuels can be more favorable at a time when energy prices are low and countries like Britain are rethinking subsidies on renewables to keep electricity prices down.”

For the full story, see:
STANLEY REED. “Clean Power Muddied by Cheap Fuel.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 20, 2016): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 19, 2016 and has the title “In Britain, a Green Utility Company Sees Winds of Change.”)

“Ordinary People Should Have a Go”

(p. A11) The classical archaeologist and now big-picture historian Ian Morris, whose last book argued that war is good for you, now explains why coal is too. In “Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels,” Mr. Morris puts “energy capture” at the center of human values since the Ice Age, through three eras: the Foragers to begin with; the Farmers after about 8,000 B.C.; and, in the past few centuries, the Fossil Fuelers.
. . .
A culture favorable to liberty and dignity for commoners came out of the Reformation and 16th-century Holland, spread to Britain and Britain’s colonies in the 18th century, and resulted after 1800 in an explosion of ingenuity.
This Great Enrichment, which Mr. Morris acknowledges but does not explain, increased income per head not by the 100% or 200% of earlier efflorescences but by anything from 2,000% to 10,000%. Routine materialism of Mr. Morris’s sort can’t explain the most important secular event in human history. He wants to pin it all on energy capture. The correct story is one of ideas of human equality changing, starting with a conviction novel in the 17th century in northwestern Europe that ordinary people should have a go. This led to massive innovation, among which was energy capture. We do not have a fossil-fuel civilization. We have a free and ingenious one.

For the full review, see:
DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY. “BOOKSHELF; Oil on Troubled Waters; In this telling, progress is explained by the rising use of fossil fuels. Yet the Industrial Revolution was powered by water, not coal..”The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 6, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 5, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, The University Center for Human Values Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.