In Siberia by Colin Thubron

“Everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom.” Upon this crucial sentence hangs Colin Thubron's In Siberia. Soviet institutions, the fabric of Soviet infrastructure and the people shaped by Soviet communism were all degrading before Thubron's eyes as he traversed Siberia in 1997, six years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This is how rabbit holes go; I started with Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (London to Tokyo and back by train, the return leg taking him across the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Express. Fascinated by that particular railway journey, I then reached for a book devoted to it, Eric Newby's The Big Red Train Ride. That left me fascinated by Siberia itself, so on to Thubron.

Colin Thubron, born in 1939, so of the same generation as Theroux, had already written about travelling through the Soviet Union in Among the Russians, published after a journey made in 1982, in the dying days of the Brezhnev era. By the time Thubron returned, 15 years later, the USSR had fragmented and Russia itself was in chaos. This time he concentrated solely on Siberia. He witnessed the fallout: the hopelessness of people left behind among the shards of Soviet megaprojects intended to conquer and develop the tundra and taiga through science, industry and Marxism.

Newby spends several days watching endless forest, taiga and tundra pass his train window. Thubron spends months disappearing into their depths, travelling by train, bus, truck and river boat, hitching lifts and taking dodgy flights into places far beyond the railhead. Newby is travelling through the Soviet Union. Thubron is travelling through what it had left behind.

Akademgorodok, the 'Academic Town' south of central Novosibirsk, gets a chapter. Founded in the late 1950s as one of the great centres of Soviet science, by Thubron's visit it had been hit badly by the collapse of state funding. Scientists had emigrated to the West, institutes were impoverished and serious research projects had been curtailed. Into the vacuum seeped some distinctly unscientific ideas. Thubron encounters underpaid academics pursuing variations on old Russian cosmism, involving mysterious energies, altered states of consciousness and devices supposedly capable of opening normally inaccessible psychophysical realms. 

Komsomolsk-on-Amur provides another telling example. The city was founded in 1932 as a great Soviet industrial project. Official mythology celebrated the heroic young Komsomol volunteers who had gone east to build socialism in the wilderness. They did indeed exist, but the labour they supplied was nowhere near sufficient. The state increasingly turned to forced labour, and around 90,000 prisoners worked in Komsomolsk during the main years of construction. The bulk the city and its industrial infrastructure was in the end built by slaves.

Here, Thubron's remark about slavery and freedom takes on its full meaning. The Soviet state could decide that a city should exist in an impossibly remote place, send tens of thousands of people there, compel them to work and continue supplying the settlement regardless of whether what it produced made economic sense. Once that coercive machinery disappeared, the enterprises that it spawned began falling apart, naturally. It was not that freedom was destroying what slavery had built; rather, it was the lack of Moscow's coercion that ultimately showed how dependent those achievements had been upon that very coercion. Building railways over permafrost is not just an engineering challenge.

As with The Big Red Train Ride, I followed the author's journey along maps, online and printed, and dipped into the many places on Google Maps that have street view imagery (albeit from before the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine). These continue to fascinate.

Reading In Siberia, in places I had a distinct feeling of déjà lu – passages of Siberian history were tales I'd just encountered in The Big Red Train Ride: the aristocratic wives who voluntarily followed their Decembrist husbands into Siberian exile, grotesque punishments inflicted by the Tsarist authorities such as tearing out the septums from the noses of snuff users, and the strange survival of strange communities expelled to the  east over the centuries. Newby and Thubron had clearly drawn on some of the same source material while researching their journeys.

Both write extensively about the Old Believers, driven into exile in remote settlements after refusing to accept the 17th-century reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. Under communism religion was suppressed but not extinguished. After its collapse, belief flooded back into the space vacated by Marxism-Leninism, though often in peculiar forms.

The dull certainties of communism had disappeared, suggesting the ideology's shallow roots, bereft of tradition. In the place of Marxism-Leninism came Orthodox Christianity, Old Belief, Buddhism, shamanism, mysticism and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs. Thubron has little time for the newly confident Orthodox establishment, whose clerics he portrays as arrogant, pompous, entitled and worldly, prospering amid the poverty of people with a genuine hunger for spiritual direction.

Thubron's Siberia is populated by sects and millenarian religious groups awaiting the End of Days. He also writes about the revival of shamanism after decades of active Soviet persecution. But how do you revive a religion whose traditions were mostly oral, when the people who carried those traditions have been killed, dispersed or silenced?  You improvise; you make stuff up, filling the gaps with what you imagine it to have been like. Thubron meets ersatz shamans, some inventing traditions as they go along, complete with plastic antlers and paying clients waiting for consultations in the corridors of shabby apartment blocks.

The most striking difference between Newby's USSR of 1977 and Thubron's Russia of 1997 was the lack of a system. In Newby's Soviet Union, there's always some official somewhere, a permit needed, a guide watching him, regulations, timetables, a place one may or may not visit. Thubron's people have been abandoned by the system. People ignore regulations and scoff at uniformed officials who try to enforce them. The institutions remain, the uniform blocks of flats, the mines, the railway lines, laboratories and factories remain, but the ideology which once explained why they were there has vanished.

The final chapter takes Thubron into Kolyma, the darkest heart of the Gulag. At Butugychag he visits the remains of a forced-labour mining complex where prisoners extracted and processed uranium ore without adequate protection. Accounts from the camp describe men surviving only months in some of the most hazardous jobs. The ruined machinery and abandoned buildings are the logical end-point of his journey: Soviet industrial achievement stripped of all propaganda and reduced to its human cost.

The inhumanity of the system is stark – shocking to those who have not confronted it in their family history. The collapse of the Soviet system was something to be welcomed. Thubron had arrived in Siberia at a bleak point in its history; Soviet tyranny was not replaced in the 1990s by a liberal order that would ultimately lead to peace and prosperity as it did across most of Central Europe, but institutional breakdown, corruption, mafias, unpaid wages, collapsing industries and the sudden disappearance of certainties by which people had organised their lives.

When Thubron writes that “everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom”, he is not claiming that freedom had failed; he was underlining the extent to which Soviet achievement had been grounded on compulsion.

Reading the book nearly 30 years after Thubron's travels through Siberia, we can now see that this was a Russia in transition, after the Soviet state had lost the power to imprison society but before another authoritarian state had assembled itself to take its place. The direction Russia eventually took out of that chaos was not towards ever greater freedom.

Ultimately, I doubt if Moscow will be able to cling on to Siberia – at least the far eastern, trans-Baikal part of it, until the end of this century. Much of this was Outer Manchuria, once ruled by Chinese dynasties – and China wants it back.

This time last year:
Prophesy

This time eight years ago:
Comfort comes in layers

This time nine years ago:
Preference and familiarity

This time ten years ago:
A long day in wonderful Wrocław

This time 12 years ago:
Putin will not heal Russia's tortured soul

This time 13 years ago:
Opole, little-known town

This time 14 years ago:
Raise a glass to Powiśle 

This time 16 years ago:
Mud, rain and local elections 

This time 18 years ago:
There must be a better way (commuting woes)

The Big Red Train Ride by Eric Newby

My appetite whetted by Paul Theroux, I knew the next book I'd have to reach for would be The Big Red Train Ride, Eric Newby's account of a Moscow-Nakhodka journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Why, it even name-checks Theroux on the front cover, with this quote from him under the title – “The best kind of travel book... it awakened frosty demons in me, and memories I had thought forgotten”.

Theroux travelled from east to west from Nakhodka to Moscow on the penultimate leg of his London-Tokyo-London train journey, whilst Newby focused on the Trans-Siberian alone, travelling west to east. Theroux's journey was in December 1973; Newby's in May 1977. The Soviet Union was not yet obviously on its last legs. Indeed, in geopolitical terms it was approaching the height of its power. Yet the symptoms of what would later be called the Era of Stagnation are obvious in both books – shortages, shabbiness, endemic drunkenness, petty authoritarianism and the immense gulf between official rhetoric and everyday reality.

The sheer size of Russia comes across in the distances between stations. Take Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. One would think, you know, two neighbouring Siberian cities somewhere along the line. Yet they lie 1,088 km apart; Przemyśl by the Polish-Ukrainian border and Świnoujście on the Baltic border with Germany – diagonal opposite corners of Poland – are a mere 994 km apart by rail. Lake Baikal is 636km in length – further than the distance between Kołobrzeg and Rzeszów in a straight line. And even today, this is not a fast train, no Shinkansen or TGV. It's a week however you do it. It is worth watching a YouTube video of the Trans-Siberian Express from recent years; it retains its flagship status (the train is still called the Rossiya) but it resembles modern Polish trains inside, and the stations have had a makeover. However, Google Street View shows that away from the clean station buildings, Siberia's roads are potholed, people buy vegetables from grubby kiosks and live in wooden huts with outside toilets. [Incidentally, this post from 2019 is based on my road atlas of the USSR from the late 1980s.]

In Soviet times, Vladivostok was a closed city, so Western travellers entering or leaving the country for Japan would do so through the port of Nakhodka; this required changing trains at Khabarovsk. Today, travelling in Russia as a Westerner one runs the risk of being imprisoned on some fatuous charge and becoming a bargaining chip for Putin. This journey itself is not on my bucket list. Indeed, I don't even have a bucket list. If I want to see trees whizzing past a train window I can go from Warka on the Radom line down to Kruszyna for about 20 km of this, short enough not to get boring.

Although the two books cover much the same geographical and historical ground, they do so in completely different ways. Eric Newby offers more objective insights, whilst Theroux's book is more subjective. About the Trans-Siberian Express, the railway itself, its place in Russian and Soviet history and culture, I have learned vastly more from The Big Red Train Ride. If Theroux is an impressionist with a broad brush, Newby is very much the details man. Theroux's primarily interest is the people he encounters on trains; Newby is interested in the people, the train, the track, the stations, the landscape beyond the window and the history buried underneath it.

I read the book accompanied by three sources: Атлас железных дорог СССР (Railway Atlas of the USSR, 1988, which I bought in Stanford's brilliant map shop on Long Acre in London in the early '90s), Google Maps Street View, and a YouTube video, 164 Hours on the World's Longest Railway Journey. Eric Newby details his journey, mentioning many of the larger stations along the way; I would find them in the atlas, then jump in to Street View to see how they look today. 

Eric Newby (1919-2006) had a fascinating war record. He fought with the Black Watch regiment in North Africa, then joined the fledgling Special Boat Section, and was captured by the Italians during a raid on Sicily in 1942. He escaped from a PoW camp in northern Italy and was assisted in avoiding recapture by Wanda Škof, a young Slovene woman, whom he married after the war, and who accompanied him on many of his travels.

Their journey across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express reminded me of our Polish parish youth trips to communist Poland at the same time; everything was invigilated by the Party, its people were with us, watching us, we had to visit aluminium foundries and car factories, we had to sit through propaganda films. And so it was with Newby, his wife, and Otto the photographer who snapped the journey; Misha, “the man from the Agency” was with them all the while, telling them what they couldn't photograph (most things of interest) and lining up meetings with chairmen of collective farms and boring visits to cable factories.

Below: taken from a Soviet railway atlas from 1943, the page showing the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, with Vladivostok and Nakhodka visible. To view full size, right-click on the image to open it in a new tab, then click on it in the new tab and use the 'enlarge' tool.

This time last year:
Early onset of Autumn?

This time two years ago:
Cider-making lessons as the season moves on

This time three years ago:
Getting to Sandomierz by bus and train

This time four years ago:
Inspiration

This time 12 years ago:
Food shopping and dietary update

This time 13 years ago:
Photos from the Radom Air Show, part 1

This time 14 years ago:
Offloading PKP's risk at W-wa Jeziorki

This time 16 years ago:
Time to be stuffing yourself with fresh fruit

This time 17 years ago:
First notes of autumn in the air

This time 19 years ago:
Large spider catches fly

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

While pondering which book to read next, my gaze swept across the bookshelf in the front room; one book seemed to be just slightly sticking out. "Why not read me?" it asked. So I pulled it out. The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), by Paul Theroux. I don't remember actually reading it... I bought it a long time ago (from an Ealing charity shop). Pulling it from the shelf, I opened the book at the double-page map that preceded Chapter One. On the map was Warsaw. Between Moscow and Berlin. A good enough reason to read it, I thought...

The book traces the author's journey (mostly) by train from London to Tokyo and back via the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Express. The journey took place between September and December 1973; the book was published in 1975. More than half the book – 17 of its 30 chapters – is spent travelling through territories that, barely a generation earlier, had formed part of Britain's Asian empire: from the Khyber Pass to Singapore via Bombay, Madras, Ceylon, Calcutta, Mandalay, Rangoon and Kuala Lumpur. Theroux passes through Vietnam – after the departure of the US military, but before the collapse of the South. On his way he stops to deliver lectures on the American novel, arranged for him by various cultural attachés along his route. How he could keep to the schedule, given delayed trains and missed connections, is never quite explained.

Also not explained are the practicalities. What luggage did Theroux take? What camera? What other equipment? Clothing? The Great Railway Bazaar is not a guide book. The author offers no travel tips – like, none. Theroux seems completely uninterested in helping anyone reproduce his journey. Which, in retrospect, makes sense. Written well before online booking, downloadable timetables and low-cost flights, and long before one could ascertain the availability of seats and sleeper berths from a phone, the informational and organisational effort involved in making such an international rail journey must have been immense. "Just turn up at the station and buy your ticket!" But which station? Which ticket window? Which ticket? When will the train actually leave? Does anyone here speak English? Whom do I bribe to get a better berth?

Theroux's book makes no pretence at objectivity. It is Eurasia seen from a train by one pair of Western eyes. He is often contemptuous of what he sees; "Iranians babbling in Farsi", Indians defecating by the trackside ('the turd world'), drunken Russian train crews, fellow passengers he finds intolerably boring (and then spends the next two pages telling the reader just how boring), attendants touting for bribes. The world he sees is shocking to the modern reader – child brothels, drug addicts, hunger. Compare the cities Theroux describes with their appearance today using Google Maps Street View. The transformation is extraordinary. Behind that change lies one of the great economic facts of the past half-century: billions of people, particularly in Asia, have escaped the extreme poverty that Theroux encountered almost everywhere. [The most recent World Bank data shows 8.5% of the world's population living in "extreme poverty", with two-thirds of that being in sub-Saharan Africa. When the World Bank started tracking this metric in 1981, the figure was 42%.]

The Great Railway Bazaar describes a world that has since changed significantly. Countries have disappeared – the USSR, South Vietnam – or have changed their name – Myanmar, Sri Lanka. Some countries are all but out of bounds for Western travellers today – Iran, Afghanistan, Russia. The Orient Express (Paris-Istanbul) was at its very nadir; a shadow of its former glory, and nothing remotely like the luxury experience of today. There was no dining car attached!

Theroux does not hide the mechanics of turning the journey into a book. He frequently mentions his notebooks, by the end of the journey there were four of them. He is also constantly checking in to see what condition his condition is in. He drinks inordinate amounts of beer, wine and spirits – the latter while crossing Russia.

What makes the book worth reading half a century later is its lack of retrospective correction. Theroux does not know what is going to happen next – in particular in Vietnam, Iran or the Soviet Union. The world he is passing through is about to slip into history – of this he seems unaware. His prejudices can grate with the sensibilities of the modern reader, but they too belong to the historical document. Theroux can be arrogant, entitled, unfair and sometimes obnoxious, but it is precisely because he does not sanitise either himself or what he sees, that the book remains an vivid and highly readable time capsule.

As it happens, I read the book during last week's heatwave, much of it in the late evening in bed, sweltering under a thin sheet, with Céleste and her kittens confined to the house. A suitably third-world ambience was thus achieved, nicely according with what I was reading.

And what did Theroux write about Poland? On page 346, an American couple he met on the Trans-Siberian Express tell him: "We're celebrating by going around the world. We're on our way to Poland..." to which Theroux replied drily: "So you're really living it up." This was still some way before Irkutsk. But his actual impressions of Poland? On the book's penultimate page, one reads: "I slept through Warsaw, glared at Berlin and entered Holland with a stone in my stomach." So much for Poland.

This time last year:
A walk in the sun

This time five years ago
Accounting for coincidence
[Henry Cow – Piekut]

This time six years ago:
Działka food

This time seven years ago:
Proper summer in Warsaw

This time eight years ago:
Poland's trains failing in the heat

This time nine years ago:
"Learn from your mystics is my only advice"

This time ten years ago:
Out where the pines grow wild and tall

This time 13 years ago:
Behold and See (part V) - short story

This time 14 years ago:
Syrenki in Warsaw

This time 15 years ago:
What's the Polish for 'impostor'?

This time 16 years ago:
Running with the storm on the road to Mamrotowo

This time 18 years ago:
St Pancras Station – new gateway to London

This time 19 years ago:
Mountains or sea? North Wales has them both

Water Which Does Not Wet Hands revisited (Pt II)

Part I of the review here.

It is the nature of Homo sapiens to be curious – to ask the most fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality. Why is there something rather than nothing? What are we made of? Why do we think and feel? If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there, does it make a sound?

As humanity evolved from hunter-gatherer to settled communities, more time became available for asking those questions and making observations from which hypotheses could be created, putative answers to those questions that have gnawed at us from our birth as a separate species.

Our first attempts at defining the nature of reality were coded as myths and legends; supernatural beings whose actions defined the paths of celestial objects across the sky, good or bad harvests, and phenomena such as volcanoes and thunderstorms. Telling these stories was the job of shamen, not scientists.

Systematic scientific thinking and practice began in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia during the third and second millennia BC. These first steps in what would become mathematics, astronomy and medicine went on to influence Ancient Greek natural philosophy, who attempted to explain physical phenomena by natural, rather than supernatural, causes. Knowledge of these Greek concepts deteriorated in Latin-speaking Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, but lived on in the Byzantine Empire. The Hellenistic worldview was preserved and absorbed into the Arabic-speaking Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived the learning of natural philosophy in the West.

The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe marked a break with the natural philosophy that had preceded it. The scientific method that emerged departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions. It was more mechanistic in its worldview, nudging out the supernatural explanations, it was more integrated with mathematics, and focused on acquiring and interpreting  evidence. Proof became the ultimate goal, proving conjectures, experimentally or mathematically. Science became separate from philosophy; matter… from spirit.

Alchemy served as the bridge between Mediaeval thought and the birth of the scientific method in the Enlightenment. Dr Szydło’s book examines the links between alchemical thinking and practice and the first true scientists. In particular, the author sets out a number of Sendivogius’s accounts of processes, comparing them to modern chemistry. The book follows on with the work of pioneers of today’s scientific method, as they worked on identifying oxygen as an element.

Dr Szydło separates practical alchemy from philosophical alchemy in Sendivogius’s writings. The philosophical includes musings on “the spirit of the Earth”, the practical includes observations made while heating lead oxide, for example. Sendivogius’s central-nitre theory was instrumental in stimulating experimental investigation into the vital constituent of air and influenced Robert Boyle and John Mayow, whose work in isolating oxygen as a constituent of air were crucial in the shift from alchemy to chemistry.

Post-Enlightenment science took the path of reductionism, stripping away all of alchemy’s arcane trappings of mysticism, replacing it with empiricism. Yet four centuries on, scientists acknowledge many more gaps in their knowledge than was the case a hundred years ago. Reductionism is giving way to complexity. The acknowledgement of what we don’t know leads to new ways of thinking about the ultimate nature of reality. Consciousness and the conscious observer take on a new primacy. Thirty years on from when Water Which Does Not Wet Hands was published, new parallels can be sought between how alchemy viewed ultimate reality and how it is seen today.

Rereading the book today through the lens of contemporary consciousness studies reveals new congruences. Sendivogius's universe is alive, filled with purpose and permeated by a principle that appears simultaneously as spirit, matter and life. His worldview contrasted profoundly with the dead, clockwork universe of the materialist reductionism that would follow. 

Whilst Sendivogius's 'central nitre' is not consciousness, it is a vital force with formative causation, a fundamental property of the Universe.

Were Sendivogius to walk out of a time machine into today's world and to have the chance to talk to our leading scientific theoreticians and philosophers, I think he would rather side with Donald Hoffman, Phillip Goff or Rupert Sheldrake than with Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. Or, were he still alive, Daniel Dennett.

Is the pendulum of philosophy swinging back, or was materialist reductionism an aberration from more intuitive thinking about the nature of reality? Time will tell, I need more lives to assuage my curiosity.

This time last year:
A better tomorrow – science and technology

This time ten years ago:
Memory, place and experience

This time 11 years ago:
UK Number One in world Soft Power rankings

This time 14 years ago:
First flight from Modlin

This time 15 years ago:
Another cycle route to work

This time 18 years ago:
PZL M-28 and Piaggio Avanti – Okęcie regulars

Water Which Does Not Wet Hands revisited (Pt I)

Zbigniew Szydło's book about the alchemical times of Michał Sędziwoj (1566-1636), known across Europe by his Latinised name, Sendivogius, requires a re-read in light of developments in science and philosophy since its publication, as well as my own evolved understanding of how we describe reality. How is alchemy perceived today? How does it fare when viewed from a perspective of panpsychism, dual-aspect monism and the stagnation in fundamental physics?

Author Zbigniew Szydło is better known to the English-speaking world as Andrew Szydło, famous for his (literally) explosive chemistry demonstrations at numerous Royal Institution lectures. His 1994 book looks at the life and works of one of Europe's greatest alchemists, he asks whether Sendivogius discovered oxygen in the practical sense – the heating of potassium nitrate is thought to have provided the oxygen need to keep rowers alive as they propelled the first documented submarine down the Thames in 1621. The book's main aim is to establish Sendivogius as an important figure in the transition from alchemy to modern chemistry – above all through his ideas about nitre, air, combustion and respiration.

Sendivogius was a Polish nobleman and diplomat; he served in the courts of Polish king Sigismund III Vasa and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II as an advisor on metallurgy and mining, as well as alchemy. He travelled extensively across Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and the German-speaking lands, and authored several significant alchemical works that were widely printed and reprinted in different language-versions across Europe in the 17th century. 

When I first read the book in the mid 1990s, my worldview tended towards the physicalist and the rational; I paid scant regard to the metaphysical. At the time, I read Dr Szydło's book primarily as a narrative intended to overturn the myth that mediaeval alchemists were mere charlatans who claimed that they could turn base metals into gold. Instead, Dr Szydło presents a stage in the history human thought before the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment. Alchemy was an entire philosophical system attempting to describe reality in a hermetic language known only to adepts. 

It is known that Sendivogius's works were studied by both Antoine Lavoisier and Isaac Newton. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" – indeed.

Sendivogius recognised that air was not chemically uniform, identifying within it a particular life-giving and combustion-supporting component. His writings influenced later investigators, helping prepare the conceptual ground from which oxygen chemistry eventually emerged. The book does not present Sendivogius as the discoverer of oxygen, but as a remarkable early investigator of the phenomenon later understood as oxygen. 

Today I am re-reading the book in the context of Philosophy of Mind, of the increasingly held view that consciousness is fundamental, and comparing the thoughts of Sendivogius to those of contemporary philosophers and scientists such as David Chalmers, Donald Hoffman, Bernard Carr, Philip Goff, Bernardo Kastrup and Rupert Sheldrake. But more on that in my next post. I am also re-reading the book in the age of AI and Wikipedia, which allow instant dives down rabbit-holes for greater detail and wider context.

The book goes into much detail about the importance of salt to alchemy. Today, every school pupil knows that salt is NaCl; one atom of sodium bonded to one atom of chlorine. A highly reactive metal that burns in air and a poisonous gas; combine the two and you get something that's indispensable to life. To a modern chemist, a salt is something more; it's "an ionic compound formed by neutralising an acid with a base". But to Sendivogius and his contemporaries, salt was one of the three fundamental pillars of reality (tria prima), along with sulphur and mercury. When the alchemists considered salt, they were looking at the processes of fixation and crystallisation – grounding spirit into form.

Another salt is worthy of note in terms of how it was viewed by alchemy: gunpowder. Saltpetre (potassium nitrate or nitre), when mixed with sulphur and charcoal, has explosive properties. The sudden release of violent energy has its analogy in the heavens; thunder and lightning must be caused by similar processes. Hence the concept of 'aerial nitre'; heavenly gunpowder.

Reading about the theories of alchemists as they attempted to define reality in their terms of makes me think that science today is somewhat arrogant, believing that it's so close to grasping reality on one neat theory of everything, an equation you can wear on a t-shirt. 

["Lagrangian of the Standard Model of particle physics – this equation sums up our current understanding of fundamental particles and forces. It represents the Standard Model of particle physics. The top line describes the forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The second line describes how these forces act on the fundamental particles of matter – quarks and leptons. The last two lines describe the Higgs boson and the mechanism by which particles acquire their mass" – from the CERN merch shop.]

As the language of myths and legends gave way to the language of alchemy, which in turn gave way to the language of science as the way humans describe reality, so the language of science will inevitably evolve and move on. Does not string theory and quantum gravity – attempts to frame a theory of everything in a mathematical framework – not hold something of the arcane language of alchemy? I am certain that humans in four centuries' time will look back at the beliefs that science holds true today with the same patronising smirk that is on our faces as we read about the alchemists.

[Co]incidentally, my youngest kitten, fifth-born of the fifth-born, is named Kwintesensja ('Quintessence'). Or Kwincia for short. Dr Szydło points out that "Aristotle introduced the idea of a fifth element – the quinta essentia – from which the heavens were made. The quintessence was linked to ideas of perfection and eternal life. It became the basis of the idea of a universal spirit or ether, or 'world soul', which was to play an important part in alchemical theory."

More in the next post.

This time last year:
Out of the box: exploratory kittens

This time two years ago:
Do you think in a language?

This time three years ago:
Faith, construction, history in Wrocław

This time four years ago:
A better tomorrow – geodiversity

This time five years ago:
Warka – small-town Poland's moving up

This time six years ago:

Summer działka joys

This time seven years ago:

Local round-up

This time eight years ago:
New Nikons on the way!

This time 14 years ago:
Work continues on S2, going under the railway lines

This time 15 years ago:
Stand Easy! – a short story

This time 18 years ago:
God Save The Queen - I mean it, Ma'am

This time 19 years ago:
On the Road Again

An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne

One of the most fascinating books I have is a present (as with many of the most thought-provoking books in my collection) from my brother. A 1934 third edition of J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, a book which strikes me as being so amazing as to possess otherworldly properties...

Firstly, a word about the author. A British aeronautical pioneer, Dunne designed aircraft with a swept-wing, tailless configuration. Today aircraft with identical configuration fly as the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit and B-21 Raider stealth bombers. [This article from a US Air Force website name-checks Dunne as the designer of the first practical flying-wing.] So in the world of science, engineering and technology, Dunne is acknowledged as a Serious Man, not some proto-New Age purveyor of woo-woo flakiness. 

Below: digitally enhanced photograph of J. W. Dunne at the controls of his D.6 tailless monoplane in 1911, and a Northrop Grumman B-21 stealth bomber, due to enter service with the USAF next year. The similarity in configuration, despite being separated by a century of aerospace evolution, is remarkable.

Dunne catalogues his most noteworthy  precognitive dreams. One that we can easily check today referred to the Burntisland railway accident that happened on 14 April 1914, the fatal derailment of the Flying Scotsman train (contemporary newspaper photo of aftermath, below).

Dunne writes: "The dream occurred in the autumn of 1913... the place was just north of the Firth of Forth Bridge in Scotland. The terrain was open grassland, with people walking in groups thereon. A train going north had just fallen over the embankment. I saw several carriages lying towards the bottom of the slope..." Indeed, just 12 miles north of the bridge. 

The author mentions many other precognitive dreams sufficiently memorable and shocking as to merit inclusion, including one about the naval bombardment of Lowestoft, which went on to happen during World War I – a war which not yet broken out when he had the dream. Spookily, Dunne refers to the 1914-1918 conflict in the book as 'the first world war' 12 years before outbreak of the second one.

The rationally minded reductionist-materialist would dismiss all this as the random firings of random neurons in the random brain of a random human. Given billions of humans each with brains containing billions of possible neuronal connections, yeah, I can see the attractiveness of this argument. Yet reading the book, I sense a consciousness that was unusually open to information from the future, a man who determined to use the scientific method to attempt to explain how this could happen.

An Experiment with Time was written as the final mathematical touches were being applied to the theoretical underpinnings of quantum mechanics were being agreed. Dunne is clearly up to speed with the work of Schrodinger and Heisenberg and the significance of the observer effect. The language he uses is groping towards that used by today's philosophers of mind, but lacking much of their vocabulary.

Dunne was convinced he could see (if only briefly and imperfectly) into the future. I am convinced that indeed he could. But as to how this process works – I have not the slightest clue. Is it something that one day rational science will be able to explain? Or is this phenomenon entirely spiritual in nature?

Dunne considered himself to be a rational man, steeped in the scientific paradigm and its explanatory powers. As such, he sought a scientific explanation to something he clearly felt to be real. His book is an attempt to couch in scientific language results of an experiment framed in the scientific method.

He calls for large cohorts of volunteers to log their dreams as soon as they wake up, with the highest degree of fidelity and detail, and then to see whether any events in the dreams correlate with actual events that happen in future days, weeks, months and years. He presents the results; nothing here that any scientifically trained mind would remotely accept as proof.

Ultimately, I believe that some people, Dunne included, did have the gift of precognition. Other rare cases have other gifts that our materialist-physicalist paradigm is unable to explain. Attempts to use scientific method to quantify such phenomena (the PEAR Lab's Global Consciousness Study) end up proving that there is indeed a statistically significant 'something' going on – but this is roundly ignored by science because there is no scientific framework to suggest why this may be. And so such efforts are sneered at as 'pseudoscience' with efforts made to dismiss the methodology.

Quantum mechanics and consciousness studies may take us further down a road towards an explanation that conforms with the scientific paradigm; on the other hand, it may open the door to an entirely new paradigm. Or it may just turn out that some things are simply meant to remain a mystery.

Precognition – being able to glimpse into the future –

This time last year:
The psychological benefits of 'place nostalgia'

This time last year:
From automatic action to mindful control

This time two years ago:
Keep on keeping on

This time three years ago:
Time and Consciousness

This time four years ago:
Altered states – higher planes

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation – Czachówek

This time 15 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

This time 16 years ago:
Good graffiti, bad graffiti

Entwined Histories by Piotr Wilczek

For anyone living in the Polish-British space, this book is an absolute must-read. A collection of 38 essays written by Poland's former ambassador to Washington (during the first Trump administration) and to London (taking office just as Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began), the book is presented as a 'cultural memory'. It avoids the format of a conventional diplomatic memoire; Prof Wilczek reveals no juicy tittle-tattle. "I shall be taking such secrets to the next world," he said at the book's Warsaw launch. Rather, each essay shows how the histories of Britain and Poland have been interwoven by war, exile, culture, tradition and diplomacy in unexpected ways. 

After a spirited attack on lazy media stereotypes of Poles in an article to The Spectator, Prof Wilczek has become a regular guest on the pages of the magazine, currently edited by Michael Gove. A revised version of the chapter, How London became Poland's second capital, made its way from the book to The Spectator earlier this month.

What makes the book so fascinating is the topics chosen for 38 essays. A few are familiar (such as the stories of spy Krystyna Skarbek or General Maczek); most of them, however, uncover new territory even for readers well-versed in British-Polish relations. These include the story of how the Duke of Kent might have become the King of Poland had he not died in a plane crash in 1942, and the story of Poland’s ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, Jan Dantyszek (Johannes Dantiscus), who arrived in London as envoy of Poland's King Sigismund I in 1522, exactly 500 years before Piotr Wilczek took up the role of Poland’s ambassador to the UK. I also found fascinating the story of Socinianism, a nontrinitarian Protestant movement ('the Polish Brethren'), based in Raków, "a modest town which housed a printing press, a famous academy and some of the sharpest minds of the age." Prof Wilczek writes: "For a brief but incandescent period, Raków was Geneva without the dourness – Reformation thinking at its most open and its least vengeful." The Counter-Reformation got to the Socinians in the end, forcing them into exile. "Socianian thought percolated into the bloodstream of English radicalism. Its fingerprints can be seen in the writings of William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania." A trip to Raków (40km south-east of Kielce) is thus in order.

Another noteworthy chapter, A Polish Eye on England's Harbours – with Joseph Conrad in Mind, considers through visits to Southampton, Portsmouth, Liverpool and Hull how the Polish-born writer understood the British Isles as home to a sea-faring nation. Prof Wilczek quotes from Conrad's description of the Thames Estuary in Heart of Darkness, which remains one of the most atmospherically evocative passages I have ever read in the English language.

London is a top posting for any diplomat, so about a third of the book is focused on it. I found the essays on the Warburg Institute and the diplomat's guide to navigating London's gentlemen's clubs the most interesting, as well as the descriptions of its bookshops – and its Polish restaurants.

One thing I would have like to have seen in Entwined Histories is some comparisons between the training and ethos of the British and Polish diplomatic corps. Diplomacy is very much a field in which one needs phenomenally fine judgment and superb people-skills – and above all, knowing when to stay silent. Dealing with the assorted ogres, narcissists and ne’er-do-wells that all too often rise to positions of highest office requires a suspension of normal instinct-based behaviour. "Diplomacy is a balancing act between urgency and restraint," writes Prof Wilczek; I feel that it is something you have to be born to do; most of us would be too quick to snap back with an undiplomatic riposte that would carry with it real-world consequences. How the diplomatic mindset is nurtured across different cultures is of great interest to the general reader.

Entwined Histories reads well and smoothly; it shall end up on my library shelf next to Speeches for Leaders by the former British Ambassador to Warsaw, Charles Crawford.

Entwined Histories is available from Chronos Books (www.chronosbooks.com) for £12.99/$17.95.

This time last year:
The [2025-brood] kittens on their 12th day

This time last year:
A new path to Krężel

This time two years ago:
Mutineers march on Moscow

This time six years ago:
Lifelong brand ambassador

This time eight years ago:
How much for locally grown strawberries?

This time nine years ago:
Zamość – the beautiful, must-visit town of Poland's east

This time 15 years ago:
Israeli Boeing 707 visits Warsaw again

This time 16 years ago:
More interesting aircraft overhead...

This time 17 years ago:
Poland is really short on mountains

This time 18 years ago:
The warmth of the sun
[with noctilucent clouds]

This time 19 years ago:
Full rainbow over Jeziorki

Epigramology by Jacek Koba

"Dogs fetch. Cats bring. Therein lies the difference." An example of Jacek Koba's witty sayings, a few of which have ended up on this blog – Jacek being a regular commentator here for over 15 years. Now he has published a book, Epigramology – Modern Epigrams and Aphorisms, which is an absolute delight. The contents: over 600 epigrams covering modern life, from politics, money, religion, work, education, relationships, travel and... cats and dogs.

Epigrams and aphorisms are an antidote to the expendable content scrolled up by modern media. They require pauses, consideration and return. "The reader is encouraged to dip in and out at random," it says in the preface. Indeed – this book is perfectly suited for confined spaces; it has been designed to be dipped in and out of, during those brief private moments in which the reader can extract meaningful insight. Epigramology should be read in short bursts. Read a few, close the book, pause to think – and then return.

The very title Epigramology sounds half-classical discipline, half-laboratory mishap: the scientific study of the sentence that goes off in your hand. This is the territory of the epigram. A miniature essay that won't waste the reader's afternoon. The book's original subheading was to be "Quintessence, Luminescence and Incandescence", which neatly categorised the epigrams around the three – definitions, insights, and rage.

The epigram is an unforgiving literary form. A weak poem can hide behind atmosphere; a padded essay can take refuge in nuance. But an epigram is out on its own. It must enter, strike, take a bow, and then vanish. If it lingers, it becomes advice. If it explains itself, it becomes a LinkedIn post. If it moralises, it becomes a bumper sticker. Epigramology is a project to revive a classic form that demands intelligence, compression and a pinch of elegant cruelty. It diagnoses our troubled civilisation one sentence at a time.

Personal bugbears I must say intrude somewhat – Epigramology has it in for the urban cyclist in the same way that my blog has it in for the SUV buyer/driver. And this causes me to reflect. Both targets are sublimations of the real villain – Homo inconsideratus incogitans – the inconsiderate unthinking. Czlowiek, który się nie zastanawia (the person who contemplates not).

The book was self-published via Amazon, and I must say that self-publication has now been made vastly easier and cheaper than ever before. AI's role in the publishing process is making big changes. Authors can now check their content for originality – and for epigrams, originality is crucial ("I must have read this somewhere before but forgotten it"). For publishers, AI is a vital tool for protecting themselves against accusations of profiting from plagiarism. Large language models are ideally suited for sifting through everything that's ever been written to ensure that what had genuinely come from the human mind is fresh.

Raise a wry chuckle with your after-dinner speeches by dropping some Koba epigrams into them.

My favourite Jacek Koba quote, one that I have successfully deployed in my life, is "Happiness is an expectation-to-reality ratio of 1:1".

Epigramology is available from Amazon.com (link here).

This time two years ago:
Qualia Compilation 8: Eye operation

This time three years ago:
A date for the history books

This time five years ago:
WinterCity/SummerCountry

This time six years ago:
Homage to Americana

This time seven years ago:
This land is my land

This time 11 years ago:

The day, seized.

This time 14 years ago:
Classic British cars for British week

This time 15 years ago:
Cara al Sol - a short story

This time 16 years ago:
Pumping out the floodwater

This time 17 years ago:
To Góra Kalwaria and beyond

This time 18 years ago:
Developments in Warsaw's exurbs

Plato, God and the Afterlife

Threaded through Plato's treatise about the State are many references to God and the Afterlife. It is, after all, natural to assume that in the pre-Modern world practically everyone believed in some sort of God or other. The Greeks had their myths, their polytheistic pantheon of Gods, and Plato assumed that these Gods were associated with the mythos of the Hellenic peoples. Though when Plato refers to God, he does so in the singular. 

In his ideal state, the mythos must be protected. Poets who subvert tales of the Gods, who ascribe evil intent to the actions of the Gods, should be banned (Homer included). Very much in the vein of Putin.

Plato is at his most specific when it comes to setting out his spiritual vision right at the end of The Republic, in the second half of Book X. He tells (through the narrator, Socrates) the Myth of Er. 

A slain warrior who returns to life after 12 days, to recount what he had just witnessed. As Er tells it, when his soul left his body, it "went on a journey with a great company" to a place of judgment, "at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand". This is familiar to the Christian; God at the Last Judgment, separating the good from the bad, the left and the right, the sheep from the goats.

But what happens next is more in the Eastern traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism: "Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser—God is justified."

The soul chooses for itself a new, different, life. The choice of new life is crucial, for it is part of the continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement, with each successive life being better than the last – if the right choice is made. And this choice, claims Plato, must be framed in moral and ethical terms. "Learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always the better life." 

Er speaks of a soul that chose the life of a tyrant, "his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality; he had not thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first sight perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own children". Our souls are to be "schooled by trial". Plato's recipe for a happy life on this earth is to dedicate yourself to "sound philosophy". 

Plato and I see the process of reincarnation in the Hindu way; a continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement. One life isn't anywhere near long enough to fulfil a soul's purpose. "What was ever great in a shirt time? The whole period of three score years and ten is surely a little thing in comparison with eternity?" "The soul of a man is immortal and imperishable ... there is no difficulty in proving it."

Plato states something that I have long held to be true; that evil is equivalent to entropy. "The corrupting and destroying element is the evil, and the saving and improving element is the good", he says. He compares disease in humans, mildew in corn, rot in wood and the rust of iron with the evils that corrupt the soul: unrighteousness, unbridled appetite and ignorance.

"The soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil must exist forever, and if existing forever, must be immortal," writes Plato.

And so, to the final sentence of the final part of the most influential book in Western philosophy: "Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing."

Saṃsāra.

This time last year:
Mornings with My Cat, Mii

This time eight years ago:
Black-necked grebes hatch

This time nine years ago:
To Warka in the sunshine

This time 13 years ago:
The descriptive vs. the prescriptive

This time 14 yeas ago: 
Noc Muzeów – night of pride in being Polish

This time 18 years ago:
Why Poland can no longer afford to keep the grosz
[It's still here. If you find one in your change – keep it.]

Plato and politics

The Republic is remarkable for the light it sheds on the human condition. This 2,400-year-old treatise about making society – made up of flawed humans – work remains even more relevant today than when it was written. Its implications are global, rather than concerning city-states of Ancient Greece. 

Reading Plato today in a 19th-century translation is slightly jarring as it casts Victorian shade over a work which is 2,400 years old; but as I discovered yesterday, the version I read had a massive influence on the development of modern Britain, and thus the world.

Benjamin Jowett’s translation entered university libraries almost immediately after its publication in 1871. It became the dominant English-language academic Plato for generations because of Jowett’s immense influence within the Victorian Oxbridge intellectual establishment. This influence is to be felt to the present day, about which, more below.

The Republic's central premise is a thought-experiment. It posits the ideal state as imagined by 'Socrates' (Plato's narrator – the real Socrates didn't leave any writings). 'Socrates' suggests that the state should be ruled by a class of Guardians, whose one aim in life is to rule the state; they should indeed be brought into the world with this express intention. A caste of high-born philosopher-kings, they should not possess wealth, but be provided for by the rest of the state's citizens – the cobblers, the shipwrights, the bakers, the farmers, the builders and everyone else. The Guardians should be the children of renowned warriors, they should be generalists rather than specialists. Controversially, they should share their wives in common, and bring up their children in common.

Did Plato really believe this to be an ideal form of governance? Or was it a narrative device? A conceit designed to provoke thought – in today's parlance... to trigger?

Plato identifies various forms of government: aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Familiar terms to us today, but Plato uses them slightly differently, attaching different values to them. Tyranny, of course, being the worst, then, as now. But democracy he sees as a form of mob rule, where the majority can hold undue sway over the minority; the free poor can get together and say "there's more of us than there are of the rich – let us pass laws that allow us to seize their wealth." However, avoiding the rule of tyrants was the greatest challenge for society.

Plato identifies the drive for money and power as the key to understanding the motivation of tyrants. Appetite – lust for power, for glory, for wealth – is why rulers slip away from idealised forms of government towards more corrupt polities. You only need to look at contemporary America and Russia to see how true Plato's insights remains some two and half millennia on.

At the heart of politics sits personality and human behaviour. Not ideology. A fucked-up mind within an untiring, driven body, obsessively seeking power, wealth, and in some cases adulation, turning power into wealth and wealth into more power – this is Plato's tyrant. We see this so clearly today. Ideology is merely a means to the end rather than being an end in itself. "Vote for me, because I hate those whom you hate" has replaced "vote for me and I'll give you the rich man's money".

Plato's Republic serves as a timeless warning to societies to watch out for those who seek to rule over us. Plato argues that a decent and stable society can exist only when the qualities of justice, truth and goodness govern both the individual and the state. He commends rule by philosophically educated guardians who subordinate their private interest to the common good. 

Back to Jowett. This ideal filtered through into the British Civil Service (after the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854. Its full title was: Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, Together with a Letter from the Rev. B. Jowett. Yes, that Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, who would go on to translate Plato's The Republic.

The result would be a close real-world approximation to a Platonic administrative elite, though moderated by parliamentary democracy. Plato set out that rulers should not seek wealth, that rule should belong to the educated and morally disciplined, and that within the ruling class, appetite must be subordinated to the common good. The Victorian reformers believed that public office should not be a source of private wealth or patronage. Entry into the Civil Service should be by ability, not connections, and an ethos of integrity, duty and competence should govern, not avarice or party interest.

Plato's observations about tyrants' appetites squares with modern warnings about the 'dark triad' of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Rising politicians who display these traits (especially if they are capable of masking them!) need weeding out as they gain power, before their innate characteristics – indeed their personality disorders – can turn into tyrants. 

In my next post, I shall turn to what Plato had to say about God, the soul and the afterlife.

This time four years ago:
The speed of life

This time five years ago:
Does it all come right in the end?

This time six years ago:

Self-discipline and creativity during the lockdown

This time seven years ago:

Russia's Far East on road maps

This time eight years ago:
Heavenly Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Why are all the shops shut today? 

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki at its most beautiful

This time 15 years ago:
Useful and useless in my wallet

This time 16 years ago:
In search of the dream klimat - remote viewing made real

This time 17 years ago:
Zakopane to Kraków in 3hrs 45min
[Less than two hours today.]

On Getting to the End of Plato's Republic

Phew! That was hard work. Four hundred and sixteen pages. I finished this morning, having started reading it over two months ago. And this is my second attempt; my first bash (last autumn) ended about a quarter of the way into the book.

BUT IT WAS WORTH IT!!

As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1929, "...the European philosophical tradition is ... a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato posed the foundational questions and set out the conceptual map, over which later philosophers have argued; answering him, modifying him – rejecting him even, but hardly ever ignoring him. And so I set out, determined to read such a crucial text. 

This particular book, my son has reminded me today, spent most of its life in my parents' downstairs lavatory. I guess it served to impress guests, signalling intellectual pretensions, and it might have been something my mother dipped into now and then while seated on the throne. It was neither annotated (as many of my father's science books are) nor even visibly thumbed.

The Republic is part of an anthology, The Essential Plato (with introduction by Alain de Botton), a 1999 reprint of the Victorian translation, by Benjamin Jowett. I now realise that this is not the easiest way into Plato's work. Jowett made zero effort to make the original Greek easy to read, leaving immense sentences that stretch on sometimes for half a page as single chunks. Rather than breaking them down into less ponderous prose, Jowett's text gives off the air of a Victorian mind trying hard to appear lofty. You drift away in successive subordinate clauses, searching for the sentence's principal verb.

Yet Jowett's translation is to Plato what King James Version is to the Bible – it's the version that many generations of Britain's educated elite cut its teeth on while reading the Greats or PPE at Oxford.

So I read the whole book out loud (another reason it took so long – I never took it with me on the train). I read it so that it would make sense to me. If I failed to get Plato's point, I'd re-read the paragraph. Aloud. And as I did so, it dawned on my why my studies at school and university were not as effective as they should have been – I had so often skipped the hard bits. At the meta-level, often while reading Plato, I was conscious of my mind beginning to wander off. So I read slowly, around six pages a day on average, compared to the 20 or so pages a day of previous books I'd read this year. Also, I read it with pencil in hand, making notes in the margins, underlining points I considered important and flagging up with asterisks the key ideas. 

Another thing that irked me throughout was the fact that though ostensibly The Republic is in the form of a dialogue between Socrates (the character through whom Plato speaks) and his followers, the actual 'dialogue' is mostly Socrates' listeners saying things like "Yes" and "True" and "Exactly" and "By all means" to just about everything that Socrates says. With the exception of Thrasymachus, who puts up a vigorous argument against Socrates' (Plato's) point of view in Book 1, everyone else comes across as a cypher, a mere nodding yes-man. The reader yearns for a response such as "up to a point" or "only in some cases" or "that's a bit of a sweeping generalisation, Socrates!" This is no dramatic debate among equals, no challenges, not a true dialogue; rather, it comes across as a narrative device, a framework upon which Plato hangs his ideas.

Having said that, these 416 pages contain ideas that have shaped our world to a remarkable degree. 

In my next post, I shall cover what Plato actually wrote 2,400 years ago, and why his thinking on human psychology, politics and spirituality remains so utterly relevant today. And why I so frequently was writing 'Trump!' and 'Putin!' in the margins.

This time last year:
The platform is in working order (or not)

This time two years ago:
Anatomy of a Moment

This time three years ago:
Ego – self-consciousness – pure consciousness

This time seven years ago:
The Day the Forecasters Got It Wrong

This time eight years ago:
Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time

This time 12 years ago:
W-wa Wola became W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 two years ago today 

This time 13 years ago:
From yellow to white – dandelions go to seed
[2026: this happened two weeks ago]

This time 16 years ago:
The good topiarist

This time 17 years ago:
Wettest. May. Ever.

This time 18 years ago:
Blackpool-in-the-Tatras
[My last visit to Zakopane – I've not been back since]

Andrew Marr's 'A History of Modern Britain'

There's never a good time to write a contemporary history. Historical narratives need closure. Loose ends need tying up, threads need to be neatly summarised. Causes linked to effects. The start-point of any history is easier to set than its end, and the choice of where to begin a modern history ends up defining the work. 

I picked up Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain (2007) having watched Adam Curtis's 2025 BBC documentary, Shifty. Curtis starts his look back at what's gone wrong with Britain by dropping the pin on May 1979, from the day Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. On the other hand, Andrew Marr's narrative (which came out as a BBC documentary in 2007 and in book form later the same year) starts in 1945 with the general election that brought in Clement Attlee to Number 10. This was as radical a moment as the one that ushered in the start of Thatcher's revolution. Attlee's Labour government brought in the Welfare State and the National Health Service, it nationalised large swathes of the British economy, it started decolonialisation, and introduced major educational reforms. All this against the backdrop of national bankruptcy and the onset of the Cold War.

Whilst I cannot quibble with either start date when it comes to analysing the state of the UK, I'd say that bringing Marr's A History of Modern Britain to a conclusion in 2007 was settle on the worst end-point possible at which to wrap up. For the shit was months away from hitting the fan. The global financial crisis would usher in austerity, the Tory-LibDem coalition and ultimately lead to the Brexit referendum. But Marr's documentary was in the can before Tony Blair had resigned as prime minister, to replaced by Gordon Brown just after the entire series had aired.

With that major proviso – one that was entirely out of the author's hands – let me go on with my thoughts. I'd very much like to place Marr's History of Modern Britain alongside Shifty as a significant explainer of the forces that shape contemporary Britain. However, they differ greatly in form and in content. 

Shifty begins its narrative when I was already a young man, whilst History of Modern Britain begins 12 years before my birth. I recognise Marr's portrayal of postwar Britain, it's hopes and its handicaps as the world I was born into; grey and drab, but getting brighter year by year as the goodies of consumer market, and innovation in technology and marketing, were rapidly disseminating through society. 

The optimism of Labour, the steady stuffiness of the pre-Thatcher Tories. I remember well the 1964 general election, Labour's victory, its slogan, 'Go Labour!' and prime minister Harold Wilson talking about the "white heat of the technological revolution" that prompted my father to vote Labour (something he'd never done before, nor indeed again until much, much later). Hovercraft, supersonic airliners and the GPO Tower, augmented by fictional visions of the future (Fireball XL5, Stingray and Thunderbirds) grounded in the heroic recent past (Airfix kits of Spitfires and Lancasters, Churchill tanks, HMS Ark Royal and Commando soldiers). This was all before Shifty's timeframe.

Marr, being a first and foremost a political journalist, is at his strongest dwelling on the political intrigue going on behind the scenes and the personalities. The downfall of leaders, from Harold Wilson through Thatcher and Blair, is well recounted.

Popular culture is neatly covered, but with a strong generational skew towards the 1970s when the author (born in 1959) was growing up. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Ian Dury, the Jam, the Police, the Specials, UB40, Live Aid all get a namecheck or two, but there's no mention of hip-hop or rap, Oasis or Blur – popular music fizzled out with the onset of Marr's adulthood. And indeed mine (it could be argued that compared to the 1970s, contemporary popular music is feeble).

History rhymes. I was reading this book's coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war ('weapons of mass destruction) with the run-up to the Iran war going on ('weapons of mass destruction'). I was reading about Peter Mandelson's contribution to Labour's 1997 election victory just as he was being arrested on charges of abuse of public office. The seeds of Brexit were sown, with a major contributory factor being Tony Blair's decision to open the UK labour market to Poles and citizens of the other seven countries that joined the EU in 2004. Instead of the 13,500 migrant workers forecast by analysts, over a quarter of a million turned up within a year, with many settling in rural parts of England and Wales that hadn't seen a foreigner in centuries.

Marr's prequel to A History of Modern Britain, the BBC documentary series The Making of Modern Britain (2009) is readily available on YouTube to watch (sadly,  A History of Modern Britain isn't). One way or another, I'd recommend reading the book though. And having it on your bookshelf, especially if you or indeed your parents, lived through these years. It's a gripping read and never becomes dull, not even in the minutiae of fiscal and macroeconomic policy details. 

Having said that, Marr is more small 'c' conservative than Curtis – his approach to history more conventional. The two work well together; for me. A History of Modern Britain is an excellent guidebook to Shifty, providing a historically rigorous framework upon which can be stretched the canvas of Curtis's compelling vision.

This time two years ago:
A family 'what-if' and the soul

This time eight years ago:
Work proceeding around Jeziorki

This time nine years ago:
Karczunkowska reopens to traffic

This time 14 years ago:
Goodness gracious!

This time 15 years ago:
Muddy feet, Warsaw 'pavements'

This time 16 years ago:

Cycling and recycling

This time 17 years ago:
Winter clings on to the forest

This time 18 years ago:
Toyota launches the iQ

This time 19 years ago:
Old school Łódź