Author Archives: aidanjmcquade

Spent Light, by Lara Pawson

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Summary: “It’s quite hard to describe really. To begin with, it’s about a toaster, but it ends up being about everything,” the Kirkdale Bookshop on Spent Light.

When, about 20 years ago, I first introduced my father to the televisual masterpiece that is The Wire, his stunned reaction to the first episode was, “I have never seen anything like that before.”

This memory came back to me, more than once, reading Lara Pawson’s extraordinary book, Spent Light, because I quite simply have never read anything like this before. 

From time to time it seemed to me almost like some other  things: Maybe the notebooks portions of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines? Or some of the (allegedly) imaginative passages in Anje Krog’s Country of My Skull? But in the end it is very much its own thing – intimate, funny, at times uncomfortable, occasionally horrific, wholly original. 

It is writing that has the intensity of poetry. And so perhaps the best way to describe Spent Light is as a series of linked autobiographical prose poems, starting with a toaster but in the end being about the whole world, as the Kirkdale Bookshop put it with such brilliant concision. Along the way, Lara touches upon love, war, squirrels, atrocities, and the joys of a good broom. 

I’ve known Lara since Angola where she was a journalist during that country’s brutal civil war. So, perhaps the only unsurprising thing about this book is that it is unsurprising that she wrote it. It is a work of genius. It should become recognised as a modern classic. 

Ghosts of the British Museum, by Noah Angell

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Summary: a fascinating exploration of the dark side of British history and culture through the spooky stories of one museum

When I was a student in Belfast in the 1980s I used to feel a cold chill every time I walked past one spot, particularly at night-time. I mentioned this to a friend. “You would,” he said. “There was a young fella murdered there earlier in the Troubles.”

Noah Angell gets similar feelings in almost every gallery in the British Museum. But then, the whole place is essentially a crime scene. 

So much of the stuff there, from the Parthenon Marbles to the Benin Bronzes to much of the Egyptian collection was stolen in the course of Britain’s bloody colonial plunder of the planet. Angell wonders in this book if the murders that accompanied that pillage still echo in the trophies of conquest that the British Museum now houses. 

This fascinating book grew out of Angell, an American in London, noticing at a social gathering that former employees of the British Museum had a lot of freaky stories to tell. So, he began gathering them: diverse tales of the uneasy ghosts that still seem to lurk in every corner of the Museum. These include the moving mummies in some of the, frankly creepy, Egyptian galleries; the hauntings of the old reading room by the shades of forlorn former employees; the ongoing religious wars between the ghosts of Christian and Islamic warriors around rooms containing the Sutton Hoo hoard; the feelings of Museum staff that certain American and Asian artefacts emanate a sense of demonic possession. 

As Angell notes, the British Museum likes to present itself as one of the key places on the planet which protects and preserves world heritage for all humanity. However, only about 1 per cent of the Museum’s collection is ever on display. So, it really is a place in which much world heritage is disappeared rather than displayed.

Not that that makes these artifacts in any way safer: the British Museum did irreparable damage to the Parthenon Marbles in ignorant efforts at maintenance; in 2023 it emerged that thousands of artefacts, particularly from the Greek and Roman collections, had been pilfered, many sold on ebay.

At least the thieves were acting in the spirit of the Museum itself, which is fundamentally a repository of stolen goods. Angell wonders if the key lesson that hordes of schoolkids draw from their visits to the Museum is that stealing is really okay if you can just get away with it… which is, if truth be told, a very British idea.

In its refusal to return stolen artefacts to their rightful owners the UK, and hence the British Museum, stands at odds with most enlightened thinking about the ethical curation of world heritage. Angell does report that George Osbourne, chair of the Museum’s trustee board, proposed transferring the Parthenon Marbles back to Athens as a loan. This, understandably, the Greek government has rejected: how can you take a loan of something that is rightfully yours? But this did make me feel rather more sympathetic to Osbourne: British law forbids the British Museum from returning much of their stolen loot. So Osbourne, it seems, was trying to come up with some path towards resolving this historical injustice.

As anyone who has visited the British Museum will know, it can do fascinating work exploring and explaining aspects of history. But, even if you don’t believe in ghosts, this absorbing book provides a compelling insight into the dark side of the institution’s own history, a microcosm of the country in which it is based. It is a shameful past that the British Museum, and all of British society, must squarely face if they are ever going to rehabilitate themselves. 

Letter to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

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Summary: on returning a honorary OBE

16 April 2024

Dear Prime Minister

In 2017 I was awarded an honorary OBE in recognition of my services to the eradication of slavery. I am now returning this as it is something which I can no longer, in good conscience, keep.

On 15 April 2024, your government refused to provide protections for the victims of modern slavery from your unconscionable “Rwanda scheme”. Over the past months you, as Prime Minister, have acquiesced in attacks on the European Convention on Human Rights by members of your parliamentary party. These, along with the UK’s bipartisan position on Gaza, have put into sharp focus how British policy now distinguishes between people whose lives it values, and those whose lives it disdains. 

These represent a fundamental repudiation by the UK of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are a rejection also of an enduring British human rights tradition stretching back to Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a longer tradition of rule of law that stretches back to Magna Carta. 

As such they send to the whole world a message that the UK rejects the core bases of human rights and rule of law upon which progress in human dignity, including anti-slavery action has been based for hundreds of years. This can only impede the anti-slavery struggle and embolden other governments who seek to systematically abuse the rights of their subjects and citizens, including  by the facilitation of their enslavement. 

I hope that you will yet find it in your heart to alter course and embrace and defend these British traditions of human rights and rule of law rather than sacrifice them to some ill-judged populist crusade.

Yours faithfully

Dr Aidan McQuade 

Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my home place, by Martin Doyle

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Summary: An outstanding portrait of the pity of war

Margaret Yeaman has never seen her grandchildren. She lost her sight on 15 March 1982 when a no-warning car bomb exploded close to her workplace in Banbridge, County Down, causing splintering glass to lacerate her face. 

Margaret’s story, of being in the “wrong place at the wrong time” is just one amongst many that Martin Doyle explores in his book, Dirty Linen. The book also takes exception to that “wrong place, wrong time,” line. So many of the people whose stories Doyle recounts were just doing their jobs, providing for family and community, or just trying to have a bit of craic. It was the paramilitaries who were in the wrong place at the wrong time for these ordinary people.

Some will still argue that atrocities such as the ones recounted in this book were necessary to advance justice in the North of Ireland. But as Margaret and people like her tell their stories of how their families were devastated by violence, these should bring shame to that notion: as if the British government was ever going to be moved to change policy by Paddies butchering Paddies on the country roads of Ireland. It’s why they introduced “Ulsterisation” to begin with.

Dirty Linen is, in part a memoir, and Doyle gives an honest accounting of his experiences coming of age amidst such carnage, including the miserable abuse he sometimes suffered as a young Catholic in that religiously mixed part of County Down. 

This book could also act as something of an introduction to the art of the North of Ireland. As literary editor of the Irish Times, Doyle is able to draw upon the work of so many writers and artists, from Seamus Heaney to F E McWilliams and Colin Davidson, to help him give voice to the depth of the human tragedy that the Troubles represented.

But, as a result of Doyle’s sensitive interviews with Margaret and people like her, his book is also an exemplary work of journalism and a deeply important contribution to understanding the history of the Troubles. It offers an unflinching portrait of the pity of war by exploring the trauma and courage of the victims of both loyalist and “republican” paramilitaries. 

Some of those victims whose stories Doyle explores also became perpetrators, or at least sympathetic to the idea of revenge. But so many more refused to become as twisted as those who mutilated them and their families. Instead. they often begged for no retaliation and strove for forgiveness, or at least toleration. Theirs are stories that are so much more heroic than anything that could ever be written about the paramilitaries who pressed the triggers or planted the bombs.  

If this was all that Doyle did, then the book would be a marvel. But his painstaking accumulation of detail across the book also builds a picture of the pervasiveness of collusion between British state forces and the loyalist Glenanne gang. Perhaps other writers and researchers have done similar work. But I have not read such a convincing indictment of the breadth of British collusion anywhere else. So, if you want to understand why the British government is so keen to stop Troubles era criminal investigations, read this book.

At a time when the Troubles seem to be giving rise to some exemplary non-fiction, Doyle’s book could well stand out as a classic. 

 

Thomas Cromwell: a revolutionary life, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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Summary: sure what are a few dead human beings when you consider cultural influence?

Undoubtedly the greatest of Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau films is A Shot in the Dark. In it Clouseau falls in love with a murder suspect, housemaid Maria Gambrelli, played by the luminous Elke Sommer. Even when apprehended holding a set of bloody hedge clippers that have been used to kill yet another victim, Maria drifts through the film with an ethereal innocence, somehow untouched by the squalidness and violence that surrounds her. 

Perhaps bizarrely, it was Maria Gambrelli that I was most reminded of by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, such is the sympathy and indulgence that MacCulloch affords him. Maria, of course, was not a murderer, whereas Cromwell was. But for MacCulloch, this is not the most important thing about him.

Rather it was Cromwell’s role in the establishment of Anglicanism that for MacCulloch is the most significant thing about his career. For this, he almost forgives the occasional burning of a Protestant heretic or the public dismemberment of a Catholic, and such killings are skated over with considerable blink-and-you’ll-miss-them rapidity.

MacCulloch argues that Cromwell’s Protestant convictions were genuine. Hence his role in the dissolution of the monasteries, a vast act of cultural vandalism amongst other things, was not just the legalised theft of their property for the crown. It was also an effort to advance the reform of religion in which he truly believed. In this vein, for MacCulloch Cromwell’s greatest lasting achievement was obtaining an authorised translation of the bible into English. 

MacCulloch makes a case that Cromwell was a complex figure, and that the depth of this complexity is obscured by an absence of sources: many of his papers were likely destroyed by his servants when he was arrested.  So, Cromwell was not wholly the monster that some of his actions might suggest. Government in Tudor times, for which Cromwell had a prodigious flair, was, after all, a bloody business and, Cromwell’s sainted Catholic antagonist, Thomas More, did not have clean hands either.

But there is a danger of whataboutery here. Just because everyone else was doing it, we should not casually excuse the horror in which a person was implicated. Amongst other atrocities, Cromwell played a pivotal role in the judicial murder of Anne Boleyn and those falsely accused of being her lovers. 

Dozens of other Catholics and “heretics” – Protestants who Henry VIII and Cromwell regarded as too extreme – followed. MacCulloch reckons that Cromwell’s introduction of parish registers to record baptisms, deaths and marriages was a way of identifying Anabaptist “extremists”. This was part of a broader intelligence system in which the theocratic government of which Cromwell was a central part, monitored and condemned people for crimes of conscience alone. 

Cromwell’s bloody trail continued right up to his own judicial murder. This was engineered by high officials jealous of his influence. They were empowered to act against him by the king’s fury at his role in arranging Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves. For some reason, the diseased and festering Henry found that he could not manage to have sex with her. So, fortunately for Anne the marriage was never consummated, and a quiet annulment was arranged.

Taken in their totality, when considering Cromwell’s achievements in government and religion he must be seen as a major figure in British history. But there is a saying in the Talmud: “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.” In recognising the scale of his influence, for good and ill, in the making of the modern world, it is remiss to downplay the countless little domestic worlds that Cromwell helped condemn to the fires of fanaticism in the course of Henry’s monstrous reign. 

Empireworld, by Sathnam Sanghera

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Summary: an elegantly written exploration of the contemporary impact of the British Empire on the world.

Empireworld, Sathnam Sanghera’s follow up to his brilliant, Empireland, expands on the theme of that earlier work, exploring the impact of the British Empire beyond Britain’s shores. 

Sanghera does not cover everything. If he did he would still be writing. But also, as he acknowledges, there are some subjects which have been so comprehensively dealt with that he feels he has little new to add.

The history he does recount here is a mixture of the thematic – for example, the role of botany in Empire, and the imperial and anti-imperial history of British NGOs – and geographic – for example, Nigeria and Mauritius. His discussion of anti-slavery is a mixture of the two, with a principle focus on Barbados and the West Indies.

The result is engrossing, illuminating, and on occasion engagingly contentious: For example, is the anti-slavery image “Am I not a man/woman and a brother/sister?” so clearly a patronising and racist one as he seems to conclude? The anti-racist sports people who have adopted the pose in recent years have shown it can be now, as many interpreted it at the end of the 18th Century, a sign of fraternity rather than subservience.

Across the book Sanghera shows how every idea carries with it the seed of its own opposite: racism and slavery generated anti-slavery and anti-racism; imperialism gave rise to anti-imperialism. This leads to a very complex history, allowing the discernment in some places of many positive legacies of Empire – rule of law, parliamentary democracy, tea – alongside many negatives – partition, civil war, corruption, impoverishment. 

This complexity leads Sanghera to be careful in his conclusions, seeking with this book to promote nuance, understanding, and dialogue, rather than judgement. 

This is a hugely laudable objective, particularly for a country that needs to recognise, as Sanghera rightly notes, that other peoples’ – foreigners! – perspectives on Empire are vital for a proper understanding. 

One such foreign perspective that Empireworld put me in mind of, was the 1916 speech from the dock by the great Irish anti-slavery activist and anti-imperialist, Roger Casement, who observed, “For [the English Establishment], there is only “England”; there is no Ireland; there is only the law of England, no right of Ireland; the liberty of Ireland and of an Irishman is to be judged by the power of England.“

For Ireland, one could substitute the name of any country of Empire. Empire was positive for subject peoples if it was in England’s interest. If it was not, then, as Sanghera describes, they could be starved, enslaved, shot with dum-dum bullets or subject to any other expedient or abuse that the British government chose to mete out.

This principle remains true to this day, it seems to me, for Scotland and the North of Ireland, the last vestiges of Empire.

Sanghera does not discuss Ireland, or Scotland, much in this book. But he does not have to. There are plenty of others who have and continue to do so. Instead, Empireworld is another superb study of frequently unacknowledged and unexplored history. A visit to Kew is never going to be the same again. 

Brotherhood: when West Point rugby went to war, by Martin Pengelly

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Summary: an important insight into American war-making

Before 9/11, Martin Pengelly, with his amateur English rugby team, played against West Point in a friendly game when they toured the UK. Pengelly’s team won. In subsequent West Point legend Pengelly’s team was described as “semi-professional”. They were not.

Rugby in West Point is something of an outsiders’ sport. So, the West Point rugby team was populated by students who, by and large, were not quite good enough to get on the American football team. Still, some disadvantages turn out to be advantages by introducing these young men to a much finer sport.

Over twenty years since his on-pitch encounter with these young men Pengelly revisits them and explores how they fared in the subsequent “9/11wars” in which they fought.

The book is an interesting study of a subculture – rugby – of a subculture – West Point, and of American officers’ experiences in twenty-first century war and counter insurgency.

It is perhaps churlish to note that there is negligible consideration of the impact of these wars on Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Pengelly was not a combatant and the politics and humanitarian consequences of US policy, whether astute or blundering, does not seem to be at the forefront of the minds of any of those whose story he is telling. So, there is little of the sort of empathy and soul searching that Tim O’Brien, for example, brought to his writings on Vietnam.

Still, it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the waste of life, in training and in combat, that Pengelly describes his subjects enduring.

Overall, this is an elegantly written book, and an important insight into what goes into the make-up of a revered portion of American society, one that will continue to exert its influence nationally and internationally into the foreseeable future.

Fairly Smooth Operator, by Caroline Walsh

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Summary: a thoughtful rumination on leadership from the experience of, on occasion, being badly led

Caroline Walsh’s book, Fairly Smooth Operator, is something of a memoir, recounting her experiences, first as a member of the US Coast Guard, and later as an analyst with the CIA.

Her theme is not, however, derring do, military morality or historical scandals. Rather Walsh’s focus tends towards the more mundane aspects of life in these organisations and particularly the “chickenshit” of military life. With humour and considerable generosity of spirit she explores the petty abuses of power meted out on weaker or more junior colleagues, because the abuser is a bully or an idiot. She reflects on the damage this does to both individuals and the organisations of which they are parts, because bad leadership invariably results in the injury and loss of good people.

So, Fairly Smooth Operator is a useful book for anyone concerned with the world of work in general and, in particular, with the challenges of management and leadership in teams and in big, bureaucratic organisations.

Walsh is now studying for a PhD in the area of ethical leadership. Judging on this book, she will doubtless have many more useful and important things to say on this subject in years to come.

The Kidnapping: A hostage, a desperate manhunt and a bloody rescue that shocked Ireland, by Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy

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Summary: a lucid and gripping account of an important aspect of the Troubles.

On 24 November 1983, Don Tidey, a supermarket executive, was kidnapped from outside his home by a unit of the Provisional IRA. Twenty-three days later, on 16 December, he was rescued in Derrida Wood, County Leitrim, by a joint operation of the Irish Army and the Garda. In the course of the rescue the IRA unit killed two people: 23 year-old Garda recruit Gary Sheehan, and Private Patrick Kelly of the Irish Army.

The authors trace the origins of this tragedy to the early 1980s when the IRA came up with a new fundraising strategy: kidnapping for ransom. It began with the legendary racehorse, Shergar. Seemingly temperamental stallions do not submit to the same sort of intimidation techniques that the IRA found worked so well on innocent German factory managers and single mothers from Divis Flats. So, unable to keep the horse placid, they killed and disappeared the beast before moving on to vulnerable human targets. Conlon and McGreevy recount the series of kidnapping and extortion operations that followed before the abduction of Tidey.

It is sometimes easy for a Northerner like myself to forget the dreadful impact that the Troubles had upon the South. With this book the authors seek to redress this historical amnesia. Both Leitrim men, they also expose the prejudices that other parts of Ireland, with their crass ignorance of what it means to have a significant paramilitary presence in one’s community, developed against their county.

There is a palpable and justifiable thread of disgust at the paramilitaries’ attitudes and actions running through this book. At one point the authors quote John Hume who observed that many Provos seemed to regard Irish citizens who did not support their bloody campaign as lesser beings.That may well have eased their qualms about pressing triggers on people like Gary Sheehan and Paddy Kelly who were doing nothing more than trying to protect the innocent. Conlon and McGreevy also trace the devastation wreaked by the trauma of those deaths on their surviving families. Meanwhile the probable killers continue to be feted in Sinn Fein circles, and those they killed ignored.

The Kidnapping is a superb book that helps strip away any romantic hue forming around the Troubles and helps all Ireland face up to another vital piece in the totality of our history.