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16 September, 2023

Venice: an early bastion of liberal capitalism. Print Collector/Getty

Capitalism is taking an illiberal turn

From medieval Venice to Renaissance Florence and the Dutch lowlands, and “then most spectacularly in Britain and America”, the advance of liberalism has always shadowed the advance of capitalism, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. But while you can’t have liberalism without capitalism, “you can certainly have capitalism without liberalism”. Coca-Cola sponsored the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany; today, China is pioneering an “idiosyncratic synthesis of market mechanisms with Leninist power”. Western capitalism is also taking an illiberal turn: a few companies are consolidating enormous influence. In America, the top 0.1% of firms now control 88% of all assets, up from 47% in the 1930s. As the tech billionaire Peter Thiel says: “Competition is for losers.”

In politics, these behemoths “set the terms of debate” by funding think tanks and pressure groups, and sometimes write the legislation themselves. They openly engage in tax-avoidance and other shenanigans that were “once confined to the backstreets”. Apple has a “cozy deal with Ireland”; Google once achieved a 2.4% tax rate on its non-American profits by routing them through Bermuda, Ireland and the Netherlands. The “insider privilege” of today’s capitalism poses a profound threat to a central liberal principle: meritocracy. There are, however, “welcome signs” of a fightback. America has opened an antitrust case against Google, and the EU is penalising tech companies for invading privacy. For all the threat to the liberal order from radicalism, “we need to pay much more attention to the threat coming from capitalism itself”.

FDR with his mother Sara and his wife Eleanor. Getty

The two passionate mothers who changed history

Historians of the wartime partnership between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt have long observed the importance of the two leaders’ mothers, says Jonathan Darman in Air Mail. Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons, by veteran biographer Charlotte Gray, draws striking parallels between the two ostensibly very different characters. Both were daughters of Gilded Age American fortune-seekers. Both saw marriage as their calling, only to be “unmoored by early widowhood”. And, most importantly, “both ultimately came to see their sons as a chance to make their mark on the world.”

Lady Randolph Churchill, an American socialite born in Brooklyn, was a “beguiling, scandal-tinged beauty” known for her striking looks – “more of the panther than of the woman”, it was said – and her romantic entanglements with powerful men. Not just her husband Lord Randolph, the Duke of Marlborough’s “brawling, spendthrift, syphilitic younger son”, but also the “sexy Austrian count” Charles Kinsky, and possibly Queen Victoria’s son Bertie, the future King Edward VII. Naturally, this left relatively little time for child-rearing. His mother, Winston later wrote, was a “radiant being” who “shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly – but at a distance.”

There was never any distance between Sara Delano Roosevelt and her only son, the future American president Franklin. At Springwood, the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson River, Sara “mistrusted nannies and governesses”, keeping young Franklin near to her at all times. When he went off to Harvard, she took a flat in Boston so “nothing greater than the Charles River need keep her from her ‘dear, dear boy’”. And after he married his distant cousin Eleanor in 1905, Sara bought a pair of adjoining Upper East Side town houses: one for the young newlyweds, and one for herself. “The two households were connected by doorways on three floors.”

Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons by Charlotte Gray is available to buy here.

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THE PIED-A-TERRE This one-bedroom flat is right in the hustle and bustle of London’s Soho, on a pedestrianised passage just off Dean Street. Occupying the second floor of a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse, it has a reception room with floor-to-ceiling sash windows and original limestone fireplace; a galley kitchen with cherry wood countertops; and a sizeable loft. The bedroom window overlooks a quiet internal courtyard. £1.05m.

The Kray twins. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty

How to break out of prison in style

“Poor old Daniel Khalife,” says Mark Mason in The Spectator. His recent exit from HMP Wandsworth, hidden underneath a delivery van, didn’t even secure “Most Creative Prison Escape of the Week”. That had to go to Danelo Cavalcante, who broke out of Pennsylvania’s Chester County prison by “crab-walking” up two walls which lined a narrow passageway, wedging himself between them by putting his hands on one and his feet on the other. (He has since been recaptured.) Khalife’s jailbreak isn’t even “the most inventive in Wandsworth’s history”: in 1965, Ronnie Biggs got out with the help of an outside team, which parked a van equipped with a platform lift next to the prison wall.

The most impressive prison breaks rely on considerable cunning. The South Korean robber Choi Gap-bok was a yoga expert, which meant that, “after applying skin lotion to himself”, he was able to squeeze through the 6x18in slot used to deliver food through his cell door. “The young Kray twins once took advantage of the ‘twins’ bit when Ronnie was inside and Reggie was free: the latter visited the former, put on his glasses and stayed there while Ronnie walked calmly away.” And Michael Vaujour’s 1986 escape from a Paris prison was aided by grenades with which he threatened officers. “Except they weren’t grenades. They were objects he’d painted to look like grenades. Specifically, they were nectarines.”

Bound to be a Waitrose nearby. Castle Combe, Wiltshire. Getty

Richard Osman’s “twee and pleasant land” 

Richard Osman has a decent claim to being Britain’s “incumbent national novelist”, says Anna Leszkiewicz in The New Statesman. The 52-year-old’s Thursday Murder Club series has sold over five million copies; the second and third installments were among the fastest-selling novels in Britain since records began; the fourth, released this week, may do better still. The film rights have been bought by Steven Spielberg. How on earth has Osman done it? What makes his books – about four residents of a retirement village solving crimes – sell so well?

Osman’s murder mysteries belong to the genre of fiction known as “cosy crime”, a category that also includes the likes of Agatha Christie and GK Chesterton. And boy, is it cosy. His England is a “twee and pleasant land”, where farm shops and Waitroses are “nestled between dappled hedgerows and golf courses”. It is a world without poverty, politics or pandemics. Even the violence is soft touch: “Murderers buy their knives from John Lewis and fist fights break out over the Call the Midwife Christmas special.” The whole thing seems designed to “provoke a mild chuckle of recognition from middle-class readers”. Given Osman’s pedigree in puzzles – he conceived and co-hosted the daytime TV favourite Pointless – it’s surprising that the plots aren’t more enigmatic. But he appears to have learnt something else from his small-screen success: “find something that works, and give it to your audience again and again”.

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Are these dresses ok? Yaorusheng/Getty

Beijing is considering banning garments that are “detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese nation”, with fines or 15-day prison sentences issued to those that don’t comply. Exactly which kinds of clothes are unpatriotic is currently unclear, though Japanese kimonos and “effeminate” menswear have already been the subjects of state crackdowns.

“Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children.”

American writer Sam Levenson

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