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5 November, 2023

Schwarzenegger in 1982. Paul Harris/Getty 

Arnie the grizzled guru

In his new autobiography-slash-self-help book, Be Useful, Arnold Schwarzenegger “divides his preposterous life into four distinct acts”, says Will Lloyd in The New Statesman. First comes “Arnold the Bodybuilder”: the kid from an Austrian village who conquered the world with “a 57in chest, a 34in waist, 28.5in thighs, 20in calves and a competition weight of 235lbs”. Then came “Arnold the Movie Star”, who took over Hollywood despite speaking, as Robin Williams put it, “less dialogue than any actor, except maybe Lassie”. He received Golden Raspberry nominations for Worst Actor, Worst Supporting Actor and Worst Screen Couple (with a clone of himself) for the 2000 film The 6th Day. Then it was “Arnold the Governor”, who led California – “a state that would be a G7 economy were it a nation” – for two terms.

But in the late 2000s, Schwarzenegger’s life collapsed. It was revealed that he fathered a child with the family housekeeper, and his wife divorced him. The Austrian action man pushed through this dark period to enter his fourth act: “Arnold the grizzled guru”. Be Useful offers readers the toughest of tough love. One chapter is genuinely called “Shut your mouth, open your mind”; the thrust of his advice is to “bend the shape of reality to your will”. Alternative titles for Be Useful might include “Stop Crying You Weakling: If Your Life is Trash That’s Because You’re a Pussy”. But the world is much less malleable than Schwarzenegger appreciates. “The best advice will always be: Know Thyself. Those are not words Be Useful has much time for.”

🪆💩 The book is interspersed “with some of the maddest similes ever printed”. They include: “like being stuck in a clothes dryer with a load of bricks”; “like Viagra for dreams”; and “like trying to move inside a set of Russian nesting dolls full of shit and hair gel”.

Be Useful: Seven tools for life by Arnold Schwarzenegger is available to buy here.

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The Japanese Imperial Guard looking very smart and not at all contrite. Yoshikazu Tsuno/Gamma-Rapho/Getty

Where’s Japan’s post-colonial reckoning?

Britain and other countries that once ruled empires never tire of beating themselves up over their pasts, says Eri Hotta in UnHerd. Yet Japan gets a relatively easy ride. Around the start of the 20th century, the Land of the Rising Sun was on a “determined march to become a world player”. It acquired the island of Formosa – now Taiwan – in 1895, annexed Korea in 1910, and “eventually ruled most of Southeast Asia”. Its colonies were “rife with forced labour, sex slavery, torture and biological experiments”. During World War Two, thousands of women from China and Korea were forced to become “comfort women” – a euphemism for sex slaves – for the imperial army. So where is the “post-colonial reckoning” we are so accustomed to seeing in the West?

The main explanation is that Japan positioned itself as the “anti-colonial colonialist”, liberating states from Western imperialism. Burma had to be freed from the British; the East Indies from the Dutch; Indochina from the French. But in ousting the “predatory West”, the Japanese behaved “very much like colonial masters themselves”. The historian Grant Goodman even said the Japanese “out-colonialed” Westerners with their brutality and exploitation. Yet despite the country’s defeat in World War Two, Tokyo was never held to account. The US didn’t remove the emperor, for fear of a rebellion. A “lingering reverence” for the imperial institution made colonialism an almost taboo subject in post-war Japan. And so the delusion about its “Pan-Asianist dream” persists.

Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, in Louboutins, obvs. James Devaney/WireImage/Getty

What our shoes really say about us

Everyone knows “you can always judge a man by his shoes”, says Richard Brooks in The Observer, but exactly what our footwear reveals about us has shifted over time. Women have worn high heels as a “statement of power” for centuries, from pearl-buttoned Victorian boots “worn to titillate and dominate”, to Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks and Christian Louboutins. Yet heeled boots used to be the preserve of men. Soldiers in Assyria wore them around 700BC, when their invention coincided with the development of the stirrup – the chunky kicks enabled weapon-laden soldiers to “sit more firmly in the saddle”. Elizabeth I even wore heeled boots to emphasise her “masculinity”.

“Footwear can also change its purpose quite rapidly.” Cowboy boots were initially made for equine work, but later taken up by men, and even more so by women, as everyday wear. Doc Martens first came about after World War Two, when a German army doctor wanted to protect his broken foot with an “air-cushioned sole”. Within a few years they had become the go-to footwear for “elderly female gardening enthusiasts”. By the 1960s, they were popular among both mods and punks, and today have become synonymous with “androgyny and rebelliousness”. “Boots may indeed be ‘made for walkin’’, but their history tells us so much more.”

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Arthur Balfour in the 1920s. Print Collector/Getty 

The 5th Earl of Balfour first realised the significance of the Balfour Declaration when he was a 14-year-old schoolboy at Eton, says Harry Mount in The Oldie. A copy of the statement – written 107 years ago by former prime minister Arthur Balfour, backing the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine – hung in his loo at home. But the historic document was “never discussed at home or school”. So it was a poignant moment when a Jewish London cabbie spotted his school trunk with his surname painted on it. “Is this yours, mate? Are you anything to do with the prime minister?” Yes, he said, the 1st Earl was his great-great-uncle. “I don’t believe this!” said the driver, before pulling off the road and singing Jewish songs to the teenage boy. “Wait till I get home and tell my family. What he did for us!”

De Niro with Sharon Stone in Casino (1995). Universal Pictures/Getty

Robert De Niro and the bizarre world of celebrity egos

If you need a little joy in your life, says Hilary Rose in The Times, let me direct you to “the best show in town”: the New York court case in which Robert De Niro is suing, and being sued by, his former personal assistant Graham Chase Robinson. “It is, in a word, bliss.” She accuses him of treating her demeaningly: asking her to “pick up a particular martini from Nobu and bring it to his house at 11pm”; calling her – twice – when she was at her grandmother’s funeral. De Niro, for his part, “denied ever yelling at his former employee by yelling at her”. When she said he had once asked her to scratch his back for him – which he later conceded was true – he shouted across the courtroom, “Shame on you, Chase Robinson!”

But in the “bizarre world of celebrity egos and the assistants paid to massage them”, De Niro’s alleged behaviour isn’t out of the ordinary. One PA I spoke to in Los Angeles said a former employer had “screamed at her that the butter on his bread was too warm”. Another gave her “24 hours to get hold of a DVD unavailable in the US and ship it to the East Coast”. Naomi Campbell infamously pleaded guilty to assault after throwing a phone at her maid. Jennifer Lopez was reported to have “banned some staff from looking her in the eye”. And spare a thought for Christian Bale’s long-suffering PA. In his tell-all book, he said his duties had included “sniffing Christian’s armpits for BO right before he hit the red carpet”.

Dan Stevens and Michelle Dockery being posh in Downton

I’m a socialist – but I can’t resist a titled aristocrat

Why, despite being a committed socialist, am I up at 3am, “about to begin my seventh episode in a row” of Made in Chelsea, asks Rory Mullarkey in The Guardian. The reality show is all about posh Londoners, with names like “Binky” and “Boulle”, cheating on each other and then denying it in nice cafes. “This is hardly high-class stuff, despite being literally high-class stuff”. Yet I love it so much I’ve written a play about it, Mates in Chelsea. Indeed, “I can’t help but hoover up any media with a titled aristocrat”. When Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley ploughed his sports car into a delivery truck and died, I sobbed “like a little boy”.

Posh people have long dominated “the landscape of the English imagination”. I think it’s something to do with their freedom from consequence. These “God-nominated scions of untouchability” don’t have to deal with bills or interest rates. They are, effectively, children, and endlessly fascinating as a result. PG Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster is cushioned by his place in society and “mothered perfectly by his omniscient manservant Jeeves”. Even bad behaviour gets a pass. During the interval of Laura Wade’s excellent play Posh, after 75 minutes of pseudo-Bullingdon boys “shouting about how much they hate poor people”, a woman sitting behind me sighed wistfully to her friend: “It just makes you wish you were back at Cambridge, doesn’t it?”

“All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.”  

Spike Milligan

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