Long relegated to history’s vast nether regions of obscurity, the twentieth president of the United States, James A. Garfield is best known for two things: he was the last of the American presidents to be born in a log cabin (in Ohio in 1831), and he was the second American president to be killed by an assassin’s bullet while in office (the first being Abraham Lincoln, sixteen years earlier in 1865).

Candice Millard does her best to lift this once highly regarded, entirely self-made paragon of late-19th-century American politics out of anonymity in her new book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. Millard traces Garfield’s rise as a poor yet precocious child whose father died before his second birthday to his reluctant ascension to Republican presidential nominee and victor of the election of 1880.

“I have never had the Presidential fever; not even for a day,” Garfield said at the time, but in a day when the Republican Party was rife with conflict between the old guard “stalwarts” who believed in the patronage system of rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies, and reform-minded “half-breeds” who favored a government and civil service based on merit, Garfield did not back down from what he saw as his noble duty for his nation.

Solidly behind the “half-breeds” Garfield appointed his former rival and fellow reformer James Blain as his Secretary of State (after he made Blain promise him that he would never again run for president, a promise that Blain, ultimately, broke) and aimed to take Washington by storm and shake up the stagnant and corrupt political system that had washed over the government of late-nineteenth-century America.

While much of the United States was behind Garfield’s reformist agenda, fate unfortunately was not. Less than four months after he assumed the presidency Garfield was shot, at close range, by the fantastically deranged eccentric Charles Guiteau in a Washington, DC train station. Less than three months later Garfield was dead.

Millard, who expertly sets the stage leading up to Garfield’s assassination on July 2, 1881 by introducing her readers to a cast of vivid characters – from the famed and dogged inventor Alexander Graham Bell, to the flamboyant stalwart Republican senator Roscoe Conklin and his toady Chester Arthur (who also happened to be Garfield’s Vice President thanks to a compromise that the stalwarts and half-breeds entered into at the Republican convention), to Lucretia Garfield, the president’s shy yet keenly intelligent wife who Garfield had grown to adore over the years. Yet none of Millard’s characters are as remarkable as Charles Guiteau.

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction and Millard seems to relish her opportunity to write about a subject who, if created for a novel, would seem completely unbelievable. After an odd childhood Guiteau attempted to gain admission to the University of Michigan but when he couldn’t pass the entrance exam he instead joined the Oneida utopian society in upstate New York, famed mostly for its acceptance of free love and the fact that its members included two presidential assassins (the other being Leon Czolgosz who killed President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York in 1901).

Despite its free love mentality, the women of Oneida did not warm to Guiteau (in fact, as Millard notes, they took to calling him Charles “Gitout”) and after five years in utopia he left and later filed a lawsuit against Oneida leader John Noyes. After floating around New York and Chicago, Guiteau, who was an expert at sneaking out of hotels without paying his bill and “borrowing” money from distant relatives who he never intended to repay, somehow obtained a law license and began practicing, first in Chicago and later in New York. Never very successful, he regularly enraged his clients by making nonsensical arguments in court that had little to do with their cases.

After abandoning the law, Guiteau dabbled in theology briefly before finding his true calling around the stalwart Republican fringes. This is where Guiteau is at his most fascinating and where Millard shines at capturing his chilling persona. It was during the 1880 presidential campaign that Guiteau convinced himself (and likely nobody else) that he had helped to elect Garfield president by delivering an uninspiring (and little-heard) pro-Garfield speech one time in New York City. It was also during the campaign that Guiteau struck up a one-sided “friendship” with the vice presidential nominee Chester Arthur and other members of the Republican Party, writing largely unanswered letters to them – including Garfield – that took a familiar tone as if he had been friends with them for years.

Once Garfield was elected, Guiteau was convinced that he would be given the ambassadorship to Vienna as his prize for electing the president (later deciding that he preferred Paris instead). Despite the fact that Guiteau never did anything to legitimately help elect Garfield, and that neither the president nor any member of his inner circle had a clue who Guiteau was, he continued to write chummy letters to Garfield and members of his administration. He even joined the throng of office seekers who flooded the White House (a common practice in the19th-century political landscape) after Garfield took office to make sure that the president was aware of his request.

One day, while visiting the State Department to inquire about when he could finally take up his new post in Paris, Guiteau crossed paths with the new Secretary of State himself. Blain, in no uncertain terms, told Guiteau to get lost and abruptly walked away. Crestfallen yet undeterred, Guiteau decided that he had to warn the new president about his Secretary of State who clearly wasn’t aware of how important Guiteau had been to Garfield. But when his warnings went unanswered, Guiteau concluded that the problem ultimately rested with Garfield himself and, with the full backing of God – whom, by this point, Guiteau believed wanted him to kill Garfield – his task was set.

The assassination itself was a relatively simple task in the days before presidents had a protection detail and walked around openly in public places. Guiteau shot the president in the middle of a crowded train station minutes before Garfield was scheduled to board a train to the seacoast of New Jersey and he was apprehended moments later by police.

But what Guiteau thought was his crowning achievement – indeed the very work of God – was actually just the beginning of the end for Garfield and an American public shocked at the news of their mortally wounded leader. Millard then enters the next phase of this tragedy, describing in vivid detail how Garfield, ever cheerful even while enduring extreme pain and facing death, had his recovery thwarted by the antiquated medical practices of a particularly arrogant physician.

While the assassination of James Garfield has largely been lost to the passage of time, Candice Millard’s page-turning new book has brought it back to life in a remarkable way. Adeptly weaving together the stories of fascinating characters to create movie-like scenery, Millard reintroduces us to this truly American tragedy.

Greg Houle is a freelance writer who lives in New York City. Find out more at www.greghoule.com

Notwithstanding the racy title, it’s possible for Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Red Heat, a substantially detailed account of politics in the Caribbean, to appear intimidatingly opaque, or Everest-like, to the non-expert reader. Halfway down the first page, however, the fear is put aside. Von Tunzelmann writes with such excitement and energy that the grey and factual expositions become an adventure. Instead of relating dates and figures with dispassion, creating educational but lifeless non-fiction, Red Heat is invigorating, and becomes a page-turner instantly. Harnessing the energy and romanticism of Che Guevara and The Motorcycle Diaries, Von Tunzelmann uses the rich drama and revolution of that period to create spell-binding reading, without losing facts. Red Heat somehow manages to combine the intricate and vital details, with a compelling and fantastical story, making it a valuable resource on many levels.

The prologue, called ‘The Secret War’, immediately introduces the reader to Alex Von Tunzelmann’s unique talent for merging historical illustration with wit and the finesse of a good, contemporary fiction writer. She begins with a trick. “The plot was aimed at New York” are the first words of the book, and they begin a paragraph which appears to depict the terrorist attacks of September 2001; “The plot was aimed at New York: the most famous city in the richest nation on earth, and the most sought-after prize for any anti-American terrorist”. However, after lulling the reader into the assumption that the paragraph is talking about 9/11, the record is set straight; “The date was 17 November 1962″. In this self-aware, socially connected way, Red Heat, guides the reader along what is undoubtedly a journey; from the youthful strivings of Fidel Castro, through Spanish wars of 19th-century Haiti, and slave trades, to the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis. Every historical event is related with pure clarity, cool needle-sharp precision in dates and facts, and most importantly, an exuberance that compels the reader to carry on.

The detail in every episode suggests an incredible amount of research and in-depth expertise from Von Tunzelmann. Not a single word is wasted, every sentence holds a vital, precious seed of information. There is no fluff, or vamping, because there is no need to find fillers and incidental pulp. Von Tunzelmann expresses encyclopaedic and unfailing erudition, while never being academic or lofty. Each sentence is filled with fact, but simultaneously breath-holding with thrills and drama, living up to its title; ‘Heat’ is exactly what it has. This is something very unique in a writer; the exhilarating suspense and story-telling of a top-notch whodunit, combined with the flawless factual knowledge of a valuable reference resource. It makes the material accessible to readers coming from any approach, for any purpose. One can read Red Heat as part of academic research, or as a revolution fan on the back of The Motorcycle Diaries.

Von Tunzelmann moves seamlessly from high-office political chess manoeuvres and the intricacies of men in suits in Washington or Santiago, to the sweat on the backs of unwashed and exhausted guerrilla forces following Fidel and Che through mango groves, carrying ammunition for their next terrorist strike. There are despotic villains manifested in international dictators; Trujillo, Batista, and sweaty, idealistic heroes to make women swoon. The book is exciting, and brings together far-reaching worlds; wars on tropical islands; (“The question that must be asked about 1962 is not whether it is feasible that the government of the United States might have resorted to such techniques- evidently, it might–but what could have been going on among the palm trees on a couple of islands in the Caribbean to provoke a superpower to such extreme action”), the uprising and revolution of oppressed people all over the continent, and the Kennedys, the Cold Wars, and politics, and Missile Crises that involved and frightened the entire world, not just its leaders. Red Heat incorporates them all, and submerges you, totally, in the action. The narrative voice, because that’s what it is, even though this is non-fiction, is not only passionate and erudite, but casual, so much so that the book feels like a conversation with a clever friend. Von Tunzelmann is always affable, and filled with rapt joy in her subject.

Red Heat is enriching, whether you’re a student, romantic, or just enjoy literature. This is one of the first books to absolutely capture my attention, so fully that I lost awareness of my surroundings, which is surprising given that this is a non-fiction book in an area that I’m interested in, but by no means well-educated in, the extent of my knowledge being that Che Guevara was from Argentina. One feels captivated, and educated, all at once.

In one of the final chapters of Jason K. Stearns’ significant new book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, the author writes about a battle in the central Congolese city of Kisangani during what is now known as the Second Congolese War in 1999. The battle, which was actually fought between the Ugandan and Rwandan armies – Congolese troops were not involved – resulted in the death of hundreds (if not thousands) of innocent Congolese people. During a conversation with a pastor named Philippe, whose son had been killed in the crossfire, the author asked whom he blamed for his death. “There are too many people to blame,” Philippe tells him.

It is a succinct statement that, nonetheless, aptly explains the enormous tragedy that is Congo. On a continent famous for its stories of calamity the Congolese tale is perhaps the saddest one of all.

This enormous country, the size of western Europe, has always had a habit of seducing foreigners. From David Livingston and Henry Morton Stanley, who explored its vast and deadly jungles in the 19th century, to Belgium’s King Leopold II, who brutally ran it as his own personal fiefdom (despite having never visited himself) until the early 20th century, outsiders have always had vast influence over Congo. And, as Stearns points out, this hasn’t changed much over the years.

Since 1996, when the conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide seeped over the border and started what is now known as the First Congo War the result has been an enormous and epic calamity – the size of which the world has not seen since the Second World War. Some reports claim that as many as five million people have died in Congo as a result of this complex conflict involving the armies of no fewer than nine governments and well over a dozen rebel groups. The vast majority of the victims of this war – now sometimes called “Africa’s World War” because it has drawn in so many surrounding nations – have not been killed in combat but instead have died from preventable disease and famine as a result of the fighting. In addition to the staggering number of casualties, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped as a brutal instrument of terror.

How does one explain such a tragedy? And how exactly does such a tragedy fly almost completely under the radar as it has in most of the rest of the world?

Stearns, an American who spent a decade in Congo working for the United Nations and local human rights organizations, has made a valiant attempt at answering these daunting and difficult questions. He probably understands the complexities of the Congo conflict better than most. But, as he adeptly points out in the book, the brutality of this war – stories of rape, cannibalism, and people being burned alive is most often the focus of the conflict’s paltry media attention – often reduces what is happening in Congo to mere wanton savagery without context. The Congo becomes the very setting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where people engage in brutality without cause.

Stearns has worked tirelessly to show us that this isn’t the case at all. He interviewed countless people – soldiers, government officials, and others – to get to the heart of this vastly complex and multi-faceted conflict. While there are no simple answers here, if he had to give a single raison d’être Stearns concludes that it is ultimately Congo’s lack of visionary leadership that has done it in. A situation largely born out of centuries of politically destabilizing forces, from the slave trade to its hasty independence from Belgium to the brutal three-decade rule of Mobuto Sese Seko who sucked the country dry. This vacuum of leadership has led other nations – mainly Rwanda but also Uganda, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and others – to exert their own political will on this land rich in mineral wealth. The result has been the birth of numerous rebel groups within Congo that have been introduced into the morass of foreign influencers and corrupt puppet governments. All of this has led to a murky and protracted struggle for control.

The complexity and fatalism of this conflict turned off the rest of the world long ago – if indeed the rest of the world was ever actually interested at all. Simply put, while Congo has been tangled in a quagmire for over fifteen years, few have cared about why it is happening. Jason Stearns works hard to try to change this reality, probing deeply into the causes of the conflict, and skillfully moving past its shocking brutality to get at its nucleus.

Whether or not Dancing in the Glory of Monsters will shake the world from its apathy about Congo remains to be seen but Stearns should be commended for trying to explain the most deadly conflict the world has seen in generations – and perhaps the most deadly conflict the world has ever ignored.

Greg Houle is a freelance writer living in New York. Find out more about him at www.greghoule.com and follow him on Twitter @greghoule

US Senator James Inhofe equates French involvement in Côte d’Ivoire with a history of colonialism. Greg Houle argues why he’s wrong

For somebody who constantly boasts about his knowledge and understanding of the African continent, US Senator James Inhofe (R – Oklahoma) sounds shockingly naïve when addressing the recent events in Ivory Coast which has done on a regular basis in recent weeks.

Last month, following the capture of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo after he refused to leave office despite losing his election to challenger Alassane Ouattara more than four months earlier, I received an email message from Sen. Inhofe’s office with the subject line “French Colonialism Must End”. The email included a link to a YouTube video of Sen. Inhofe railing against Ouattara, the United Nations, the US State Department, and France from the senate floor.

In the twenty-five minutes speech Sen. Inhofe condemned the violence unleashed by French and UN peacekeepers as they liberated the West African nation from President Gbagbo.

“I hope every president of sub-Saharan Africa is watching right now,” Sen. Inhofe says to his colleagues in the senate, “because what happened [in Ivory Coast] can happen to any country in sub-Saharan Africa.”

And if it did, Sen. Inhofe, Africa and Africans would be much better off.

During his speech the conservative senator makes a gallant attempt at using a well-worn liberal line of thinking: instead of allowing the UN and Europe to engage in neo-colonialism in Africa we should be listening to Africans and allowing them to solve their own problems. The French and the UN were choosing sides in Ivory Coast, Sen. Inhofe asserts, and Ivoirians were left voicelessly at the mercy of the imperialists.

Nice try Sen. Inhofe.

During his speech the senator points to a statement made by African Union Chairman Theodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasobo. The chairman, who is also president of Equatorial Guinea, condemns France’s role in Gbagbo’s ouster. (The AU chairman has since pledged the organization’s “full support” to President Ouattara in a press release issued on April 15). The irony of using such a statement by a ruthless dictator like President Mbasobo to illustrate a point about the free will of the people seems lost on Sen. Inhofe, or at least he doesn’t hint that he’s aware of any irony.

President Mbasobo is one of Africa’s worst dictators – which is saying a lot. Having come to power in a bloody coup in 1979, President Mbasobo has remained at the helm in Equatorial Guinea for nearly thirty-two years, where he has stifled all political opposition (all but one member of parliament is from his own ruling party). President Mbasobo is the prototypical African “Big Man”, a megalomaniac, who has built a cult of personality in his tiny nation that rivals anything seen in history. It is so large, in fact, that he has even referred to himself, without any apparent blowback, as a god.

But Sen. Inhofe doesn’t stop there. He goes on to mention a conversation that he recently had with his “good friend” Yoweri Museveni. President Museveni has ruled Uganda for the last quarter century and shows no sign of leaving – even recently having his nation’s constitution changed so that he could continue to rule. Sen. Inhofe assures us that President Museveni too is angered by the “colonialist” behavior of the French and the United Nations in Ivory Coast; another great African “liberator” who wasn’t consulted by the West before they moved in on Gbagbo. What a shame.

The reality, of course, is that Presidents Mbasobo and Museveni, along with so many other African politicians, are shockingly worried at the precedent that was set by French and UN action in Ivory Coast. In fact Sen. Inhofe could have also included Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe in his speech who, after over thirty years of misrule and tyranny, has successfully driven his once-promising nation into the ground. Predictably President Mugabe also decried the West’s involvement in Ivory Coast, and some reports suggest that he even (illegally) supplied troops and weapons to Gbagbo in the process.

The two organizations designed to give a voice to Africans and provide an “African solution” to this African problem in Ivory Coast, the AU and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), failed to do so. In fact it was the very impotence of these organizations that prompted the UN and France to step in and prevent a further slide toward civil war in Ivory Coast and to uphold the internationally recognized election results in the nation.

What Sen. Inhofe doesn’t understand, or refuses to admit, is that the AU and ECOWAS don’t necessarily, or even likely, represent the will of the African people at all. Instead they are mouthpieces for a largely corrupt and all-powerful ruling class in Africa that has for decades all but neglected the overwhelming majority of Africans who they claim to represent and in doing so have helped their nations and much of the continent slide even more deeply into extreme poverty and despair.

Real African voices have been shut out of the African political process in similar ways that Arab popular opinion, until recently, was largely silenced by those in power in the Middle East and North Africa. One of the more remarkable aspects of the popular uprisings sweeping across the Arab world right now is how, perhaps for the first time in generations, Arabs are listening to each other and not to the propaganda of their own corrupt governments. The same tired old bogymen – the United States, Europe, Israel, Al-Qaeda, religious sectarianism – dragged out once again by the regimes in Tripoli and Damascus and Sana’a aren’t having the same results on the people of Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere that they used to have. The citizens of these nations are courageously starting to crack the destructive apparatus placed on them by political leaders whose only goal has been to stay in power at all costs.

While French motives in Ivory Coast may not have been entirely altruistic, by helping to remove Gbagbo, France and the United Nations supported the democratic process in Ivory Coast. And on a continent where you can count the number of democratic transitions of power on one hand, supporting democracy and upholding the democratic process – something that so many African rulers have failed to do for their people for so long – is not only vitally important but necessary for the future of the African people.

Greg Houle is a freelance writer who has written for numerous publications, including the National Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Charlotte Observer, Washington Times and others. Follow him on Twitter @greghoule

01 Guernica: Launched in 2004 by New York-based writers Joel Whitney and Michael Archer, Guernica is an online journal of original creative and non-fiction work. Material is published on a fortnightly basis with a weighting towards the journalistic side. Many interviews discuss loosely political themes with novelists, as well as poets, filmmakers and others, whilst features generally investigate a wider pool of opinions and ideas. Guernica also publishes new poetry, short stories and slideshows of art (mainly photography). Their blog features a range of more politically focused commentators.

02 A magazine of art and politics: As the allusion to Picasso’s iconic painting implies, Guernica’s stated aim is to explore “the crossroads between art and politics”. This is an interesting fault line, which the site more or less traces. Sometimes this is explicit: Jamal Mahjoub’s recent interview with Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, for example, spoke of January’s uprising and Poulomi Basu’s photographs follow India’s first women soldiers. Often, though, the crossover is implicit, connecting liberal politics with an artistic sensibility.

03 Features and style: Long-form journalism is complemented by much briefer poems and short stories (including a recent experiment with flash fiction). American writing is frequently punctuated with new pieces from around the world and sporadic translations. Although opinions are drawn from across the United States, there is a hardcore Brooklyn writers and, although Guernica has an international perspective, it remains something of a New York project. Likewise, many contributors share a background in MFAs and teaching creative writing, giving the site a unique voice. The visual material is generally more global.

04 Behind the scenes: Something of Guernica’s philosophy carries over into its masthead. Having been incorporated as a no-for-profit two years ago, it is a collective effort relying on the goodwill of smart and engaged contributors. The 30-plus editors, broadly journalists and teachers, are all involved with a large collection of other publications and projects. Former Spike contributor Nancy Rawlinson is a contributing editor.

05 Features and interviews: The site has interviewed an impressive roster over its six year existence, including John Updike, Don DeLillo, Juot Díaz, and Arundhati Roy. The schedule usually includes two new features and two new interviews every fortnight. Recent highlights have been David Morris’ article ‘Public Disinterest’ and Meaghan Winter’s interview with Dean Spade. The former is a history of how vital channels of public information (the US postal service and broadcast airwaves) have been hijacked and the implications for the future of the internet, whilst the latter profiles America’s first openly transgendered law professor on an eye-opening range of issues.

06 Creative content: Whilst Guernica’s poetry, short stories and visual arts each get, on average, only one post each per fortnight, they have garnered a numbered of awards. 2009 was a particularly good year with E.C. Osondu’s story ‘Waiting’ winning the Caine Prize and Matthew Derby’s ‘January in December’ got a Dzanc Books Best of the Web award. Both were published in 2008. Recent highlights have included Melissa Ann Chadburn’s ‘Loose Morals’, with it immortal opening line “Did you know that more people jack off than pick their nose while driving?” and Albert Abonado’s poem ‘Snake Story’. Birthe Pionek’s photographs of life in Canada’s Yukon (‘The Idea of North’) have a View-Master depth and tone, the portraits look away from the lens, lost in thought.

07 Support: The not-for-profit philosophy of Guernica is reflected in its calls for support. The homepage is bordered with large advertising placeholders, suggesting different ways for readers to join the community. In addition to donations and subscriptions, there is a rather hopeful shop offering t-shirts, stickers, mugs and magnets. Guernica also offers a tiered membership scheme ranging from a $25pa Friend to a $1000pa Sustainer. The latter receives a quarterly newsletter, a messenger bag, various tickets to Guernica events, and a name on the website. The organisation frequently advertises for interns to help develop the platform.

08 Blog and opinions: Guernica’s blog offers near-daily material, often co-hosted on other blogs. More overtly political, these posts can offer a leftist defence of American liberal values, as demonstrated by Robert Reich’s writing on domestic policies. Reich served under Clinton and is now a Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley and much of his Guernica material focuses on the economy. The blog also has a global dimension, exemplified by Robin Yassin-Kassab’s posts on the Middle East. But there is also room for arts coverage on the blog, a recent highlight being Erica Wright’s promotion of the term ‘dude-lit’: “It speaks to a debate I’ve simply had one too many times about great novels in which Thomas Hardy and James Joyce win out over Brontë and Virginia Woolf every time. And by ‘win out’, I mean the dude I’m talking to speaks louder and more forcibly”.

“YouGov is the authoritative measure of public opinion and consumer behaviour. It is our ambition to supply a live stream of continuous, accurate data and insight into what people are thinking and doing all over the world, all of the time, so that companies, governments and institutions can better serve the people that sustain them. YouGov is the most quoted research company in the UK, so by joining our panel of over 350,000 members and taking part in our surveys you really can get your voice heard. Panel members are sent regular surveys on a whole host of topics from politics to brands, finance to shopping, and we want to hear your views.”

01 YouGov – What the world thinks: The London-based online market research firm was launched in May 2000 by Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi. Digital polling radically reduces the cost of polling, allowing a much greater sample to be canvassed. This, in theory, makes for much greater accuracy. Panel members are recruited from targeted sources such as non-political websites or via specialist recruitment agencies. A detailed profile is completed, enabling YouGov to select a representative sample of electors for each survey. The general public can also join the panel through the website, although this sample is generally excluded from published political polls. A 40% response rate is usually reached within 24 hours and 60% within 72 hours. Each response is rewarded with an incentive of between 50p and £1 per survey, paid out as a lump sum of £50. The organisation claims their members and methodology constitute enough demographic information to represent the electorate as a whole.

02 Services and international sites: Obviously this data is valuable and YouGov offer a full range of research-based services. In addition to bespoke projects, there are a number of off-the-shelf products. BrandIndex measures daily shifts in public perception around 850 consumer lines. Last year, YouGov launched SixthSense, which aims to give a near-real time overview of different market sectors. Nine broad consumer areas are offered, such as ‘Health and Beauty’ and ‘Technology Market’, which are then broken down into focus areas, including ‘The British Mindset’, ‘Ethical Living’ and ‘Breakfast’. These reports can be bought individually, generally for £1750 each. Since the company was floated for £18million in 2005, it has been on something of an acquisition spree. In 2005, it acquired Siraj to focus on the Middle East (offices around the Persian Gulf, panel of 140,000). Polimetrix followed in 2006 (Palo Alto, New York, and Washington CD, panel of 1.1million) and 2007 saw Psychonomics (Cologne, Berlin, and Vienna, 120 researchers and consultants) and Zapera (offices across Scandinavia, panel of 140,000) join the YouGov family. The move hasn’t been particularly successful with resistance to the online methodology in the US and losses in Germany. Since 2010, the company has declared an interest in exporting the model rather than attain international influence through acquisition.

03 Subject areas: YouGov’s public website is an interesting variation on the newspaper, creating stories through survey findings. Broadly speaking, these are divided into ‘Life’, ‘Consumer’, and ‘Politics’. The range of reports in quite wide and may use data from sources outside of YouGov. There is also an archive of reports, which demonstrate sample size and questions, and a full breakdown of statistics. Sometimes the results are surprising, such as the 3% in the product placement report who claim never to watch television or films (rising to %5 in Scotland). Other recent surveys have included ‘Libya Intervention’ and ‘Ghosts’.

04 Main stories: YouGov are regularly commissioned by newspapers to (very accurately) predict the results of Pop Idol and X-Factor. This is obviously great advertising for the brand and the website retains something of a tabloid feel, rather than the more solemn identity we might associate with polling and research. The articles themselves are written by a small team and usually reflect the overall conclusions of research quite accurately. When consensus is overwhelming, the author may extrapolate what this may mean for key trends. But it is just as likely that the article presents a full range of opinions, when the results are more evenly weighted.

05 Leader Board: TellYouGov is a move into the real-time arena. Users can engage anonymously on any topic via a range of means, including email, SMS, Twitter or directly through the site. You can add a topic (a ‘Tyg’ as they call it) or comment on an existing one with a plus or minus. Topics then rise or fall accordingly and there are various ways to read the data. The results are rather depressing, consisting of blunt attacks on politicians and celebrities, and generally negative opinions on trending issues. YouGov claim they remove offensive remarks but a few homophobic comments were visible. It would be interesting to know how this data is used.

06 Government Trackers: This is YouGov’s daily log of voting intentions and government approval ratings. Attitudes to the domestic financial situation are also tracked. Although YouGov’s accuracy is hard to establish on a day-to-day basis, they highlight their success in specific circumstances, such as the 2008 London mayoral election and their record on general elections is generally strong. Various claims have been made over party political bias and ‘push polling’, such as an emotive weighting of questions concerning the Liberal Democrats, but it is hard to find sustained evidence to support.

07 Commentaries: In addition to key YouGov staff members, a small range of commentators engage with research to present a deeper analysis of (mainly) political trends. These try to explain shifts in public sympathy and also stray into consumer issues. The BBC’s John Humphrys is a regular contributor.

08 Other aspects: Despite the compelling economics of online research, YouGov has struggled financially. Following the recession, there was a collapse in profitability during 2008 (just after the company had expanded its overseas portfolio) and shares remained correspondingly low. However, shares have begun a modest climb throughout 2011 and the board continues to report a healthy balance sheet with £11million in net cash. Last year, The Register published a story about a YouGov feasibility study to see whether users were prepared to install tracking software on their computers. Sophos said it would classify the software as a ‘potentially unwanted application’.

Further Reading:
British homepage for YouGov
The TellYouGov Leader Board
YouGov SixthSense consumer reports

In the week after Michael Foot, socialist and former-Labour Party leader, died I encountered a veteran taxi-driver early one morning in Liverpool. What started as mere headshaking and tutting at the fellow revellers eventually became a discourse on the political traditions of Liverpool and the state of Britain as a whole. (All of this was nicely juxtaposed outside the ‘Golden Arches’ of a crammed McDonald’s.) It was thrilling to hear someone who was clearly once so passionate about his beliefs; however, he had never thought much of Foot and it was clear that his interest in politics generally had gone the same way. He summed up his apathy with this closing statement: “You go to work, you do your best, but nothing ever changes.”

Eric Hobsbawm’s recent collection of essays under the somewhat misleading title of How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism would probably not be much help to him, but is, nonetheless, a valuable resource for anyone interested in Marxism or even wider political theory – at least for those already interested. For this collection is not Marxist-Soup for the Soul or A Very Long Introduction to Marx; despite containing sixteen separate essays covering everything from the Utopian Socialists and their influences on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Antonio Gramsci and the role of Marxism over the post-Second World War 20th century, several chapters may be too obscure for the casual reader and throughout the whole book Hobsbawm makes references that require prior knowledge or further research.

On the one hand, any book that inspires further reading and thought should be praised (and indeed this reader went scrabbling around bookshelves for a tattered copy of The Communist Manifesto) and yet on the other, surely Hobsbawm thwarts his aim of encouraging people to think about Marx seriously again with a fairly inaccessible text. This is an especially important consideration when one considers that ‘Marxist’ is still, even in this time of recession, greed and bankers, a dirty word; you’ll never meet one – save the token poseurs on university campuses everywhere with their Che Guevara t-shirts and/or berets. Some criticise Hobsbawm himself for what they see as his failure to properly repudiate the Soviet Union – and, sure enough, early on in the book there is a mild, passing mention that “Russia was too backward to produce anything other than a caricature of a socialist society”. However, such critics are wrong to dismiss his work out of hand and his desire to change the way Capitalist society thinks – which is, after all, admirable.

Another concern follows this; Hobsbawm confidently asserts that “the end of the official Marxism of the USSR liberated Marx from the public identification with Leninism in theory and with the Leninist regimes in practice.” How can he be sure of this? None of the notes in the back of the book give further clarification. But it seems rather more likely that, for the foreseeable future, Marx will be as firmly connected, in the public imagination, to the horrors and failures of the USSR as Nietzsche is, more spuriously, connected to the Nazis.

Hobsbawm’s upbeat views about Marx and his philosophies’ make How to Change the World a book you truly can judge by its cover: lots of red (a given); on the front cover a flag-wielding worker (perhaps a Cossack) striding over a Russian cityscape with a sea of people running through it; beneath that the iconic black and white image of Guevara (to pull in those aforementioned enthusiasts?); and on the back cover a Soviet parade replete with guns, tanks and two giant Lenin busts. Such images are damaging to the essence of the book – thinking afresh – because they attempt to create an almost bucolic vision of Communism which would be laughable even to early critics of Communism such as Orwell and Koestler.

Overall, the first section of the book, which deals with Marx and Engels, is more enjoyable than the second, dealing with Marxism itself. The latter contains the chapters that would lose the vast majority of readers –two about Antonio Gramsci, though obviously important to the macrocosmic perspective of Marxism, seemed somehow out of place and served to remind me that this collection was made up of pieces written by Hobsbawm at various times for different projects. The first section, however, is a great examination of the early influences on Marx and Engels such as Fourier and Saint-Simon (whom Marx expanded upon for some of his most memorable phrases, such as: “The exploitation of man by man”), their early politics and the writing of their major works. Anyone intrigued by these chapters, who hadn’t already done so, would be well advised to read Marx’s widely available works and also Francis Wheen’s splendid biography of Marx which adds further depth to him as a philosopher and as a man.

Returning to the cabbie from Liverpool, the real problem with changing the world is not rescuing Marx from history but engaging the working population of the present. Obviously the mass of Western people do not actively think of themselves as Capitalists, though this may be slightly more prevalent in the USA, indeed they don’t think of themselves as anything, they are apathetic – but they are not nihilists, which, of course, requires a particular kind of belief in futility – which is why, in the end, it’s disappointing Hobsbawm doesn’t engage more thoroughly with the problem of engaging the working-classes in political movements or underscore the need for new thinking rather than new interpretations of old ideas.

What drew you to writing about ‘The Troubles’?
Northern Ireland was the war of my generation. As a child it was always on my television screen and as I grew older I wondered what they were fighting about. Inquisitive by nature, I read up on the subject and was intrigued to discover ‘The Troubles’ had been going on for centuries. When I was 16, I had friends stationed in Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland, and the letters and telephone calls that I received – as well as illegal videos they sent me that directly documented the war, eventually led me to write Freedom First Peace Later.

Did you do a lot of research for the novel?
My research was firstly to read Martin McGartland’s novels Fifty Dead Men Walking and Dead Man Running. It was to inspire one of my characters, Barry – an undercover IRA man actually working for the British Government. I read all of the history that I could find so I could get an accurate view, and I read it from all sides so it was unbiased. This is part of the reason I wrote Bobby Sands hunger strike and subsequent death into the novel.

Has writing about the situation changed your attitudes at all?
At the starting point of my book the only viewpoint I knew was that of the British Soldiers and what was reported on the BBC. It was interesting to know the other side. In part I wish that the 2008 film Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen had been about, as I watched it when it came out and wondered if I’d done enough justice to that side of the story.

I hear that the economic downturn has increased sectarian activity in Northern Ireland. Can you imagine a sequel to the book?
I can absolutely imagine a sequel to the book. The basic storyline is already in my mind. I know that Connor, who escaped the IRA to New York after the brutal death of his Catholic girlfriend, got off far too lightly at the end of the book. He was all set to live happily ever after, but I feel the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder setting in.

Freedom First dramatises the struggles of people dealing with social division, would you say that individuals will always find a way to build relationships? Or are some ideological conflicts impossible to overcome?
Interestingly the working title of my novel was actually The Divide, before I came across a mural in Northern Ireland stating the words: “Freedom First Peace Later”. In my opinion there should be no social division in any circumstance. My catholic grandfather came to England after escaping from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. Failing to locate his family back in Poland and believing that they were dead, he met and married my grandmother, an English Christian. He raised his children in English schools but showed them their Polish heritage by sending them to Polish language schools and introducing them to the Polish community. Cultural diversity to me is a beautiful thing, and one can only become richer for experiencing it.

Do you think that novels can help in this process of understanding?
I believe that anyone having trouble accepting other cultures into their community should read Rose Tremain’s The Road Home. It is a beautiful tale of an immigrant coming to England to work to send money home to his family. We are surrounded by people like this, but so often dismiss them as ‘playing the system’ or not taking time to listen to their story. The Road Home rightfully won the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction and was short-listed for the Costa Prize 2007. If any book can provide understanding on social and cultural division it is this one.

I think I read that one of your passions is history. What is it about the subject that makes for such compelling fiction? How does fiction differ from history? What can it add?
Historical events are a fantastic template for fiction. By using actual events a writer can have the best of both worlds, highlighting causes or occasions but adding their own spin and characters and by adding these ingredients make the tale a little more personal. A great example of this is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Everyone has a general idea about the Mafia, but to bring the story down to one family makes it little more understandable, and in some instances a little more sympathetic to that character. Of course the historical events have to be accurate, as I found out when I inserted a real historical event in my book, which happened in 1987, although my book was set in 1981! I realised this during the final edits and it was amended in the paperback version, although not in the ebook version that had already been produced. This was picked up on by an Irish newspaper and the backlash was something I had to respond to. I have also learnt that people are sensitive about their history, I came across a newspaper article about my book on an IRA forum and the review of my book wasn’t flattering. I felt the need to defend my work and I joined the forum to put my side of the story across. That day that I spent on the forum was challenging, although none of the posters had actually read my book they assumed – incorrectly – that it was stating that the IRA were bad men. After much deliberation, suspicion that I had written my novel with political motive on my part and barely concealed threats, I managed to convince these men that I simply had a tale that I wanted to tell.

Tell us about your other manuscripts.
Rather than writing one book from start to finish, I have a few on the go. The novel that I am currently working on is about a 16-year-old agoraphobic boy named Jack, entitled Fear of the Market Place. Agoraphobia in Latin literally translates to ‘fear of the market place’. Alongside Jack’s story is that of his neighbour Mrs Hirsch, a survivor of Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. The Holocaust is a historical event that has always been close to my heart, and I always knew that one day I would write about it. I started this novel in 2009 and around the same time was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. I found it increasingly hard to continue writing the novel as I realised my life was becoming more and more like Jack’s. At that point I wasn’t taking any medication and was feeling like I couldn’t be too far from my home, so I could spend weekends recovering in my favourite chair in order to make it through work the following week. My illness and the demands it made of me were taking over my life. Things came to a head when one day I was so stripped of energy I had to choose between going to work or doing my housework, when of course one should really be able to do both! After a two-week stay in hospital in April 2010, ongoing help from my consultant and proper medication, my Crohn’s went into remission (and still is!) and I was able to continue with Jack and Mrs Hirsch’s story. I’m now 20,000 words in and Fear of the Market Place has been submitted in for the Yeovil Prize 2011.

Further Reading:
Jeanette’s website
Jeanette Hewitt at BlueWood Publishing

Mention the name Michael Foot and listen out for the automatic sneer. A rolling of eyes at a “disastrous leader”, accompanied no doubt with devilishly cutting asides about donkey jackets, walking sticks or Worzel Gummidge, delete as appropriate. Gerald Kaufman’s deathless Wildeanism chiding Foot’s 1983 Labour Manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history” will be added by the more confident comedians, and much, much merriment will be had all round. Oh, the laughter!

Let’s leave aside the fact the economic shit-storm the world currently finds itself in stems entirely from the Mephistophelian neo-liberal pact which this “suicide note” rejected, a pact wholeheartedly signed up to by the current “realist” Labour administration, along with the rest of the world. Let’s ignore the fact that the 1983 result was that of a party caught between the SDP schism, an economic upsurge and Falklands wargasm euphoria. Let’s gloss over the fact that Soviet Communism and unregulated international capitalism have both been utterly, comprehensively discredited, while simple logic dictates the democratic socialist alternative Foot put forward has been vindicated. The fact the man was basically right all along – we can delicately place that trifle to one-side for now. We can all still agree however that when it comes to the everyday devious machinations of leading a political party, and of creating an effective electoral machine and vibrant media image for the slick media age, Foot did not find his forte. What was? Writing. Journalism, ideas and writing.

Foot began writing in the 30s for a variety of magazines and papers, broadly championing the underdog, and more specifically drumming up solidarity against the menace of Fascism. His 1940 book Who are the Guilty Men?, denouncing as it did the Tory Chamberlain government’s appeasement of Hitler, did much to consolidate progressive support for the war effort, with the promise of a better society at home beyond. In the 40s he joined the Tribune newspaper along with, amongst others, his friend George Orwell, helping establish it as a voice for the Labour Left which stood solid against the hegemony of both US and USSR. On into the 60s, concurrent with acting as the conscience of the same Labour Left from the backbenches, he found time to write the definitive biography of his mentor Nye Bevan, a similarly exhaustive tome on H G Wells was to follow later.

It was the old rival Denis Healey who said that a politician needs a “hinterland”, outside cultural interests to keep them human. No-one could ever accuse Foot of not cultivating his own spiritual and mental landscape. The selection of essays here are a testament to the man’s mercurial mind, the breadth of his intellectual scope. Taken from over a half century, only a small number touch on purely political “issues” – nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, Irish nationalism. Foot’s preferred form was to discuss the life, work and ideas of an individual man or woman, and a small majority here are portraits of political figures, usually taken from reviews of biographies or collections from their own work. It takes in leading figures from Labour history and earlier British socialism, from Bevan and Bevin to Robert Owen and William Morris, the still earlier radicalisms of Tom Paine and Charles James Fox. Irish and Indian independence are well represented with Indira Ghandi and Daniel O’Connell, as is feminism with Emilene Pankhurst and Brigid Brophy. Yet at the same time there are a great many portraits of writers and characters not best known for their politics – Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Rebecca West, the Romantic poets and Heinrich Heine – not to mention Peggy Aschroft.

That the politicians segue so well into the writers is a testament to the well- rounded totality of Foot’s mind and vision. The struggle for truth and freedom are as important in the literary sphere as in the party political, maybe more so. Aesthetics, beauty, form and style are at the very least equal to politics in his thoughts and enthusiasms. In discussing Edmund Wilson’s biography of Rousseau, more reference is made to relevant quotations from Byron than to any theoretical road to Robespierre. Essays on the history of Hampstead common, and the infinite wonders of Venice, perhaps the least “political” here, are probably the most beautifully written, with an evocation of time, space and place which is truly involving, even moving.

Foot writes in a style both cultured and clear, mildly mischievous, totally lacking pomposity, and wearing its very evident learning lightly. A passion, quiet yet pronounced, reserved but unmistakable, is evident at all times. Personal recollections lightly pepper the essays on those he knows and knew, while the same easy, almost conversational style flows similarly into those from centuries past, creating the pleasing impression that Foot was on nodding terms with Coleridge and Morris just as he was with Richard Crossman and John Smith (which, in his life of the mind, he perhaps always has been).

A clue there perhaps that it takes a duller man than this to succeed in the grubby world of leading a political party. The decency consistently evident in his prose also lays bare the absolute absence of the killer instinct needed for leadership. The venom of the zealot isn’t there either. Rare asides against Thatcher are dismissive rather than enraged, bereft of the rabidity she so easily inspired in so many. Figures such as Ernest Bevin and others on the Labour Right are appraised admiringly. Even a review of the autobiography of nemesis Healey is genuinely warm and salutary. Tom Driberg, the louche old eccentric (ie. fantasist) and rogue (ie. sociopath) is recalled with the affection of the friend that he was (though the bad points are laid bare too.) Anti-Thatcherite Tory and historian Ian Gilmour is praised, and there is even a short yet powerful defence of Churchill, paying robust tribute to the old reactionary against the modern fallacy held by revisionists on Left and Right alike that a deal could or should have been struck with Hitler.

This lack of killer instinct means he lacks the final “bite” of the truly great writer too. Eloquent praise pours freely, but not once is there an effective literary slaying of a hated foe, not a shortfall that could be levelled at his friend Orwell.

This politeness, this sheathed sword and profoundly English politeness can irritate. The kind words found for that other “loveable rogue”, the Tory Kray-groupie Bob Boothby seem to be stretching the limits of tolerance past snapping point. And seeking and finding the good points even in that other arch Conservative icon Edmund Burke; for instance, is hard to take from the more partisan. Even here though, he does well to convince. How many of the golf club bores, bigots and blimps who denounced the man as a “dangerous extremist” when he led Labour could demonstrate the barest fraction of his broad minded respect for and interest in competing points of view?

Foot is a socialist in the truest sense, yet forever free of the dogma that dogs too many of his tribe. And free of the great sins too. Absolutely no apologia for the crimes of Communism from him – Stalin is condemned here in a brief article taken from the week of his death, written when the rest of the world were paying tribute. An unequivocal defence of Salman Rushdie taken from the time of the Satanic Verses furore, shows that he would have no part of the alliance with militant political Islamism which some on the Left have cynically seen fit to serve. His support for NATO’s bombing of Serbia is more contentious, though, whatever one may think of it, still presents him as someone true to a liberationist vision on his own terms, unaffected by the fact that such a position would not be popular amongst his own beloved wing of his own beloved party.

Foot sees socialism as the rightful heir of earlier struggles for liberty and autonomy that distinguished the great rebels of the past. This is the socialism of liberation, not restriction, the vision of liberty which inspired the creed in the first place, expanding the vision of the free-born Englishman to include those without property. This doyenne of dissenters is one himself, and when he writes of, say, of the great early Parliamentary radical Fox, or the still greater radical writer and pamphleteer William Hazlitt , it is with the knowledge and passion of someone who has devoted their whole life to it, in both the intellectual and the practical sense. Foot feels a truly organic lineage to this tribe, a lineage he is more than entitled to.

An impassioned portrait of Heinrich Heine, one of the longest essays here, is perhaps the best example of the Foot’s infectious enthusiasm, his quiet passion, his blending of the poetic and political. The personal too, as he describes how Heine came to be his “hero” after discovering her with a beautiful Yugoslavian girl with whom he was once in love, before coming to know him through what he saw as his modern day avatar, the cartoonist Vicky, who had “every Heinite feature, the same diminutive size, the same race, the same iconoclastic temperament with a comparable artistic gift. He too, like my Jewish girlfriend, knew Heine by heart, and would summon his hero to his side whenever the political battle was most ruthless or pitiless.” These personal asides are –springboards to a fine, enraptured paen. As someone who has never read Heine, I am inspired to do so, much sooner than later. “He could never make up his mind whether he was a poet or a politician”, says Foot of Heine, and the reason for his particular connection with this writer becomes that bit clearer.

I have found myself slipping into the past tense in writing this review, and yet Michael Foot is happily still very much alive at the age of 96. When he does pass away however, an age of passion, principle and philosophy at the higher levels of politics will die with him. It is unthinkable, literally unthinkable that a book like this could appear today. The leaders of today’s party political machines, – slick, shallow, technocratic, faux pragmatic and narrowly philistine – could not begin to produce anything of the like. You may as well expect Fearne Cotton to write an essay on the transgressive ambiguities of the Velvet Underground. You can just about see they “work in the same industry”, but nonetheless, a “category error” has occurred. Does not compute.

True, Gordon Brown wrote a biography of James Maxton back in the 80s, but it seems Brown was a different man then. On the Tory benches, Michael Gove makes an effort to engage with the cultural sphere, but this is a very limited exception to the greater picture. Ideas don’t matter. But they should, something that Foot never forgot. This book is a window to an age of wider political possibility, and of greater political imagination. It is also simply an immensely strong body of writing on its own terms. And finally it is the truest tribute possible to the man himself, a giant among pygmies.

Monsignor Quixote – Graham Greene

See all books by Graham Greene at
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Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholicism in his writing, George Orwell could always be relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in his mind, he was hardly without justification. Polemical righteousness brimming over, he rashly wrote in the 30s that the English novel was “practically a Protestant art form”, and that Catholic practitioners were thin on the ground both numerically and qualitatively. Practically as he put pen to paper however, two of the greatest English authors of the mid century – Henry Graham Greene and Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh – were surfacing to take the literary world by ferocious storm. And it’s fair to say the pair weren’t exactly short on Catholic sensitivities. A bad call from Mr Orwell on this one at least.

In many respects the authors could scarcely be more different. Greene’s milieu was the forgotten corners and back alleys of life. The jittery street gang, the persecuted runaway, the jaded official in a fading Imperial outpost. Boozy landladies, failed accountants. Greene’s every fibre was tuned with sympathy for the underdog, siding with the rebellious and the forgotten, his narrative home the sleazy underbelly of life. Not so Waugh. His territory was the landed estates of the southern counties and their intersection with the cold elites of London high society. While his misanthropic satire found endless and endlessly amusing reasons for his narrative contempt towards the dramatis personae of lower gentry and upper bourgeois who populated his books, there was no denying that, at heart, he identified with them. Indeed, his lampooning of the upper and upper middle classes hinged largely round the fact that they failed to live up to his reactionary ideal. Moving outside this caste, his attitude shifts from mere contempt to outright hatred.

While both transcended both, Greene’s style skirted round the genre of the thriller, Waugh around that of the comedic farce. Greene’s narratives are littered with gangland intrigue, colonial corruption, the grimy and sweaty fear of pursuit. Action, in the purest sense, is central, as is plot. The characters are conveyed via a direct mental inner voice toward the reader, their dialogue, and interaction with each other being secondary to this. Again, the contrast with Waugh could hardly be greater. His narratives are comedies of manners, black comedy but comedy nonetheless. His genius stems from the ironic nuance of the reciprocal voices on display, the interaction of their dialogue being vital. Unlike Greene, the plots of his novels are essentially secondary, framing devices against which the characters can “flourish”, were that not so inappropriate a word for the languishing on display. These are characters whose inner lives are implied rather than explored, conveyed in shadow.

What they did have in common was an intense sense of inner desolation, an acidic looking within, and it was their Catholicism that both mirrored and embodied this. Read any novel by either author, and whichever of the myriad delights you my obtain from the experience, the lasting impression, the “aftertaste”, is a subtle yet distinct despair, an existential dislocation obtained via osmosis from the central characters. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance,” declares Greene, with Waugh in full agreement.

In the past a Catholic in Britain was, by definition, an outsider. Even today, Britain is officially a Protestant nation with a Protestant monarch, an identity forged in the fire of adversity to the Romanist other. These atavistic rivalries may have dwindled and mean little to the majority of people in the UK today, but in the 30s the rifts were still raw. It wasn’t too long before then that suspicion toward Catholics was much like that shown towards Muslims today. Worse in fact, with official sanctions barring the “other” from office, and from voting. Most Catholics in the country are there by the apparent virtue of the Faith being handed down. In the main they come from immigrant backgrounds, chiefly from the Irish diaspora of the past two centuries. A disenfranchised, working class tribe, greatly over-represented in the industrial north of England, and in Scotland (this before we even begin to touch on Northern Ireland.) None of this, however, applied to either Greene and Waugh, bourgeois, upper middle purebred English southerners both. They were Catholics by choice, by their own conversion. Outsiders by choice too.

Both seemed to want a Faith which underlined and justified the constant sense of separation they had always felt towards their peers. They also seemed to want to find as stark and unforgiving a theology to identify themselves with as possible. Greene converted to the Faith in 1926 at the age of 22, following a lonely and troubled youth savagely punctuated by suicide attempts. Suffering what is now termed bipolar disorder, Greene spent his whole life engaged in extremes of behaviour, not least in his prodigious sexual incontinence and proclivities. Greene stated he became a Catholic as something to “measure his evil against”. In later years he adulterously fucked behind Italian altars for the thrill. There must be a suspicion Greene was playing with the Faith for his own sense of internal drama, much like Dali, whose use of the religion was a prop to adorn his art with ever more outlandishly theological accoutrements. Catholicism is after all, a religion of the picturesquely ornate, of the dramatic. The stained glass and incense filled churches, the arcane blood and flesh fuelled doctrines of transubstantiation, the unflinchingly Manichean morality, the sheer ancient grim majesty of it all. This is truly the religion of the drama queen. You don’t get that with Methodism. For all this though, Greene was not merely playing with some theological dressing up box. There can be no doubting the sincerity of his conversion. His private letters show his Faith was central to his life.

In both life and literature however, Greene was a poor advertisement for the familiar argument of religion being a solace in life, the “heart in a heartless world”. Two of his most celebrated central characters, the colonial administrator Scobie inThe Heart of the Matter, and the nameless whiskey priest of The Power and the Glory, are hopeless, tired and desperate shadows of men, whose Faith only serves to make them spiritual as well as emotional wrecks. Both live daily with the knowledge their actions, be they treacherous or adulterous, are condemning them, with absolute certainty, to eternal damnation. These are not truly bad men, but by the standards of their own Faith they are beyond redemption, sealing their own personal tragedies. Then on the other hand, we have Pinkie, the psychopathic young gangster of Brighton Rock. Here is a truly bad man, and one whose certainty of his own damnation only serves to spur him on to ever greater evil. “He was damned already and there was nothing more to fear ever again.” In each case, the religion makes for a wonderfully powerful and evocative component of the novels, a character in itself, more than that even. Wonderful for the reader. But wonderful for Greene himself? Noel Coward met Greene when they both prowled in the same Hollywood circles, touting their works for adaptation on the silver screen. He came to remark on Greene’s “strange, tortured mind”. Whether his Faith served to salve or further inflame the wounds of this torture is open to conjecture.

Waugh’s conversion was more clearly that of a man desperate to retreat into a mythical past. This was after all the man who proclaimed “the trouble with the Conservative Party is it has not turned back the clock one second.” There was a spate of conversions to the Faith in the 30s of men from the upper-middle-class, men trying to find a mooring, a sense of backward-looking solidity in a traumatic age. Once more however, there is something far deeper, and steeped in an ambivalence.

Waugh came to prominence as a novelist in 1928 with Decline and Fall, two years before his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Famous and feted at the age of 25, Waugh continued with the drunken hedonism he had begun in his Oxford years. He was indeed one of the feckless “bright young things” he wrote about. His growing horror at the spiritual emptiness he saw in this gadddabout life was what spurred him into the arms of the Church, which he saw as the most Eternal of institutions, a haven amongst the creeping chaos.

In the views of Waugh, we see in sharp relief the antagonism between the heart of Conservatism, and the capitalism that it defends. Margaret Thatcher herself for instance, would have been personally shocked and repulsed if she spent any great time in the company of her shock troops, the coked up young yuppies of the 80s, as they lined it up on the toilet tops. Waugh’s contempt for the fly by night shallowness of the young rich sat ill at ease with his support for of the Tory Party without which their lives of philistine luxury would be unsustainable. Hence his impotent railing against clocks going forward. The real establishment of England was once Catholic of course, back in the 15^th century, an age so long ago as to have lost all contemporary meaning. His Catholicism therefore was a very real sense of clinging to a past so elusive as to be non-existent, grasping at a phantasm.

In his novels, the Faith emerges as the still at the centre, the calm amongst the inferno. This can be seen most clearly in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s agnostism is set against the Faith of the Marchmain family, or in The Sword of Honour triliogy, wherein the aristocratic Crouchback’s represent even more clearly the valiant rearguard action of the Church, and indeed old England itself, against all the forces of modernity. In other novels the Faith’s talismanic status is subtler. Tony Last, the cuckolded husband in A Handful of Dust, is presented as belonging to the past, underlined by his church attendance, however vague minded that may be. His humiliation by non churchgoing wife Brenda and the vulgar ( key word ) social climber John Beaver shows once more the clash between the (virtuous) old and the (degenerate) new. It is a mythological battle between Old England, the rural, certainty, tradition and social cohesion, against the New World, the urban, capitalism, dynamism, change, hedonism, class conflict and progress. In Sword of Honour, Waugh sees Guy Crouchback, when he still thinks he is fighting against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany both, claims “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

It’s an internal battle the Right will never resolve. That Catholicism is no longer the religion of the “establishment” serves Waugh well. As he sees the massed ranks of modernity triumph, as he surely knows they will, he can psychologically cast himself in the role of the king over the water, exiled valiant victim and patrician overseer simultaneously. Such was the source of both his art, and the bilious, bitter anger that never left him.

In Britain we have the paradox that Catholicism – in the wider world so very often the creed of the oppressor over the centuries – is the religion of the persecuted underdog. This has led to the most bizarre and schizophrenic political allegiances and alliances. In 30s Lancashire, unemployed Communist marchers would doff their caps when passing Catholic churches, at the same time as senior clerics were backing Franco. Orwell wrote of visiting workers’ houses with “the crucifix on the wall, and the Daily Worker on the table”. There has never been a shortage of left-wing British writers of Catholic background, but seems fair to say this has usually stemmed from their “outsider” nature, their working class and/or Irish background, rather than the religion itself. With Anthony Burgess – in later life a bitter rival of Greene’s – we have a descendant of the Irish diaspora, his childhood in Manchester’s Moss Side influenced the Left perspective of his early writing, his Catholicism informing his later conservative slant.

The upper and middle-class converts to the Faith of the 30s however, were far more often doing so for reasons which became reactionary by default, even if that was not the initial intention. In this sense Waugh was the more typical figure. In 1937, when Nancy Cunard sent a survey to leading novelists of the UK asking which side they took in the Spanish Civil war, Waugh was one of the tiny minority who declared their support for the Falange. A minority view among authors, but not among the kind of dyspeptic saloon bar Tory he came more and more to exemplify and signify as both his age and drinking increased. The Blimpish caricature he succumbed to by the end was probably an extreme rather than a typical example however, and by a sublime irony was mirrored in the similar decline into self-parody of Kingsley Amis a generation later, a writer Waugh lambasted as “lower-middle-class scum” at the beginning of the latter’s career.

Amongst the 30s converts, the Left-radicalism of Greene therefore must be seen as a great exception. Once again though, the tale is more complicated. Greene started out on the Right. Along with many youths of his class, he acted as a strike-breaker during the 1926 General Strike. After his conversion, he wrote for the right-wing Spectator magazine and took the side of the put-upon Mexican clergy following the revolution in that country. His earlier novels contained numerous mildly anti-Semitic asides (excised on republishing at his behest.) In many ways therefore, he seemed destined to trudge down a classic Conservative path.

But Greene was one of those converts, a minority amongst the Blimps of his class, who heard the message of social justice ring louder than that of defence of hierarchical tradition in the call of the Faith. Greene’s vision of Catholicism stirred him to side with the downtrodden in the world, and for him that meant the Left. He became an intractable and articulate foe of US imperialism, especially of its machinations in Southern and Central America. In 1955 he wrote The Quiet American, a novel which was to become a classic anti-imperialist parable. In later years he was to meet and correspond with Fidel Castro, and while still critical of the curtailing of religious and intellectual freedom in the country, strongly supported Cuba’s struggle against US hegemony.

In Latin America of course, the populace shared his Faith, yet he was conscious that the dominant reactionary elements within Catholicism had no interest at all in his anti-imperialist vision. When therefore, in the 80s a new strain of Faith within the region came to prominence which shared his vision, he could scarcely contain his intellectual glee. Liberation Theology combined the apparently antagonistic Catholicism and socialism which had both so inspired Greene, uniting against the US backed juntas of the subcontinent. Oscar Romero in Salvador and Evaristo Arns in Brazil were just two of many to speak out the US sponsored repression and poverty which racked their nations. Greene came to personally befriend another such Liberation priest, Leopoldo Duran.

That such movements were to fail, crushed by the Washington backed strong-men, Oscar Romero assassinated – Greene, eternal pessimist as he was, no doubt anticipated. That they failed to receive the backing of the Vatican, that indeed that they were explicitly denounced by them, he may have found harder to reconcile. Perhaps this contributed to the weary irony of his statement to interviewer John Cornwell in 1989, that he was now a “Catholic agnostic”.

Had he lived to see it however, he may well have been heartened to see the success of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, a new generation of leaders combining socialism with their Catholicism. The latest success of the left-leaning bishop Fernando Lugo becoming president in Paraguay would no doubt of gladdened him most of all. Who could doubt he would have seen some vindication here, and an answer both to the Catholic hierarchy who saw in the Left its great nemesis, and those on the Left who argued that believers could only ever be reactionary. Waugh, meanwhile, would have spun once more in his grave, a tomb already doubtless given to much rapid rotation.

Greene and Waugh may have had diametrically opposed positions in their politics from their own interpretations of the Faith. But, transcending politics, what both seemed to take from the Faith in their writing was a sense of the complete fragility and frailty of the human condition, the essential unworthiness of people gained from Original Sin. In Greene this seemed to inspire a sense of poetic heroism amidst inevitable failure and desperation, in Waugh a very real contempt not just for humanity as a whole in the abstract, but for all human beings individually. That sense of the tragic which under-writes and illuminates the drama in the one, the sharp satire in the other, a sense of the comedic and the sublime in both. It also served to solidify the bond which grew between the two. Melancholic heavy drinkers, red eyes unsatisfied, tilting at the cold Protestant world from different angles. For all their myriad differences, the two became firm friends, and remained so until Waugh’s death in 1966.

Larkin claimed “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth”.

With Greene and Waugh, the inspiration, the framework, the habitat, spark and realm of their work was neither harsh mental state nor delicate flower. Catholicism was the muse for them both. As a very lapsed member of the Faith myself, and distinctly sceptical as to any positive influence it may lend to the modern age, I can at least offer it gratitude for giving the work of both to the world.