What the spotlight hides: Israel, Gaza and the wars we don’t see

Another war

It was one of the swiftest military reversals of the twenty-first century. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh had been a point of often violent contention between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Its population was mostly ethnic Armenians, yet it lay inside Azerbaijan surrounded by areas with Azeri majorities. The two nations had fought wars over the area from 1988 to 1994, briefly in 2016, and then again in 2020, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. An Azerbaijani blockade then pushed the region to the brink of famine.

Surprisingly, given that it was such a long-running conflict, its end was very rapid. The Azerbaijani offensive that began on the 19^th September 2023 was so crushingly successful that by the 20^th September, Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh were routed and the Armenian led regional government had dissolved itself.

What followed was a humanitarian catastrophe. Fearing a pogrom, virtually all the Armenians in the region, some 100,000 people, hastily crammed all the possessions they could into their cars and drove to Armenia. A community with routes in the area stretching back before the time of Christ was suddenly caste out. This Armenian Nakba was made all the more bitter because the system of international humanitarian law designed to prevent this kind of thing arguably has its origins in a 1915 genocide directed against Armenians.

However, neither this historical baggage, nor the scale of the suffering, nor the way that the war impinged on significant powers like Turkey or Armenia seemed to bring it much attention in the UK. Indeed, I spent time trying to make a graph on Google Trends to illustrate how little covered it was. The problem is that when you compare the line to almost anything else Britons might search for, the line showing searches related to Nagorno-Karabakh are indistinguishable from the x-axis.

I can’t really take the moral high ground here. At the time, I thought “that’s a shame” and didn’t think about it any further. Which to be fair is about all the international community managed. Turkey is an important ally of Azerbaijan and acting against Azerbaijan would have led to tension with Ankara. Given that the US and EU want Turkish co-operation with everything from getting grain out of Ukraine to stopping refugees reaching Europe, that wasn’t going to happen. While, Moscow had appointed itself as the guardian of the Armenians, it was too consumed fighting a war it justified as preventing an entirely made up genocide of Russians in Ukraine to do anything about the very real ethnic cleansing of Armenians. Hence, the speed of Azerbaijan’s victory was matched only by the inertia of the international response.

Hence, the already minimal coverage faded fast and I didn’t think much about it until a friend posted an Instagram story about the war in the Gaza. “We cannot be silent during a genocide” they stridently proclaimed. Funny, I thought. I’m almost positive you managed it back in September.[1]

On spotlights

One of the few books I’ve ever read that manages to be truly counterintuitive and convincing at the same time is Against Empathyby Canadian psychologist Paul Bloom. Though empathy is often viewed as an uncomplicated positive. Bloom argues it is not a straightforward booster of human connection. Instead it actually functions like a spotlight: what falls within its circle is illuminated, vivid and obvious. Outside of it though, things (and even people) are obscured, sometimes practically invisible. Indeed, if the spotlight falls on one group of people but not another, it can actually help us justify cruelty by the latter against the former.

The war in Gaza has put the question of empathetic spotlights back on my mind. Within the UK, there are large vocal contingents of people supporting either Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ or the ‘liberation’ of Palestine. They seem to disagree on virtually everything. However, they share a conviction that we as Britons must pay attention to what is happening in the Israel-Gaza conflict.

On one level, this is not only understandable, but obvious. The suffering of Israeli civilians in the massacres on October 7^th was genuinely horrific. Then in the military action that followed Gazan civilians have faced death, destruction and deprivation on even larger scale. It’s natural to desperately want this to stop. It would be inhuman not to wish this war was over.

But why this war? Why do the other wars happening in the world – Wikipedia’s entry on “ongoing armed conflicts” lists 21 – not merit the same attention? Many have higher casualty counts and have involved even more widespread atrocities than the Israel-Gaza war. Yet as we shall see, we simply do not engage to the same extent.

Now you may have reasonable question: even if the amount of attention and concern we give to Israel-Gaza is in some sense an outlier relative to other conflicts, is that actually a problem? After all, isn’t it better to care about something rather than nothing? That’s often true but a singular focus can be harmful.

Here I think Bloom’s warning is worth heading. If we shine our empathetic spotlight too brightly on Israel, Palestine, or Israel-Palestine, there’s a real danger that the rest of the world, or at least certain parts of it disappear. That can lead us to decisions that are irrational or even outright destructive. Sadly, I think the way we are talking about foreign policy within the UK at the moment is demonstrating why this is the case.

The wars we don’t see

Researchers at Ghent University suggest that as many as 600,000 people may have died in a civil war in Ethiopia fought mainly between the Ethiopian and Eritrean government on the one hand and the regional Tigrayan Defence Force on the other. A joint report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found that “new administrators in the Western Tigray zone, as well as regional officials and security forces from Ethiopia’s Amhara region, are responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing, carried out through crimes against humanity and war crimes, targeting Tigrayan civilians in Western Tigray since the war began in November 2020 … [This included the use of] murder, torture, forcible transfer, rape, sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearances, widespread pillage, imprisonment, possible extermination, and other inhumane acts as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population.”

If we shift our attention to Myanmar, we see repeated, extreme campaigns of extreme violence by the countries military authorities and their allies. The people most severely affected by this are the Rohingya, members of a Muslim ethnic minority mostly residing in the state of Rakhine. Or rather previously mostly residing in Rakhine. Throughout 2015, 2016 and 2017 the military systematically burnt them from their villages. Tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands fled. Such was the extent of this ethnic cleansing that the majority of the Rohingya now live not in Myanmar but as refugees in Bangladesh.

However, the Burmese military’s violence is not limited to the Rohingya. It has been at war with some of Myanmar’s other ethnic minorities for decades. Indeed, the war between the Burmese state and the Karen guerillas may be the longest running conflict in the world, stretching back beyond the origins of the current Burmese state to a proxy fight during World War II between British and Japanese backed forces. The ethnic majority Bamar have not been spared either. In 2021, the military staged a coup against the democratically elected government led by Aung Sung Suu Kyi. This plunged the entire country into a state of war. The anti-junta rebels having little outside support and are in many cases armed only with homemade weapons, whereas Russia and China have armed the junta with combat drones, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets that are used to attack amongst other targets schools and hospitals. Despite this the rebels have been gaining territory and the fall of the junta appears a real possibility.

We might also note the disturbing fact that there has recently been an upsurge in fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the site of what may well have been the deadliest conflicts since World War II.

What’s happened in Xinjiang, a region in north-west China bordering Russia and Afghanistan,  doesn’t count as a war. It’s too one sided for that. Nonetheless, the “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” directed by the Chinese regime against the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority largely residing in the western province of Xinjiang, is considered by some observers to represent genocide. Its stated aim is to root out terrorism and extremism, but it has systematically victimised Uyghurs for their religion, language and cultural practices. As Human Right Watch recorded, over a million Uyghurs were forced into “vocational training centres” that functioned as concentration camps, where inmates, including young children, were separated from their families, forced to perform forced labour, in cramped conditions, subjected to frequent beatings for offences including speaking the Uyghur language. In order to avoid being sent to camps, Uyghurs are forced to disown their culture and Islam. For example, civil servants of Uyghur origin have reportedly been forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Many women were apparently forced to make a choice between being sent to the camps and being sterilised. Meanwhile mosques and other traditional Turkic buildings have been raised to the ground. Xinjiang is subjected to some of the most intense surveillance and control of anywhere on earth. Uyghurs are subjected to a level of political indoctrination and control by local party cadres more reminiscent of the Mao era than post-reform China. They are prevented from travelling. Uyghurs abroad who speak out find their relatives in China harassed or even arrested. In a genuinely Orwellian development, areas with large Uyghur populations have been blanketed with video surveillance systems including some equipped with facial recognition and  automatically racially profile Uyghurs. Though Gaza is often described as the ‘world’s largest open-air prison’, Xinjiang, which covers an area larger than South Africa, must surely hold that grim title.

What we focus on

As we can see the Israel-Palestianian conflict is, sadly, very far from unique. But is almost unique in the attention we in the UK give to it. Since October 7, events from the Middle East have regularly led news bulletins and featured on newspaper front pages. There have been massive protests in support of the Palestinians in London and much smaller but still sizeable demonstrations with apparently pro-Israeli messages. Data from Google Trends also suggests that Britons search for terms related to the Israel-Gaza war far more than any of the other conflicts we’ve discussed.

Now in the interests of fairness, I should acknowledge that since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, it has probably resulted in more casualties per day than any other conflict. Therefore, there’s some argument for saying at this particular moment, a particular focus on Gaza is justified. However, that’s only a very partial explanation. The much higher daily death tolls in Ethiopia when that war was at its height didn’t yield Israel-Gaza level coverage. And it’s not like the somewhat higher daily death tolls in Gaza than say Sudan or Myanmar have been yielding only somewhat higher attention in the UK. It’s a whole different order of magnitude.

Perhaps even more notable than the mismatch in the attention on the conflicts themselves is the unique way that, as Jeremiah Johnson of Infinite Scroll describes from an American perspective, discussion of the war in Gaza swallows “virtually everything around it, and become a sort of ur-discourse, a controversy-swallowing force into which all other topics will be subsumed.” He notes how controversy over the war rapidly transmuted into fights over free speech on campuses, positive discrimination, and even academic plagiarism. We saw something similar in the UK, where the issue at hand transmogrified into a proxy fight over the Metropolitan Police’s attitude to policing protests.

I’m not sure if it’s a cause or a consequence, but if one is politically engaged, one’s stance on Israel-Palestine seems to become deeply connected to your broader political identity. This is most obvious in Belfast, where unionist and nationalist neighbourhoods will identify themselves as such, in part, by flying either the Israeli or Palestinian flag. This is extreme, as many things in Northern Irish politics are, but honestly the rest of the UK does it. If you tell me a Brit’s views on the Gaza War I’ll have a good bash at guessing what they think about taxes, small boats, or nationalising utilities. However, the same correlation just wouldn’t exist say the civil wars in Ethiopia and Myanmar. Even a heavy news consumer would be unlikely to have a firm views. And if they did they wouldn’t necessarily reveal their broader political tribe. And yet when it comes to Israel-Palestine, the correlation is not only there it’s apparently growing. For example, the previously strong “Arabist” tendency within the Conservative Party is basically marginal and even rarer amongst more right-wing Tories.

Which to me begs the question: why?

I know that a lot of the people who read this blog, who are predominantly people I also know offline, are deeply engaged with the Gaza war and disturbed by what we have seen. And frankly, I mostly don’t see the same investment from my friends directed at other conflicts.

I don’t believe they believe that the suffering of an Ethiopian, Armenian or Burmese person is less significant than that of an Israeli or a Palestinian. Yet they don’t march for those countries or people, nor do they reshare multiple social media posts a day related to those conflicts, and they certainly don’t judge British politicians in large measure by the stances they take on them. It’s only Israel-Palestine that gets spotlighted in this way.

I don’t understand this apparent imbalance. Yet there’s is clearly the majority position and I am not someone who enjoys taking contrarian positions. If most people disagree with me, that does raise for me the genuine question of whether they appreciate something I don’t.

So, if you are someone who is invested in a particular position on the Israeli-Palestinian question and have been prioritising it for your attention. I’d really appreciate it if you could share with me some of your thinking: What’s your motivation? Is it a conscious choice or something more instinctive? Do you feel conflicted about it or is it something you’re at peace with?

A lot of caveats

• The Russian invasion of Ukraine is an obvious exception to a lot of what I’ve written. I’ll get to that in a second.
• I am a British person in Britain writing primarily for other Brits. If you are in Israel, Palestine or a neighbouring country, or you have family or friends who do, or if you are from that region, or operate in a professional or official capacity focused on the middle east, then I recognise that your situation is different and I’m not really asking this question of you.
• I am absolutely not trying to invalidate your concern, nay your horror, at the situation. The situation is horrific. Many, many people have died, often in horrible ways, and absent an end to the fighting that seems likely to continue. As we’ll come to later in the post, I think there are risks on focusing some much on Israel-Gaza. But I obviously don’t think your concern reflects badly on you and would not want you to feel I’m suggesting that.
• Nor am I judging you if you do focus your attention on particular conflicts rather than others. As you’ll see I think there can be good reasons to do so. It’s more that, to the extent I have a normative argument, it’s that I think one ought to be intentional about how one directs one attention. Though even by that standard I’m far from perfect. You’ll notice how short the sections on the Congo and Ethiopia have been and how little of my own writing I used. That reflects the fact that my own knowledge of those conflicts is not what it should be.
• I’m specifically avoiding expressing a particular view on the merits of the Israeli military action in Gaza here. I’m sure most of you will be smart enough to read between the lines and deduce where I stand if you wish. But I have concerns about spotlighting either support for Israel or Palestine and I want to address both of them. That said because pro-Palestinian views are more common in my social circle. Therefore, my emphasis is tilted more towards addressing those set of arguments.
• As a result of that you will notice that the sections on spotlighting the Palestinian cause are somewhat anecdotal. A lot of the arguments I’m grappling with are ones I’ve personally encountered through conversations, group chats, or friend’s social media. Therefore, I’ll often be telling you what I remember rather than linking to where you can find an argument for yourself. Again, I’m asking you to trust me as a broadly reliable witness. However, if you think you were the one who expressed or shared something and I’ve not remembered it correctly, please feel free to get in touch and I’ll see about a clarification.

But what about Ukraine?

As I mentioned, there clearly there is an ongoing conflict which has drawn at least as much attention in the UK as that in Gaza: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nonetheless, I don’t think this invalidates the point about a disproportionate amount of focus being given to Israel-Gaza.

For starters, the scale of the Russo-Ukrainian war is much greater. Ukraine’s population is twenty times greater than Gaza’s. Even combined, Israel and the Occupied Territories have fewer residents than the city of Moscow alone. These are countries able to support large and highly armed militaries and for two years they’ve been pummelling each other. As one might expect this has made for truly shocking death tolls. The fatality estimates for both conflicts vary widely, it does seem fairly clear that many more people have been killed in fighting between Ukraine and Russia than Israel and Hamas. Indeed, it seems a grim possibility that the Russian invasion has claimed more lives in the past two years than the entire history of the Israel-Palestine conflict stretching back to 1948.

I would also submit that it matters that the aggressor in the Russo-Ukrainian war is a global superpower with a permanent seat on the UN security council and the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

We could also note, given the focus on the accusations that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide, the much stronger case that Putin’s regime is not only to trying to eliminate the Ukrainian state but also the Ukrainian identity of its citizens. This could see them physically eliminated, for example in the massacres at Bucha, or intentionally alienated from their culture. The latter is not as systematic as the Chinese government’s efforts in Xinjiang. Nonetheless, historic Ukrainian artefacts and memorials have been looted or destroyed, schools in occupied territory now teach the Russian school curriculum and students are punished for speaking Ukrainian. Perhaps most disturbingly, Ukrainian children have been abducted from their families, so they can be raised in Russia as Russians.

A point I’d make but more tentatively than the previous ones is that it’s clearer what Britain can do with regards to Ukraine. The provision of British weaponry – anti-tank NLAWs, Storm Shadow cruise missiles, and Challenger tanks – have been important both in their direct impact on the battlefield and in catalysing other NATO countries to share their arsenals with Ukraine. There are conflicts where, by contrast, there are few tangible steps we can take to improve the situation. Given China’s power, it is pretty insulated from anything the UK might do to try to discourage the abuse of the Uyghurs. There are also situations like the civil war in Sudan where you have to contend with none of the belligerents sharing British values, all of them having committed war crimes, and none of them trusting the UK. In that case, our realistic options are limited. I’m not sure which category the Gaza war fits into. There was a time when Britain was the main power in the Middle East. We occupied and administered Palestine for an extended period of time when we held the League of Nations mandate over it following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. But those days are long gone. I’d be curious what the case is that the UK has tools to meaningfully change the behaviour of either the Israeli government or Hamas. Frankly, it’s not a good sign that this is not more discussed. It might be we have more influence than I think. But my suspicion is that we are now more or less an irrelevance.  

Strikingly, given all of this, the Israel-Gaza war, has since its start, mostly eclipsed coverage of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, as we can from the chart below neither the Ukrainian counteroffensive nor the attempted Wagner generated the kind of search interest that October 7^th and the Gaza war did.

It does seem that for all the focus on Ukraine, we are still less interested in Ukrainian lives than Israeli or Palestinian lives.

[Side note: I’m not sure it affects the argument at all but in case you’re curious about the big green spike, it seems to have been a surge in searches Ukraine confined to a single day, September 9^th. I’ll leave you to guess what about the day’s news triggered that flurry of interest.]

Turning the spotlight on Israel

For the purposes of this argument, a singular focus on the Israeli case is not defined by believing that Israel has a right to defend itself and that this justifies its current military action, which should be supported by international allies. Rather, it elevates the significance of the Israel’s right to defend itself above that of other states and gives it a special claim upon its allies support.

Now in all honesty, I was unsure whether to include a section on this. Though there are plenty of supporters of Israel’s actions in the UK, they tend to view it as part of a wider network of alliances. Nonetheless, it is instructive to see where this logic can lead. Therefore, let us look to the US, where politicians privileging of Israel as an ally is much more conspicuous.

Take House Speaker Mike Johnson as an example. He is vocal about supporting Israel and opposing Palestinian statehood. He’s appeared at a conference alongside speakers proclaiming: “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever.” Almost immediately after the October 7^th attacks, Johnson rallied his congressional caucus to pass a multi-billion dollar military aid package for Israel.

At the same time, Speaker Johnson has been using his party’s majority in the house of representatives to block passage of a new military aid package for Ukraine. Making it clear that he is willing to support aid to Ukraine not as a goal in its own right but as something that can be traded for his desired goal of greater spending on security along the US/Mexico border. For example, saying: “When you couple Ukraine and the border that makes sense to people … If we’re going to protect Ukraine’s border … we have to take care of our own border first.”

You will note the same logic is not applied to providing support for Israel. That is not made conditional on extracting other policy concessions. It makes sense to help Israel protect its borders, even if, in Speaker Johnson’s judgement, America’s borders are not properly defended. Indeed, virtually any criticism of the US aiding Ukraine could apply with equal or greater force to aiding Israel:

• It’s too costly: the US has given about $75 billion in support to Ukraine but $300 billion to Israel over the years.
• It carries a risk of escalation: We’ve had two years of Russia huffing and puffing combined with no willingness to directly challenge NATO. By contrast, aligning itself with Israel has now resulted in American soldiers killing and being killed by Iranian proxies.
• It’s taking too long: Ukraine has been fighting Russia or Russian backed forces since the Crimea in 2014. They may have failed to make a decisive breakthrough during last summer’s counteroffensive but since February 2020, Ukrainian forces have recaptured thousands of square miles of territory and driven the Russian navy out of the Black Sea. By contrast, Israeli has been locked into confrontation with the Palestinians since its foundation in 1948 with no obvious route to a sustainable peace.
• There’s democratic erosion: There has been a strange insistence from some US politicians that Ukraine cannot be considered a true democracy because President Zelensky refuses to defy the Ukrainian constitution’s ban on holding elections during wartime. By contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempt to exempt the government from all judicial checks and balances, to say nothing of the systematic deprivation of democratic rights of Arabs living in the Occupied Territories, have apparently not raised the same questions for Speaker Johnson and his allies about Israel’s democracy. 

It is also worth noting that everything Hamas visited on Israel on October 7^th has been inflicted on Ukrainians by the Russian military. We saw the horrific executions of civilians in Bucha, rockets have been fired at civilian targets over and over again, and Russian soldiers appear to be committing acts of sexual violence on a large scale.

While it is true Hamas is constitutionally committed to eliminating the Israeli state, it clearly lacks the wherewithal to do so. Israel is in no immediate danger of losing its military superiority over its enemies. By contrast, Russia very much does have the means to make good on its threat to attempt to swallow the Ukrainian nation. Outside aid is crucial to the maintenance of Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian democracy, and sparing Ukrainians from genocidal atrocities. In short, it seems clear that if a prioritisation has to be made in allocating military support, there is no rational basis for privileging Israel over Ukraine. Nonetheless, there is a significant political coalition, perhaps even a decisive one, that argues “Israel Now, Israel Tomorrow, Israel Forever”, whilst seeing Ukraine and Ukrainians as disposable.

The final irony is that it’s not even clear that prioritising Israel as an American ally necessarily helps Israel. The US’s withdrawal from its nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 was opposed by London, Paris and Berlin, but supported by Tel Aviv. The Netanyahu government hoped the reimposition of American financial sanctions would limit Tehran’s ability to sponsor militias around the region. Instead, it caused Iran to draw closer to Russia and China, whilst the regime’s proxy forces in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen grew stronger than ever. The Houthis in Yemen have shown they can effectively close the Red Sea and even military action by the US and UK cannot stop them. It has also successfully used repression to ride out a wave of domestic unrest over its treatment of women. All the while, the regime steps closer to building nuclear weapons. If you accept the premise that Tehran is a major threat to Israel then this is a disaster for Israeli security. And it could have been avoided if the US administration at the time had not ignored the views of its European allies in favour of that of the Israeli government.

Turning the spotlight on Palestine

Mirroring what I said above about a singular focus on Israel’s interests, a disproportionate focus on the Palestinian cause is not about believing in Palestinian statehood or wanting an immediate end to Israeli military action in Gaza. It occurs when instead of placing Palestinians in a category with Uyghurs, Rohingyas, Ukrainians, Papuans, Kashmiris, and Kurds, Palestinians become the exemplary case of oppression, of suffering, of the denial of statehood by a more powerful neighbour. I find that rhetorically, such oppressed peoples will often be grouped together. Yet the interest in the Palestinian cause will frequently overshadow the others. Huge protests can be mobilised to oppose the Israeli occupation and interest in the other causes often depends on the ability to connect them to the Palestinian cause. Concern with events in Gaza and the West Bank are taken to be mainstream concerns, whereas similar issues in other parts of the world are understood to be niche issues.

The first casualty of war

This has some pernicious effects. Witness the anger at the ‘mainstream media’ for ignoring Palestinian suffering and Israeli cruelty. For example, there was an online campaign scolding the BBC for not showing lawyers for the South African government making their case to the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide. In true BBC form, the corporation put out a statement patiently explaining that it had in fact covered both South Africa’s case and Israel’s response. But often the case is a simpler one, that scale of the death and destruction in Gaza is not reflected in the willingness of the BBC and other outlets to cover Palestinian pain. Respectfully to those who feel this way, this is a belief one can only maintain by being myopic. In relative terms, there is an ocean of coverage of Gaza, whilst media coverage of Ethiopia, Myanmar, the DRC, and Armenia barely fills a single bathtub.

If you consider all the ongoing conflicts we’ve already mentioned, the mainstream media seems to be elevating Gaza not burying it.   

The upshot of deciding that the “mainstream media” is broken and biased is to turn towards alternative sources. The best case scenario here, a broadcaster based in Qatar and partially funded by its Emir. More concerningly, every time I log into Instagram, I see friends liberally reposting content from random accounts with no institutional affiliation that pump out highly emotive material that has been verified only by their own confirmation bias: bloodied children, Israeli soldiers laughing at atrocities, and even the bizarre, wildly implausible claim that Israel was showing adverts promoting tourism in Gaza whilst Palestinians are being killed. A lot of these may be accurate, but at least some of it is bound to be toxic lies designed to pray on their empathy.

The sad irony for me is that a lot of the people who are indulging this stuff can so easily recognise it in others. They’d never fall for a story made up by Macedonian teenagers about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump or the confections of American culture warriors about schools installing litter boxes for children who identify as cats. Yet the conviction that Gaza is being ignored, fed by the sense that is the war rather than a war, is helping to prize them away from the epistemic guardrail provided by the likes of the BBC.

Seeing Red Sea

There’s also a real danger that spotlighting Palestine can lead those who do it to seeing the whole middle east in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather than the Israel-Palestine conflict in the context of the wider middle east.

Witness how in just 18 months, progressive opinion in the UK has gone from being, rightly, appalled that the World Cup was being held in Qatar despite it being ruled by an absolute monarchy that abused migrant labourers on a massive scale, criminalised same-sex relationships, and imprisoned journalists, to treating a broadcaster backed by the same monarchy as the most reliable source of news on the region, simply because its coverage is reliably critical of Israel.

Or alternatively, take perceptions of the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Though these are justified by the group in terms as an attempt to stop the war in Gaza, only a small minority of the ships targeted have had anything to do with Israel, let alone the Israeli military. The typical targets have been civilian cargo freighters and oil, many from the US or UK, but also from countries including Norway, Singapore and Switzerland. At the risk of the stating the obvious, these civilian vessels have civilian crews, who are predominantly working-class people from the Global South. For example, at the point the tanker Central Park was targeted with a ballistic missile, its crew included Bulgarian, Georgian, Indian, Filipino, Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese sailors. Plus, by essentially closing the Suez Canal and disrupting global shipping, the attacks will impact the livelihoods of people everywhere. In light of this it should be pretty clear that these are not valid military targets. Launching missiles at a British civilian shipping is not only an act of war against the UK, but a war crime.

Despite all this, some of those who identify themselves as peace activists and opponents of the Israeli attacks on civilian targets in Gaza take a surprisingly indulgent attitudes to the Houthis own military activities against civilians. One friend reshared a video of a contributor on an American current affairs discussion show dunking on her fellow panellists, who expressed alarm at the Houthis strikes by mockingly reducing their position to concern that their “Amazon parcels might be delayed”. Multiple friends shared the same clip of Stop the War founder and former Corbyn advisor Andrew Murray depreciating the British and American government for caring about the Houthi attacks whilst the death toll in Gaza rose. The fact that none of the Houthis’ strikes have killed anyone so far became evidence of the movement’s humanity and compassion rather than a reflection of a massive effort by the British and American navies to shoot down their missiles and drones before they could hit their targets, to say nothing of most shipping just avoiding the region. It’s definitely a minority position but there have also been some Britons going further and praising the missile attacks as acts of solidarity with the Palestinians. This reflects a topsy turvy string of moral reasoning: a willingness to downplay or even condone the targeting of civilians in a manner liable to spread the war in Gaza because those doing so justified it in terms of stopping that war.

I would suggest that it was easier for many to fall into this fallacy because Yemen had been out of their spotlight and only entered it because they did something linked to the Palestinians. The Houthi military’s conduct during Yemen’s civil war was despicable. They attacked civilian targets including schools and hospitals, recruited thousands of child soldiers, and not only cutting off the water to a city of half a million people but planted landmines around the facilities necessary to restore it. We can debate whether it was more despicable than what their opponents did. Nonetheless, not recognising the Houthi track record of war crimes, made it more difficult to recognise the Red Sea as the latest example of it.

Indeed, the wider our framing, the harder it is to kid ourselves that the Houthi leadership has any general interest in the wellbeing of oppressed Muslims. Despite the genocide of the Uyghurs, the Houthi movement has offered guarantees of safe passage to Chinese vessels going through the Red Sea and the proportion of Chinese-affiliated shipping going through the Suez Canal has risen from 13% to 28%. More fundamentally, the movement forms part of the Iranian sponsored “axis of resistance” that also encompasses the Syrian government, Hamas, Hizballah and various Shia militias in Iraq. The axis has its routes not in a desire to defend Palestinians but Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. He, of course, did so in the bloodiest fashion possible: choosing to burn Syria rather than let anyone else have it. Whole cities, notably Aleppo, were destroyed. His security services tortured people on a huge scale. At one point, the majority of Syrians were refugees. Tehran responded to this by sending thousands of its own soldiers and even more fighters from its militia allies to participate in this carnage. None of this has prevented the Houthis from taking extensive support from the Iranians.

Bad intentions

Indeed, one of the problems that viewing the Palestinians as the world’s primary oppressed people in need of liberation, and by extension Israelis as the world’s primary oppressors, is that it renders all other oppression secondary. Which is rather useful for the world’s most egregious autocrats, human rights violators and aggressors. If you spotlight Palestinian suffering, then you can look at the support for Israel from the US and other Western democracies and conclude they are the ones sponsoring oppression.

This isn’t theoretical. Iran, Russia, and China have been using their state media apparatuses to spread disinformation about Gaza in attempt not only to discredit Israel, but by extension the US and other western democracies.

If you are angry with the British, American or European governments over Gaza, then I’m not going to deny the legitimacy of your grounds to be. But we should be under no illusions that this does not make Beijing, Moscow or Tehran the good guys in the Middle East or even moral equivalents.

As I’ve said less about it so far, let me turn to Russia’s behaviour in the region. As well as using the Wagner Group to help prop up the Assad regime, its air force carried out airstrikes on rebel held territory which may have resulted in 20,000+ civilian casualties. It also prolonged Libya’s civil war in an apparent attempt to remove a competitor in the European natural gas market. Middle Eastern and North African countries were also some of the largest exporters of Ukrainian grains, so suffered some of the worst increases in hunger and poverty when the Russian invasion disrupted these supply chains.

It’s hard to tell how many people in Britain can’t see through the use of the Palestinian cause to present autocrats as occupying the moral high ground. Probably not many. But there are definitely some. Witness the bizarre spectacle of the University and Colleges Union passing a motion calling for the UK to stop arming Ukraine. It cited some comments by President Zelensky about wishing Ukraine could have the kind of security guarantees from the US Israel has to argue that “Volodymyr Zelensky says he wants Ukraine to become a ‘big Israel’—an armed, illiberal outpost of US imperialism”.

Ukraine is 2,000 miles from Israel. Neither country is a belligerent in the other’s war. Ukraine does not occupy the territory of another nation – quite the opposite in fact. The two governments have a somewhat acrimonious relationship and Tel Aviv seems to be prioritising staying on good terms with Moscow. Yet somehow some Brits seem unable to look at the situation in the Ukraine without imagining Israel has cast a shadow over it. This isn’t just spotlighting. It’s a dangerous obsession.

Turning the spotlight on the war as whole

I also think there are problems that arise from people in the UK spotlighting the Israel-Gaza war, that don’t depend on the side they sympathise with:

1. If your goal is to actively campaign for a change in UK government policy that may make matters better, then focusing on the Gaza war will put you up against the law of diminishing marginal returns. For example, if your MP has received dozens of letters this week on Israel-Gaza, then one more from you will make a lot less of an impact on them than what’s likely to be the first and only letter they’ve had this month on Myanmar, Ethiopia or Armenia.

• The Gaza war preceded a troubling increase in hate crimes in the UK. These have targeted both the Jewish and Muslim communities. To be clear, even if the Israel-Palestine conflict was the only conflict in the world, holding British Jews or British Muslims responsible for it would still be objectionable and stupid. However, if we can keep in mind that there are many different conflicts in the world and that the ethnicity or faith we associate with the oppressors in one, we may associate with the victim in another, then that seems like a check on the kind of bigotry that leads to people throwing petrol cans at mosques or driving up to a synagogue so they can shout “Kill Jews” at worshippers.

• The strange interdependence of our views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and our domestic political divisions, can ironically mean that the more we talk about this conflict, the more we’re really talking about ourselves. If the conflict just becomes another vector through which to argue with other British people about the policing of protests, the leadership of the Labour Party or free speech at universities, then that’s not helping anyone in Israel or Gaza. Disentangling the war from our own political identities, might help us focus on solutions rather than on “owning” our domestic political opponents.

• The depressing reality is that after decades of the world getting more peaceful, war is becoming more common and bloody. 2022 saw the most deaths in armed conflict in a single year since 1994 and the most different armed conflicts since 1945. You will note that this trend predates the outbreak of the War in Gaza in 2023. It’s not a matter of the moral failings of either the Israelis or Palestinians, but of something global having changed. If we do not understand what that is, we are going to be at a substantial disadvantage in reversing it.

The answers I don’t think are right

I have put my question about the spotlight on the war in Gaza to several people. I got a range of answers. I think all of them have some truth to them but even taken together they fall short of a convincing explanation:

1. Racism: This would seem like an obvious, yet unpleasant, reason why we may be less troubled by deaths in Ethiopia or the DRC than Israel or Palestine. Yet I don’t think it can only be this. We seemed perfectly capable of ignoring the ethnic cleansing of a group of White Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

• Kinship: I’ve also heard it suggested that of course there’s disproportionate interest in Israel and Palestine because the UK’s Jewish and Muslim communities feel a pull towards solidarity with their co-religionists. This doesn’t feel all that convincing. Only 0.5% of the British public is Jewish, yet clearly support for Israel goes much wider than that. At the same time, it does seem that even amongst British Muslims, concern for the plight of Palestinians outstrips that for other predominantly Muslim peoples such at the Rohingya.

• Antisemitism: Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, and it clearly is a magnet for this kind of prejudice. Yet I know plenty of people who’ve marched for Palestine, who I’m sure are not antisemitic.

• Religion: The fact that Israel and Palestine cover what’s often known as “the Holy Land” clearly motivates some to imbue it with special, even apocalyptic significance. Yet many people who are deeply invested in the war are not religious at all. And if you are and you think, your faith commands you to determine the significance of a war not by its effect on people but on land and archaeological sites, may I gently suggest something has gone wrong along the way.

• The threat of escalation: This is a very good reason to be paying attention to the conflict. As I write, America is carrying out airstrikes on members of the “axis of resistance” in response to a series of attacks on its forces, bringing the prospect of a war between America and Iran closer. That said many of the other conflicts, we’ve discussed have the potential to escalate as well. For example, it’s not too difficult to construct a scenario, where a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia brings their Russian and Turkish allies into a conflict. More fundamentally, when I look at people campaigning for Israel or Palestine, I don’t see worry about a theoretical future war, I see distress about the already existing war with its already happening suffering.

So, for me at least, this is still an open question.

To sum up

I appreciate I am asking you to trust that I am asking that question in good faith. Hopefully, the fact this is mostly addressed to people who know me IRL helps in that regard.

Granted, I have mostly articulated what I’m writing in the form of an argument. And that probably doesn’t help me come across as genuinely open minded. But that’s mostly because I find people often need convincing there’s even a question to answer here. I’m very open to being convinced that there is a good answer to that question. I just haven’t seen it yet.

I’m certainly, not suggesting you can’t give a particular conflict the bulk of your attention. As will probably be clear from this post, I have paid more attention and feel more strongly about the Russian invasion of Ukraine than I do about the other ongoing wars in the world today. What is more, I think I have good reason for that. I’m curious what yours might be regarding Israel and Gaza.

What I do want to push back against is us putting our collective attentional spotlight on Israel and Gaza and putting the world’s other conflicts into relative darkness without even considering why. We should not come to unthinkingly accept that the lives, homes and freedoms of Ethiopians, Congolese, Ukrainians, Burmese or Armenians are a less worthy of our concern than those of Israelis or Palestinians.

Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palestinian_Solidarity_Protesters_in_London_-3_-_High_Street_Kensington_(53255352534).jpg

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[1] I would not use the expression ‘genocide’ to describe the situation in either Gaza nor in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, if it applies in the former case then it transparently does in the later.

My top 5 TV shows of 2023

Obligatory preamble

As seems to be traditional by now, the caveats to all of this are:

• For the purpose of this list, a show counts as a 2023 show if the majority of a season was released in the UK this calendar year.
• I’m just a guy watching shows while eating dinner after work, not a professional critic. Hence, there are heaps of stuff that people rave about I’ve not seen.
• I am writing from my own perspective with my own taste. Hence because I can’t bear second-hand embarrassment, I haven’t managed to watch a full episode of Succession even though I’m sure everyone who says it’s amazing is right.
• I know it’s traditional to put out these kind of lists in December or the first week of January, but you know better late than never.

5. Ahsoka

It hasn’t been the best year for franchise shows on Disney+. Even the previously great Mandalorian had a deeply inconsistent third season and Secret Invasion was almost certainly the worst thing I saw in 2023. In the context, it was a relief to see Ahsoka not only doing something new with Star Wars, but doing it so satisfyingly.

At some level Star Wars has always been more of a fantasy fable in space than sci-fi. However, Ahsoka is the most fully the franchise has ever embraced this side of itself. Not only does the plot focus in on the most mystical parts of franchise’s lore, but the tone is almost Arthurian.

This wasn’t to everyone’s liking. The show’s supposedly slow pacing drew a fair amount of criticism. For me, though, that not only spoke to the character work being given space to breath, but it also fitted with the choice of sub-genre. Our heroes have been forced to go on a long voyage that not only takes them far from the bustle of traditional Star Wars settings like Mos Eisley or Coruscant, but also creates the room for them to contemplate, to remember, to evolve. It’s not edgy, sophisticated and grounded like Andor. Nor is it pulpy and propulsive like the Mandalorian. It’s meditative and otherworldly. Whilst still delivering the lightsabre battles and dogfights you want from Star Wars.

I also rather liked some of the new, or at least new to me, characters Ahsoka introduced. David Tennant is great fun voicing the latest in Star Wars’ lineage of sassy, put upon droids. However, the most memorable entrants are the two force wielding mercenaries, played by Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno and the sadly departed Ray Stevenson. They initially seem to fit the familiar franchise archetype of “Jedi fallen to the dark side” but it rapidly becomes apparent that they are a new kind of antagonist. Stevenson is positively magnetic giving a performance so multifaceted that it completely subverts Star Wars’ typical Manicheanism.

Where I would pick up the show, and the reason it isn’t higher on this list, is that the ending is frustratingly open to the point that it feels more like a mid-season break than a proper finale. That said, this complaint is rather mollified by the news that there is a second season on the way, which will presumably pay off this build up.

4. The Last of Us

Given that this is perhaps the most disturbing show I’ve seen all year, there is something paradoxically reassuring about the Last of Us. The story is taken from the game every gamer seems to agree has the best story. It was made for the Waitrose of TV stations by the showrunner of the superlative (and tonally apposite) Chernobyl. And it centres around two of the most impressive TV actors to have broken out in recent years. So, you knew it was going to be good.

I particularly appreciated how defiantly episodic it was. Though it has the production values of a film, it is very definitely not a ‘six-hour movie’. Each episode or pair of episodes tells a distinct, complex and satisfying story in its own right. This not only makes the plot progression feel more purposive as you’re watching, but more distinct sections of it linger in the memory afterwards.

3. Poker Face

If the Last of Us was the most dread inducing show of 2023, then Poker Face is the most unalloyed fun. Writer-director Rian Johnson brings the wit and brio that infused his Knives Out films to this Columbo homage. It features Natasha Lyonne as a drifter with a preternatural ability to sense lies.

Even more than the Last of Us, Poker Face is defiantly episodic. There is an overarching plot but the focus of each episode is on Lyonne’s character arriving in a new place, meeting the characters who call it home and unravelling a fresh murder mystery.

The line up of guest stars across the season is frankly ridiculous: Adrian Brody, Benjamin Bratt, Hong Chau, Chloë Sevigny, Ron Pearlman, Nick Nolte, Tim Blake Nelson, Stephanie Hsu, Charles Melton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Merritt Weaver to name just some of them.

Moreover, the show makes an interesting companion to Knives Out and Glass Onion in that the films take place in ritzy surroundings like a country manor or a private island, whereas the show favours settings with more dirt under their fingernails: casinos, motels, a barbeque shack, a petrol station etc. Hence, while these stories are not satirical in the way Knives Out is, they do start painting a portrait of America seen from close quarters. Most importantly, like the films they manage to be engrossing, smart and funny at the same time.

2. Murder at the End of the World

It’s been a big couple of months for prestigious, thematically thrillers filmed in Iceland about women trying to solve murders in the Artic Circle. This one is basically a country house mystery set at a tech billionaire’s luxury doomsday bunker in the frozen wilderness.

I could tell you about how lovingly staged and well shot it is. I could tell you that it’s a moving portrait of a lost soul. I could tell you it has excellent performances from among others Emma Corrin, Clive Owen, and Harris Dickinson. I could tell you that it is the smartest depiction of AI I’ve yet seen in fiction and subtly weaves genuinely interesting insights about the power and pathologies of big tech into the story. I could note that, like Vigil, it finds a contemporary setting where it feels realistic for our sleuth to cut off from backup. However, what I absolutely need you to know is how engrossing it is.

I just sang the praises of the episodic nature of a number of a bunch of shows, but Murders shows why serialised storytelling can also be remarkably effective. It basically grabs you by the eyeballs and yanks you from scene to scene and episode to episode. The twists, the puzzles and the cliffhangers are so good that it’s not so much binge worthy as binge demanding.

1. The Bear, Season 2

While I am confident that the Bear is the best show I’ve seen this year, it’s paradoxically the hardest to enthuse about. It’s very hard to pinpoint why it work so well. But believe me it does.

Let me use some comparisons to underline what a success it is. In my humble opinion, it belongs in the pantheon of truly great TV alongside shows like the Wire. In fact, I’d say it’s comfortably better than many of the shows like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones that are presented as the towering achievements of Peak TV. It is nigh on impossible to pinpoint a bad scene, let alone a bad episode. There are no characters you want off the screen nor are there bad habits the people making it need to break. I really can’t muster any criticism that rises above the level of a quibble, and I don’t have many of those. In short, it’s basically perfect.

Given my current adoration for the Bear, I was surprised that I looked back at my 2022 list, it was only in eighth place. I don’t think it’s the case that the second season is better than the first. It’s more that taken together they make something truly remarkable. As I noted in that review, “perhaps the show’s greatest strength is that the character dynamics are so, well, dynamic.” If I might plagiarise an observation from the Watch’s Andy Greenwald, the Bear is set apart from a lot of prestige TV by the conviction that it’s characters can grow and evolve. The Wire, for example, is not only about the limits of individual agency vis a vis big structures like government, organised crime and the media, it also largely believes the same about people trying to take on their own nature. Even having discovered the contentment of a happy family life, McNulty is still inexorably pulled back towards his tendency to drink, womanise and overwork. Though it’s never pat or unidirectional, the Bear does show us characters progressively changing. The space afforded by a second season allows us to see that properly play out. Especially, turning Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ritchie from something of an antagonist at the show’s start to probably the most relatable character by the end.

Having firmly established the show’s default mode in the first season of sweaty, adrenaline pumping dashes to the plate, the second season has the scope to balance that with quieter, more reflective episodes. Notably, Forks where Ritchie winds up as fish out of water at a top end restaurant. That said when it wants to stick you back in the pressure cooker, it absolutely still can. A lot of praise rightly has been focused on Fishes, which uses perhaps the starriest array of guest stars ever assembled to flash back to a thanksgiving meal spectacularly careening out of control. However, for my money, even that was surpassed by the finale, which managed to leave me breathless, first from the tension and then the sheer emotion of its denouement.

If you’re as fascinated by the craft behind the Bear as I am, then it’s worth checking out this interview with Ebon Moss-Bachrach and showrunner Christopher Storer on the making of Forks:

The resistible decline of Anglican England

A friend recently sent me a post by David Goodhew about the latest figures on attendance at Church of England ceremonies. It’s as interesting as it is depressing.

His primary focus is on how Covid has emptied out pews. However, as he makes clear what the pandemic did was at most accelerate and deepen a long-standing and apparently remorseless trend. In 2000, usual Sunday church attendance across C of E congregations was 950,000. By 2022, it was 549,000. That’s less than 1% of the population of England worshiping weekly with our national church.

That actually understates the extent of the problem. What had previously looked like bright spots, such as the growth of the Diocese of London, have largely disappeared. And the contraction is most pronounced amongst young worshipers. In just 3 years the number of children in Anglican churches has dropped 23%.

As Goodhew writes:

“Where the C of E goes next can be seen by looking at other denominations in England. The United Reformed Church … is leading the trend of mainline decline. In 1972 it had 192,000 members. By 2022 it had 37,000 members. In 50 years, it has shrunk by over 80 percent. The bulk of its existing churches are small and elderly. This is what ecclesial collapse looks like. British Methodism is on the same path.

“The trajectory of the church will take a little longer, but in many places it is the same trajectory. As congregations age, they struggle to fill key posts — wardens, treasurer. They stop being composed mostly of people in their 70s and become composed mostly of people in their 80s — and then they stop. There comes a point when decline tips over into being unviable and that point is at hand for many congregations. This won’t happen everywhere immediately, but it is happening and at speed.”

Perhaps strangely, I don’t really put this down to secularisation per se. Britain’s spiritual beliefs are changing and we are collectively becoming less likely to believe in God. However, it is a fairly gradual transition compared with the vertiginous decline in active participation in church life. A similar story can be told about Christian identity. Many more people seem willing to participate in occasional Anglican rituals like christenings, funerals, or Christmas services. It seems that English people stop regularly going to church before we stop believing a creator or seeing ourselves as Christian, not because of it.

As an alternative, I’d suggest that what’s happening to the C of E and other denominations is an example of the ‘Bowling Alone’ phenomenon identified by Robert Putnam back in the 90s. He theorised that the rise of individualised entertainment that could be consumed at home without meeting anyone else, at the time he meant TV but I guess social media would now be a bigger deal, progressively ate up more of the time that previous generations had spent on civic engagement. This can be seen not only in the decline of churches but participation in everything from bowling leagues to political parties to scout groups.

Bucking these wider social trends would almost certainly be tricky for the C of E. Difficult but not impossible. Our eighteenth and nineteenth century forebears managed to pull the church out of a previous cycle of decline. We are perhaps also better placed than some voluntary groups to compete with the lure of TV and Tik Tok as entertainment was not, or at least shouldn’t have been, at the heart of what we were offering in the first place. There may also be an unfortunate ‘gap in the market’ created by the general decline of civic institutions for churches to abate the loneliness that results.

That said, I don’t think reversing these trends is a given, let alone an inevitability. After all, it’s not like we’ve done it yet.

More speculatively, I worry that the church might have a particular problem. My anecdotal impression is that the majority of congregations interested in pro-actively inviting new people to join – perhaps we could call this ‘evangelism’ – are generally committed to a set of theological shibboleths on everything from hell to same-sex relationships that most people rightly recognise as incompatible with a vision of a loving God. Conversely, those parishes that practice a more inviting kind of Christianity seem disinclined to, well, invite people to participate in it.

I think the logic of the latter position tends to be that we do not want to impose our ideas on others. And in any case isn’t what we can do for the community beyond our church walls more important than padding out our attendance numbers?

This is understandable but misguided. Sharing ideas and trying to make a persuasive case for them is not the same as imposing them on someone. A refusal to try and win others round to our point of view may seem like a sign of open mindedness. In reality, it reflects an expectation of mutual close mindedness. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah observes in his book Cosmopolitanism the result of saying “from where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right” is that there is nothing further to say. “From our different perspectives, we would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss?” Rather than promoting dialogue “it’s just a reason to fall silent”.

It’s also not the case that trying to encourage people to join our congregations is in tension with helping people who never attend church. Indeed, it’s essential. A church cannot help anyone if it doesn’t exist. And as we saw, it’s not like the C of E is in danger of vaingloriously accumulating ever more bums in pews. Many of its congregations could disappear. And if they do, they won’t be hosting food banks, fundraising for water pumps in the Global South, recruiting prison visitors, hosting lunches for lonely retirees, running youth groups, nor sending someone to check on those unwell or bereaved. That all goes.

In a funny way, the more tolerant and progressive a faith you profess, the more you’ll need to be recruiting new members. We don’t tend to place barriers like the threat of shunning or eternal damnation in the way of people who want to leave. So, people will leave. Similarly, we don’t tend to stigmatise people if they decide their journey in life doesn’t involve marriage and lots of children. So, we cannot rely on ‘demographic’ growth to replace the people who leave. Hence, sharing our faith isn’t simply a requirement for our congregations to grow, but for them to do anything other than gradually fade away.

Also, let’s be clear about this: something valuable happens in church. That’s why we go. We have substantial research evidence that being part of a religious community is good for your physical and mental health and facilitates trust in our neighbours and giving to charity. Why? Because it helps us to meet people, to make friends, to find creative ways to express ourselves, to make the space to reflect on big questions, and of course to connect with our creator and hear his words. We don’t have to justify our churches solely by the good works it does. Those activities are meritorious in their own regard, but so is being part of a church community. It is an experience we should cherish and we should be unapologetic about wanting to share it widely – before it’s too late.

Image credit: By Ethan Doyle White – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79257810

Praise the glorious works of our Lord and Miller

[Spoiler-free]

I have seen the future of animation and it rocks! On Thursday, I dutifully shuffled down to my local Odeon to see Spider Man: Across the Spider-verse. There, I found myself in the busiest screening I’ve been to since before Covid, with possibly the most engaged audience as well, watching what I am confident it is the most compelling superhero film since at least Endgame and perhaps the best animated film since Inside Out.

It’s a bravura display. That’s most evident in how it looks. Its Oscar winning predecessor, Into the Spiderverse, was a milestone for innovation in animation. After decades of mainstream animated releases almost all being in or imitating Pixar’s house style, Into the Spider-verse was refreshingly new. Most notably using a kind of dot matrix colouring for parts of the screen both to differentiate the foreground and background and to evoke the feel of a comic book. Indeed, it constantly drew upon the visual grammar of comics to enliven itself: hand-drawn stills, 60’s Batman style pops, image captions, and more. This was not new per se. Ang Lee’s tried something similar in his 2003 Hulk film. But by doing it in animation, the Spider-verse team were able to both push it further and blend them in more naturally.

Showcasing a whole new style type of animation might seem like a difficult trick to repeat. To do so several times in the same film is essentially miraculous. However, each time we visit a new universe in Across the Spiderverse, their appearance is profoundly different. And they all look astonishing. From scenes that seem to be happening in a watercolour whose palette is constantly shifting to reflect the character’s emotions, to lovingly rendered recreations of the classic cartoons from the sixties, through to what any spider man film lives or dies by: the ability to get you to hold your breath for swings, jumps and drops. As you’ve probably guessed, not a film to wait to watch at home. The scale of its artistic ambition absolutely merits – nay deserves – a screen the size of a bus.

But its not just visual spectacle either. Despite being the tenth Spider man film in twenty years and the fourth multiverse film set in or around the MCU – not to mention following on the heels of a multiverse film sweeping last year’s Oscars – you don’t feel like you’ve seen this film before. Even though at a macro-level, the plot beats are probably what you would expect, they hardly ever come without a twist. Often that comes in the form of writers Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s madcap humour, which made films like Mitchells vs the Machines, 21 Jump Street, and the Lego Movie so enjoyable. In particular, they know how to make in-jokes about the wider Spider-mythology, which are funny if you know, but get swept away in the cavalcade of gags if you don’t. Other times, whilst still managing to follow a basic heroes’ journey narrative, Lord and Miller introduce enough detours, diversions and misdirections to keep the audience on their feet. Most fundamentally, however, this is a very human story. If I say that it takes a while for the main plot to really click in, that might seem like a criticism. It isn’t though, taking the time to reacquaint us with our hero and heroine and to absorb what are the personal stakes of this adventure for them, really increases the audience’s investment in the story.

That’s to say nothing of having:

• a stellar voice cast. Of the 18 cast members listed on IMDB between them have 3 Oscar wins plus 3 nominations.* Which is pretty remarkable for what at some level is a children’s cartoon.
• Daniel Pemberton providing a cracking score. He’s not a great film composer the way that say Hans Zimmer, Michael Giaccino or Hildur |Guðnadóttir are, producing fantastic pieces of music even if separated from the films they were written for. But you really are going to have to look very far to find someone so regularly writing scores as brash or as fun.
• Spider-rex

If I may remount a hobby horse, I’ve been riding since at least 2015, this does show, or rather show again, the fallacy of conflating the two meanings of “original” in the context of a film. A film can be original in the sense of displaying novelty and creativity. It can also be original in the sense of not drawing on pre-existing IP. Being the later does not guarantee the former. Nor as Across the Spider-verse shows, does the former require the later. We’ve swung along this path before, but never this way, nor as well till now.

*Mild spoilers:

Gwen Stacey (Hailee Steinfeld, Best Supporting Actress nominee 2011 for True Grit)

Miles’ dad (Bryan Tyree Henry, Best Supporting Actor nominee 2023 for Causeway)

Spider Punk (Daniel Kaluuya, Best Actor nominee 2018 for Get Out and winner 2021 for Judas and the Black Messiah)

The Prowler (Mahershala Ali, Best Actor winner 2017 for Greenbook and 2019 for Green Book)

Once upon a time in West London

Polite Society is the funniest, most gonzo film of the year so far

There exists a sub-Reddit devoted to technically accurate but, nonetheless, deeply misleading summaries of film plots. For example, “teen ruins younger sister’s chance of appearing on national television” for the Hunger Games. It would be a struggle to write something similar for Polite Society. Largely because the film got there first.  The plot follows Ria, a secondary school student from Shepherd’s Bush, alarmed that her big sister, Lena, has agreed to an arranged marriage. Despite the rest of her family’s delight, she fears what this will mean for their close bond, for her sister’s artistic aspirations, and that her apparently perfect fiancé is not what he seems. Which sounds like the set-up for a family drama and/or a coming-of-age comedy. Which it is. But it’s also a martial arts film. Ria dreams of becoming a stuntwoman. Her bedroom is decorated with more posters from the Golden Age of Hong Kong kung fu cinema than Quentin Tarantino’s. Her struggles regularly lead to maybe real, maybe imagined fight sequences replete with high kicks and big spins. There’s also a horror element implicit in the very icky underlying premise. And lest, you’ve somehow missed that this is all a bit strange, Lina’s mother-in-law to be is played by Nimra Bucha, AKA the leader of the Clandestines in Ms. Marvel, with vaudeville villain vibes worthy of Hannibal Lector, even if – or perhaps especially if – she’s doing something apparently mundane.

The temptation for a lot of reviewers seems to be to try and explain Polite Society in terms of other films: “British Pakistani Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” or “Scott Pilgrim meets Jane Austin”. These are all evocative descriptions. Austin is explicitly invoked. Mining for comedy in the dissonance of the huge action of an American or Asian blockbuster in the down to earth setting of a typical British film is very reminiscent of early Edgar Wright, especially Hot Fuzz. Nonetheless, I’m hesitant to lean too far into these comparisons. Especially the one with Everything, which despite striking many people, including me when I first saw the trailer, as the most obvious reference point, is unhelpful for a number of reasons. For starters, Everything didn’t premiere until after Polite Society had already wrapped filming, and was, therefore, not actually an influence on it. This shows in the fact that despite the blending of many similar elements, their content differs rather markedly. Polite Society is told from the point of view of a younger generation. Everything is both more self-consciously artistic and has more gross out jokes about sex toys. While Polite Society is clearly influenced by American, Indian and Hong Kong films, it is very distinctly British and a lot of the comedy rests on capturing the distinct ways different Londoners speak. Most fundamentally, in the two films, Everything is a philosophical meditation on existence, whereas Polite Society is a social satire.

Itshould be allowed to stand by itself. I found expectations of what sort of film it would be, obscured my appreciation of the film it is: the funniest, most gonzo experience I’ve had at the cinema this year. It combines bite with real sweetness. Absurdity with a firm grounding in an actual place. Things get very surreal whilst the characters continue to seem very real. It has all the makings of a very rewatchable cult classic.

I’d also hope that off the strength of it, we’ll see writer-director Nida Manzoor and star Priya Kansara given the chance to work on something like the MCU or Star Wars. Polite Society is strong evidence, they’d be good fits and would bring a lot to a bigger canvass.

Nobody is still the best (unofficial) John Wick film

Watching John Wick: Chapter 4 is a bit like coming across a jewel made up of huge diamonds held together by Sellotape. If that sounds like a rather lukewarm endorsement, it isn’t necessarily so. For a decade, the Wick franchise has been the Bolshoi of action cinema. Even relative to those already high standards, the numerous fights, shoot outs, car chases, and blends thereof in its fourth instalment are a dramatic step up both in scope and style. In particular, the film culminates in an extended, constantly mutating sequence which seems to span the whole of Paris. It starts as a fairly standard street battle, before becoming a frenetic fight amidst the traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, an artful overhead oner of Wick shooting his way through a building, then up (and frequently down) down the long staircase leading to Sacré-Cœur, followed by a climactic duel. It is quite the adrenaline shot.

Sadly, the rest of the film undercuts the quality of the action. Granted, it is stylishly shot and the film benefits from a quality cast. However, the liberal application of sumptuous cinematography and big acting, often seem to be masking the flimsiness of the structure those amazing sequences are embedded in. Usually, in these reviews I’d summarise the plot. However, John Wick 4’s is so obviously a pretext for the action, that doing so seems beside the point. The characters seem more like a collection of archetypes, stereotypes and plot functions than an attempt to create real seeming people. They have very straightforward, perhaps even simplistic, motivations. Yet these somehow fail to coherently explain their actions. They often seem like part of the film’s aesthetic rather than its story. I know there are people who are really excited about the worldbuilding of this franchise but I’m not among them. Rather than a society in which assassins play a role, the world of Wick is apparently composed of and/or entirely geared towards assassination as an end in itself. It’s all a bit a silly.

Now, it is also perfectly possible to blend iconic action with engaging characters, stories and ideas. The Matrix is perhaps the most obvious example given that we’re discussing a film starring Keanu Reeves. Nor does a great action film necessarily require great characters, plot or worldbuilding. For example, the Raid doesn’t devote much time to any of these. However, the fact it moves swiftly over them to get to the action is rather the point. Because it handles them so economically, they do not get in the way of enjoying the action. However, John Wick 4 has a, frankly excessive, 2 hr 49 min runtime. A lot of this is action. But a lot is a famous character actor grandiloquently spouting pseudo-profound nonsense like they’re in one of Zack Snyder’s DCEU films.

That the Wick films would go in the direction of ever more brilliant action and ever less convincing everything else was not predetermined. Indeed, there is a film adjacent to the franchise that illustrates why it is preferable that action is in the service of story rather than the other way round.

2021’s Nobody has the same writer and producer as the original John Wick. Given that, it unsurprisingly also features a similar style of action. There are also a number of similar plot beats: a retired assassin, Russian mobsters, said mobsters realising they’ve pissed off the wrong guy, carnage ensuing, aforementioned assassin finding a new adorable pet at the end of film. In this case, the story focuses on Hutch Mansel (Bob Odenkirk). He is apparently an unassuming and put upon suburban dad gradually fading into the background of his own life. However, a burglary at his family home prompts him to dust off skills as a former special ops killer for “three letter agencies” and in the process to make an enemy of a fearsome crime boss (Aleksey Serebryakov).

Though Nobody features some great action set pieces, notably a brutal brawl on a bus, I’m not going to claim they come close to the spectacle of the John Wick 4. However, it has a number of advantages which none of the Wick films really do. For starters, though not exactly a naturalistic film, it is grounded in a world near enough to ours, that it is not encumbered by the need to explain its own mythology. That makes it a nimbler, and less pompous, film.

However, probably the most significant difference is in the central character. I’m not going to deny Reeves brings a lot to the role of John Wick nor that this goes beyond his willingness to train to the point he can do the action himself. His distinct blend of understatement and intensity sells the idea of Wick as supremely competent at what he does. That said, I doubt even the most devout Keanu stan would claim he’s a better actor than Odenkirk. Who lest we forget arrived part way through a season of what is generally accepted to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time and still managed to not only immediately energise the whole enterprise, but to make such an impact that he eventually became its focus.

Nobody makes effective use of his dramatic range, presenting a convincing picture both of a professional killer and a suburban dad, and the tension of these being two halves of a single character. At some level, John Wick is supposed to embody the same tension. The fourth film makes a lot of the idea that as much as Wick wants an ordinary life, being a killer is in his nature. Neither Reeve’s performance nor the script for any of these films especially sell this duality. We never get much sense of who Wick would be if he was not a killing machine. I know we see videos and flashbacks of him with his tragically dead wife before she succumbs to tragically-deceased-spouse-syndrome but that seems a bit perfunctory.

Showing the dissonance between the two sides of the man also makes Odenkirk’s Mansell a funnier character. For example, there’s a running joke about how having grievously wounded goons, he attempts to have a fatherly heart to heart with them, complete with rambling anecdotes, only to discover his interlocutor has died mid-soliloquy. By contrast, the humour in the Wick films tends to be quite slapstick and I’m not sure is always entirely intentional.

More fundamentally, the ability to sustain for the film’s runtime the illusion that the characters are in some sense real, goes to how engaging it can really be. Legendary comics writer Alan Moore advised prospective authors to “always remember that the plot is not the story. It is just what gets you from one end of the story to the other. For example, the plot of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – some animals take over a farm – is not what the book is about.” On paper, John Wick: Chapter 4 is about something. There’s an attempt to evoke themes of redemption and fatalism. However, it never for a moment makes you believes its plot, characters or faux pathos are about more than getting from one cool visual to the next sick action beat. Nobody, by contrast, makes a case that it is about real seeming – as distinct from realistic – characters. Hence, the collision of hitman and crime boss appears imbued with actual human stakes which give the bullets, punches and crashes a weight that only story, not spectacle, can imbue them with.

Mando’s back

My review of return of the Mandalorian in S.3 ep.1 the Apostate

SPOILERS AHEAD

‘New season, new structure’ seemed to be the order of the day in the Apostate. Indeed, it often felt like the structure of a season of the show compressed down to an episode. Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) has an overriding quest. In this case, to earn absolution for having removed his helmet, by bathing in the waters of Mandalore. Small issue Mandalore has been destroyed. So, along the way he has to complete sub-quests to get things he needs. And like in an episode of the previous seasons, these questlettes, often present an opportunity to meet up again with recurring characters. Hence, in this episode we got whistle stop reintroductions not only to Din and Grogu but also Greef Karga (Carl Weathers), IG-11 (Taika Waititi), Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff). That and telling us where Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) is now and, naturally, giving an in-universe explanation for why the character played by an actor who likened being an anti-vaxxer to being Jewish during the Holocaust won’t be back.

The effect of this was that the Apostate also felt rather like a recap video. A reminder to audience members who in the gap of two and a half years since Season 2 aired that, for example, Din has the Darksabre, or who skipped Book of Boba Fett altogether, and, therefore, might need bringing up to speed on why Din and Grogu are reunited.

In all honesty, I found what this amounted to underwhelming. It didn’t break new ground. Perhaps intentionally. There was a feeling of doubling-down on the familiar. There were not only a lot of returning characters but also scenes which evoke past scenes and even by the standards of the Mandalorian “this is the way” gets said a lot! Plot-wise we didn’t seem further forward than we were at the end of Book of Boba Fett. This was all set-up and no pay-off.

That said, I’m not really disappointed either and certainly not ready to conclude that showrunners Favreau and Filoni have run out of ideas. Though the recap element felt superfluous to me, it may well be appreciated by viewers who are not as obsessive in their fandom as I am. Though the action in this episode felt a bit rote to me, Grogu being a little scamp was as adorable as ever. Similarly, though this was probably not the most elegant way to do what needs to be done in a first episode, it is hardly surprising that the start of a new season would mostly be about laying the foundations for the rest of the season. Indeed, it was only a few months ago that reviewers were lauding Andor for taking its time.* In between, the greatest hits reel, there was some interesting character work being done. The scenes between Mando and Karga evidenced a low-key sadness with the bounty hunter still not quite able to reciprocate the warmth he is shown by his friend. This often looks like him meeting Karga’s expressions of concern and signs of respect with a cold focus on his mission.  I suspect this is setting up a tension between what Din wants, to return to good standing within the fundamentalist religious community that raised him, and what he actually needs: to find a home for Grogu and himself, where he is valued for more than his compliance or competence.

Side note:

The first week of March 2023 feels like something of a vortex moment for nerd, franchise pop-culture. As many, many people have pointed out two of the biggest TV shows on at the moment, the Mandalorian and the Last of Us, both feature Pedro Pascal playing a stoic warrior type who must go on a quest to take a young person with special abilities to safety. Similarly, Creed III comes to cinemas just as the Mandalorian foregrounds the character played by the original Apollo Creed. Oh and Jonathan Majors is playing the villain in Creed III *and* Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which are likely to be the #1 and #2 films at the global box office by the end of the weekend. It’s a small world apparently.

*Though in fairness, the first three episodes of Andor were released at once. Giving us a second episode so we could see things moving along might not have been a bad bet on Disney’s part.

Quant-meh-nia

Light spoilers for Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania but full spoilers for the rest of the MCU up to that point

I spent much of Marvel’s phase 4 remaining enthused about the MCU as a lot of people – including it seems the majority of critics – turned sour on it. Well the good news is that with the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the start of Phase 5, I’m no longer on a lonely island proclaiming that Wakanda Forever was actually the best film of last year. The bad news is that this is because I found Quantumania deeply underwhelming.

In the third Ant Man film, when Scott Lang’s (Paul Rudd) daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) creates a probe able to send a signal down to the “quantum realm”, a micro-universe which lies between the cracks in our own, Scott, Cassie and the Pym/Van Dymme family are sucked down into the quantum realm, where they must survive a confrontation with Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a  variant of the character we met in Loki as He Who Remains, whilst plotting a return to our universe.

I know of very few people who would say the Ant Man films are their favourite part of the MCU. Nonetheless, the previous two entries were able to act as lightweight, entertaining intermissions between more dramatic and important seeming instalments in the saga. Quantumania jettisons this idea. Instead, the third Ant Man film is supposed to launch a new phase of the saga and raise the stakes of MCU’s engagement with the multiverse. This is very much playing to the franchise-within-a-franchise’s weaknesses. Indeed, let me propose three key things that made Ant Mans 1 and 2 enjoyable: 1) Paul Rudd’s natural charm, 2) the trio of loveable ethnic stereotypes played by Michael Peña, T.I. Harris, and David Dastmalchian, and 3) the childish glee of action sequences in which things are shrunk and expanded to be comically out of proportion with what we expect. In Quantumania, these are systematically neutralised by: 1) getting Rudd to mostly do generic leading man stuff, 2) not featuring those characters, and 3) setting almost all the action in a CGI sci-fi world where we have no instinctive sense of what size things are supposed to be.

Indeed, Quantumania extenuates Ant Man’s main weakness relative to the rest of the MCU: its rather bland supporting characters. Anyone you might remember fondly from the previous films gets left in the regular sized universe. Kang aside, the new characters we meet in the Quantum Realm are neither sufficiently distinctive nor given enough screen time to make an impact. That leaves us more focused than ever on the underwhelming Pym/Van Dyme family. Despite the amount of time we’ve now spent with Hank (Michael Douglas) and Hope AKA the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), they still seem like stock characters. Indeed, despite having been theoretically promoted to co-lead in the previous film, Lily’s Wasp is such an afterthought, that at the very climax of the film her character is jammed into the action in a way that suggests that late in the day someone looked over the script and was like “shite, we really need to give Wasp more to do”. Michelle Pfeiffer gets a larger role on account of having spent the most time in the quantum realm and encountered Kang before. However, that does turn her into something of an exposition device. Nor are her character’s choices psychologically interesting enough to give the story any additional oomph. A lot of narrative real estate is devoted to Scott’s relationship with his daughter. Granted, the previous two films did a lot to set this up and imbue it with emotional stakes. However, given that since then Cassie Lang has been recast not once but twice, the link between that version of the character and the one we see in Quantumania feels rather abstract. We also get the rather cartoonish and faintly cringeworthy reintroduction of a previous MCU antagonist, which mostly just confirms that the actor who plays him/her is the most hard done by performer in the MCU not named Idris Elba.

The glaring exception to all of this is Majors’ Kang. Well, kinda an exception. The film certainly establishes Kang, who appears set to replace Thanos as the MCU’s overarching villain, as a formidable threat. Or maybe Majors, who has Olympic level screen presence, does that all by himself. Either way the film’s finale and the mid-credit scene undo all that and make him seem ridiculous.

Indeed the film consistently undermining the things it gets right becomes something of a theme. Notably, in contrast, to a lot of the MCU of late (including the films but especially the TV series) the CGI looks pretty good. Indeed, the one exception is for the rendering of the aforementioned cartoonish antagonist, which I suspect was done intentionally. This turnaround is important because the story is taking place in an imaginary realm which has to be created digitally. That the vision for quantum realm is ably executed, albeit by visual effects artists apparently once again working under dire condition, is a blessing. However, its conception is fundamentally lacking. For starters, it appears nothing like the quantum realm we saw in the previous films. It is also hard to isolate what about it is supposedly ‘quantum’. Granted Marvel is generally the softest of soft sci-fi. However, even by that standard, seemingly negligible effort has gone into identifying what might make a quantum universe distinct from our own. Consequently, any of the settings we see within the quantum realm could easily feature as a planet the Guardians landed on, without anything seeming off. Furthermore, nothing really marks these different settings out as coherent whole. Thus, the moves between them feel arbitrary. Even the individual ideas we encounter – buildings are alive, travelling about on the backs of giant manta ray like creatures, drinking ooze that acts as a universal translator – feel like something out of a story by Mythic Quest’s C.W. Longbottom. They might seem cool but there’s no apparent logic to them nor do they gel together. This thin worldbuilding would be less of a problem if there were compelling character dynamics to engage the audience instead, but as we’ve already established there aren’t really.

Finally, there is the problem that for what’s supposed to be one of the more lighthearted parts of the MCU it doesn’t seem all that funny. Indeed, the screening I was in there were fewer laughs than when I went to see Wakanda Forever, which lest we forget was mostly about grief.

[Interestingly, this is the third MCU project to be written by a Rick and Morty writer. I’ve not seen the show but my impression of it is that it may not be a great tonal fit for the MCU.]

None of which is to say that it’s not diverting and, in its way, likable. But it’s deeply uninspiring. For my money it’s the weakest MCU film since at least Eternals, possibly since the Dark World. Hopefully, it’s a blip and not a sign of things to come.

Ranking the films I saw in 2022

This has been a slightly odd year in cinema. Covid related production delays and studios still figuring out how best to combine releases in cinema and on streaming services. Indeed, this got downright frustrating at times. For much of the summer and autumn, it felt like not only was there nothing good to watch, but there wasn’t really anything to watch full stop. This is perhaps reflected in the fact that four of my bottom five films of the year came out in between April 1^st and September 31^st. By contrast, only two of the films in my top 10 came out in that six-month window, and one of those went to straight to streaming. Hence, for a long stretch it felt, without being too melodramatic, like cinema might never recover from Covid. An absolutely cracking November did dispel that impression somewhat. And even if it’s not been the strongest year for cinema, there were still plenty of good films, that I’d still like to highlight for anyone on the lookout for something to watch.

As always, I’m defining films as coming out in 2022 if their wide release date in UK cinemas was this year, or if they didn’t have one based on when they first arrived on a UK streaming platform.

There are mild spoilers for a few films on the list, but I have tried to keep them mild.

Oh and I also watched the first twenty minutes of Turning Red until I remembered how viscerally unbearable I find second-hand embarrassment, but that seemed pretty good. I also saw ten minutes of Men before being like “I’m absolutely not in the mood for this.”

35. Bullet Train

A film whose appeal seems to be entirely predicated on you reacting to a celebrity cameo, the way a particularly avid twitcher will to the sight of an especially endangered bird. If your like “I saw that person in another film last month” and hence not very fussed that they’re on screen for twenty seconds, then this film has very little to offer you. The plot is convoluted. Running gags – notably one about Thomas the Tank Engine – are flogged till they’re desiccated, and it’s painfully obvious that not a single frame of this film set in Japan, based on a Japanese book, which puts the name of a Japanese institution it its title, was actually shot in Japan.

34. Jurassic World: Dominion

A thought-provoking film that provokes thoughts like “maybe it was for the best that JJ Abrams directed Rise of Skywalker rather than Colin Trevorrow after all”.In the original Jurassic Park, there’s a scene where the approach of a t-rex is revealed by vibrations in a cup of water. If that had been in this film, a character would have said “there’s a t-rex coming”. Truly an insult to the intelligence of all involved, especially the audience.

33. Licorice Pizza

There’s something almost perversely impressive about the ability of some critics and filmlovers to ignore the problems with a film revolving around a romance between a 15 and a 25-year-old. Even if you set aside the obvious moral concerns, it means you are – or at least should be! – rooting against the film’s central relationship. Even ignoring that a lot of this film’s appeal seems to rest on your nostalgia for the San Fernando valley of the 1970s. If you don’t have any nostalgia for that time and place, because say you weren’t born for another decade and have never been to the US West Coast, then you’re out of luck with this one.

32. Operation Mincemeat

Ben Macintyre’s compelling book on espionage history is adapted into one of the year’s dullest films. You might think the story of WWII British spies fooling the Germans about their war plans by contriving for a body dressed like a British officer to wash up on shore carrying fake battleplans would be inherently interesting. However, there are two fundamental differences between the book and the film.

The book’s protagonist is essentially the lie itself and the character perspective shifts fluidly as it goes from offices in Whitehall all the way to Hitler’s desk. In the film, our point of view is stuck in London. The most gripping sections of the book, where British agents in Franco’s Spain try to ensure that the fake plans get shared with the Nazis, whilst pretending to do the opposite, is mostly dramatised via the main characters in London issuing agitated instructions down the phone to the guys on the ground in Spain.

Equally importantly, though mostly told from a British perspective, the book is really about how the Germans fell for the illusion rather than how the British fooled them. This becomes significant when the subject arises of their being a faction within German military intelligence that by the point these events took place, actively supported an Allied victory – and would shortly thereafter try to assassinate Hitler. In the book, this is the capstone to the story, the final piece that completes the whole. In the film, it creates the unfortunate implication that our heroes’ efforts didn’t in fact matter because even if the ruse is discovered, the Abwehr was going to give Hitler intentionally dud advice anyway.

31. See How They Run

There’s a popular internet saying, which I’ll adapt to be more apposite for a whodunnit, that goes “if you decapitate a goat, it doesn’t matter how ironically you did it, it’s still dead and you definitely killed it”. The filmmakers behind See How They Run seem to believe that their formulaic, unimaginative plot doesn’t matter if they wink and nod ironically about the plot being formulaic and unimaginative. This makes something tedious annoying as well. They also attempt to trade on nostalgia for Agatha Christie’s work, whilst being quite condescending about it. Kept off the bottom of the list by the always watchable Saoirse Ronan.

30. Confess, Fletch

Hollywood seemingly doesn’t know what to do with Jon Hamm: a talented actor with classic leading man good looks, but who seems most drawn to quite goofy roles. Confess, Fletch does genuinely seem like the role he’s been best suited to since his breakthrough on Madmen. That said, this comedy mystery would benefit if the jokes were funny or the mystery intriguing. Also, why are the Italian roles played by two Americans and a Chilean?

29. Minions: Rise of Gru

Of all the films this year to star Michelle Yeoh and feature a running joke about a googly eyes stuck to a rock, this is definitely in the top two! Does improve after a strikingly joke free first act. However, it consistently has too much plot and too little story. Lots of characters and subplots are introduced only to go nowhere. Action scenes that should be the set up for some slapstick, instead degenerate into largely pointless noise. The franchise seems to have also acquired its own lore, which the filmmakers regrettably feel they need to gesture towards. Kept worth watching by its warmth and the inherent humour of the minions, but this franchise feels like it needs to rest until someone has fresh ideas about what to do with it.

28. The Anthrax Attacks: In the Shadow of 9/11

This documentary leans a lot on dramatic reconstructions. Which to be fair, it puts a lot of work into, not least by casting Clark Gregg to play the prime suspect. In the process, it demonstrates that a documentary leaning on dramatic reconstructions is nearly always a bad idea. It also takes a very narrow view of a case that more than almost any other should invite a broader perspective.

27. Hunt

For the past few years, one of the most consistent markers of cinematic excellence has been a Korean language film which made its way to British cinemas. Hunt demonstrates that Koreans do in fact make films that are basically ok but nothing more. This 80s set thriller about a plot to assassinate South Korea’s president is diverting and well-acted, but also messy. The plot is too complicated. The action sequences are mostly noisy and formless. Its evocation of the darker aspects of Korea’s modern history, notably the 1982 massacre of student protestors in Gwangju, weighs down the story, without leading to the sort of deeper exploration which might justify their inclusion.

26. McEnroe

This documentary profiling the tennis legend has a lot to recommend it. It does an admirable job of dropping you into 40-year-old matches for a minute or two, and yet making you feel the same tension and the stakes as someone watching at the time. That said, some of the stylistic choices, notably illustrating large chunks of the film with footage of McEnroe walking around New York at night, feel contrived. More importantly, it’s not altogether clear that it has anything especially deep to say about McEnroe as either an athlete or a person.

25. The Gray Man

Two facts loom over the Gray Man (sic): 1) its name was a hostage to fortune for a film which became a by-word for bland competence, and 2) it is the most expensive Netflix production to date costing over $200 million. Obviously, this is a lot of money. And not just for me or you, but also for a Hollywood studio. Last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, C.O.D.A, had a $10 million budget. John Wick started an action franchise (and didn’t exactly look cheap) at a cost of $20-30 million. Indeed, even though the cost of the films has increased as it went along, the Gray Man probably cost comfortably more than the whole Wick trilogy to date. This year’s break out blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick had a $170 million budget to cover amongst other things hiring actual fighter jets from the USAF for tens of thousands dollars an hour. Speaking of real planes, the Gray Man’s $200 million budget matches that of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which depicted a 747 crashing into a terminal by … well … crashing an actual 747 into an actual terminal and filming it. Given this enormous expense, many viewers and critics were underwhelmed by a final product that will probably be most popular with people looking for something diverting but not engrossing they can iron to.

Which is to say it does have its merits. The cast is strong, especially Chris Evans as an ostentatiously obnoxious villain. The action sequences have a pleasing problem-solution quality. Henry Jackman’s score is a lot of fun. But none of that changes the fact that when the budget is the most memorable thing about a film, that’s a problem.

24. Thor: Love and Thunder

This got a rough ride from critics, who seemed to have grown weary both of its director Taika Waititi and of Marvel. And to be fair, it was nowhere near the triumph of Thor and Waititi’s previous appearance in the MCU in Ragnarök. The long comedic sections, notably at the beginning with the Guardians and in the middle with Russel Crowe playing Zeus, were overdone. The same criticism could reasonably be made of Waititi’s rather self-indulgent overuse of Korg, who he plays himself. Nonetheless, the backlash felt overdone. The comedy not working is somewhat offset by the greater sincerity behind the drama. Chris Hemsworth rises to the emotional demand of this material and turns in his strongest performance as Thor so far. There’s also a creepy yet compelling villain in the shape of Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher. And if nothing else, there’s a visually spectacular action sequence set in the ‘shadow realm’ which uses new lighting and camera techniques to blend in and out of monochrome.

23. RRR

Saying this film is ‘over the top’ is like saying the voyager space probe is ‘above head height’. It is a visually spectacular historical epic, packed with gobsmacking action, multiple lavish musical numbers, and a 3 hour plus runtime to accommodate it all. It begins with one of its heroes taking on a mob of hundreds in unarmed combat and winning, immediately followed by the other hero doing the same with a tiger.

It’s hard not to be impressed. That said I think I liked this a lot less than many people. That may partly reflect my unfamiliarity with the conventions of Indian cinema, but I found the sheer scale of everything made it tough to emotionally invest in. It is clearly sincere in its storytelling, yet its style often feels more exaggerated than many parodies. Plus, despite the story gesturing towards bigger things, the basic mechanics of the plot are rather thin given the elongated runtime. It probably doesn’t help that Netflix gives you the option of a Hindi or English dub but not the original Tamil dialogue. You might expect this problem would disappear when you reach the English language sections of the film. However, they serve to highlight that in a film featuring some of the biggest, most charismatic stars of Tamil cinemas, the British villains are played by V-list Anglo-American actors turning in the sort of performance one might expect from an 00s computer game cutscene. The contrast is jarring.

That said, even if you don’t watch the whole thing I’d still strongly recommend seeking out, say, the first hour. It’s definitely an experience.

22. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

This is a lot of fun. Nicolas Cage’s on- and off-screen persona is a pretty deep well of comedy to draw from. Resting the film on an on-screen bromance between Cage’s fictional alter-ego and a wealthy Cage superfan played by Pedro Pascal is a great decision. Both Cage and Pascal are eminently watchable, but in quite distinct ways. There’s also a strong supporting cast including Sharon Horgan, Tiffany Haddish, and Ike Barinholtz.

However, to love rather than like this, you would probably need to be a Cage aficionado on the scale of Pascal’s character. The final act tips the balance of this action-comedy way too far into action – and rather boring action at that.

21. Elvis

Very mixed. The first act is this oddly overstylised retelling of Elvis’ Wikipedia page. However, it becomes far more compelling when it settles into the story it wants to tell about how Elvis’ relationship with Col Tom Parker ultimately destroyed him. It’s a film that plays into both director Baz Luhrmann’s strengths and weaknesses. His ostentatious flair smothers the proceedings at time. To give one example, because he’s constantly cutting between scenes, in every conversation all the participants dive straight into the meat of what they’re going to say in a way that becomes conspicuously artificial. He also seems weirdly insecure in his own abilities as visual storyteller, throwing in voiceover and exposition, to tell the audience stuff he’s already ably illustrated on screen. But it’s hard to imagine any other director convincingly recreating the electricity of an Elvis concert.

20. Don’t Worry Darling

I feel like the off-screen drama has maybe pushed people into having stronger opinions about this than it merited. It’s neither a triumph nor a disaster. It’s a bit on the long side and doesn’t really break fresh ground. But it drew me in and seemed to spark plenty of discussion amongst my fellow cinema goers on the way out.

19. Top Gun: Maverick

There’s a glib version of reviewing this film which goes something like ‘the characterisation is a bit thin, it’s basically sponsored content for the US Navy, and the climactic action sequence is ripped-off of George Lucas, but also planes go wush and pew, pew. So, five stars’.

The primary appeal of this film does indeed undeniably lie in the stunning ariel sequences shot using actual planes and requiring the cast to learn to pilot them to make the shots from inside cockpits look realistic. However, that sells the filmmaking short. There’s a version of this film where the scenes on the ground detract from the action. Indeed, we need not imagine. Just look at Jurassic World: Dominion, a film that begins by recapping the events of the previous instalment of the franchise via several minutes of clunky exposition disguised as TV news report, which sounds nothing like any new report ever made. By contrast, Maverick rather more elegantly and economically has the camera linger over some photos its hero has pinned above his desk, which serve to key us into the key facts about the character dynamics from the original Top Gun which will play into the sequel.

That said, as much as I admire the filmmaking here, the choice to make the film’s antagonists nameless, faceless, and objective-less is jarring. Like we are supposed to be bought into the righteousness of military action without cause or context. If one were being uncharitable, one could also suggest that this does also perhaps reflect the difficulty American culture sometimes has in the recognising a world beyond the US exists. Also, the characterisation is a bit thin, it’s basically sponsored content for the US Navy, and the climactic action sequence is ripped-off of George Lucas.

18. The Woman King

Impressive both as a historical epic and a bloodthirsty action film. There’s a training sequence which involves characters scrambling though bushes of thorns, which is probably the most wince-inducing thing I saw on screen all year – all the more so for apparently being grounded in historical fact. The Woman King also passes what I’m calling the ‘the Widows Test’ – wherein you know a film has a really good ensemble if they can avoid being acted off the screen by Viola Davis in the lead role. Also, I wish Marvel would hire some of the behind the camera talent from this film to consult on how to shoot action sequences set at night where the audience can see what’s happening.

Two things stopped me placing this higher. Firstly, a lot of the dialogue is rather on the nose. Secondly, making resistance to the slave trade into the moral crux of the film, even though the fighting force it’s based on owed their existence in part to their kingdom’s participation in the trade, robs the film of some of its power.

17. The Batman

Given that this is, by my count, the 15^th feature with Bruce Wayne as the lead character, and comes barely a decade after Christopher Nolan delivered what is probably the definitive adaptation of this material, it is a remarkable achievement that the Batman can even justifies its existence. Robert Pattinson’s take on the character is genuinely different – younger, wrestling not with the spectre of mania, but of depression. The danger is not that be becomes like his villains, but the more insidious threat that he will sink into apathy. The choice to turn the Riddler into a Zodiac-style serial killer, not only provides a different kind of antagonist, but also shifts the feel and story structure of the rest of the film. Also, I must mention Michael Giacchino’s score, which is probably the best of the year.

If I was going off my initial assessment, this probably would have wound up higher on the list. However, I found it maybe didn’t stay with me the way I expected – especially given how much I’ve listened to the score.

16. The Banshees of Inisherin

This is probably the film where my subjective personal reaction and my attempt at an objective assessment of a film’s merit, if such a thing exists, differ most wildly. By any reasonable measure, this is a masterpiece. It is fantastically written and acted, thematically rich, and it evokes the relatively contained world of a small island off the coast of Ireland in a way that feels thoroughly convincing. It is bracingly original. The story is never predictable, except for when you are supposed to feel dread about what you know is coming next.

That said, I hated it. I was in a bad mood when I went to see it. Its thoroughly bleak worldview weighed me down even further. Hence, I have put it in the lowest position I can possibly justify placing a basically perfect film in.

15. She Said

A subtle and sensitive gut punch of a film. This is less a story about finding the truth – as characters point out multiple times, the outlines of Weinstein’s crimes were widely known prior to being made public and multiple outlets had tried to report them only to be silenced. Instead, our hero’s central struggle is to persuade enough people to speak out together that they can break the story. That foregrounds character over plot. This works due to some of the best performances of the year. Samantha Morton should really get a supporting actor Oscar nomination for the single scene she’s in, where she plays a former assistant at the Weinstein company, who recounts the price of speaking up when her friend was assaulted.

About as far from a fun watch as you’ll get, but a journalism film like this coming along every few years feels like an important reminder of the significance of an independent media and of investigative reporting.

14. Living

This is a tricky film to write about because so much of its success is grounded in restraint. That most especially applies to Bill Nighy’s central performance as a deeply private man, who is understated to the point it becomes pathological. This isn’t even a case of keeping things small to heighten the contrast when the acting goes big. There’s an artful (and commendable) commitment to expressing everything in a way that is no less powerful for being subtle. Unfortunately, this slightly dissipates in the final act, which becomes more about telling than showing. However, up to that point it is excellent.

13. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

The desire to build up another film on this list – which better lives up to the billing “multiverse of madness” – led to a fair amount of depreciation of this film. Which was a) unnecessary and b) missed quite how much there was to like about this instalment of the MCU. It is remarkable that even working within the confines of the largest film franchise ever, horror maestro Sam Raimi was able to produce something that not only reflects his personal visual style, but is also weird and in places rather messed up. That said, I do share the criticism that where we find Wanda at the beginning of this film and where we left her at the end of Wandavision, and that her arc is a bit retrograde. Even given that, Elizabeth Olsen turns in a classic villain performance.

12. The Northman

There’s a point in this Viking epic when two occupants of a remote outpost in Iceland comment on the fact that several towns to the south have begun worshiping “a corpse nailed to a tree”. This moment points to how writer-director Robert Eggers uses this film to take us into an unfamiliar, pre-Christian moral universe. Let me illustrate this point with a comparison to Gladiator. Both films are super-macho historical dramas about a warrior seeking vengeance for his family. However, in Ridley Scott’s film, Russell Crowe’s Maximus is seeking to kill an unpleasant and cruel man who by rising to become Caesar has risen to a position where can tyrannise both Rome and his own family. Hence, in that story ethical values align. The post-enlightenment audience readily and indeed necessarily accepts the righteousness of Maximus’s mission. The Northman makes things far more complicated, and, therefore, interesting.

Less high-mindedly, while Gladiator certainly delivered big, brutal fight scenes, it didn’t have, say, a stark-naked sword fight to the death on the lava flows of an active volcano. So, in the macho action stakes the Northman is victorious.

11. Nightmare Alley

You know how you know Guillermo del Torois a genius? He gets you to gladly submerge yourself into this bath of bleakness.

10. Belfast

As my top TV series this year included a comedy which showed the end of the Northern Ireland Troubles from the perspective of Catholic Secondary school girls, it seems fitting that this list features a film about the start of the Troubles as seen from the perspective of a Protestant primary school boy.

That Belfast reflects writer-director Ken Branagh’s own experiences growing up in the Northern Irish capital during its darkest times, shows through in how real and immersive the period setting feels. Indeed, when a set of readings about Northern Irish Protestant communities came up as part of my politics masters, I recognised some of the dynamics they outlined from this film.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a film directed by a celebrated actor, the performances are impeccable. Ciaran Hinds as the central character’s grandfather is especially affecting.

9. Aftersun

Basically, take everything I said about Living, apart from about it having a somewhat misjudged final act, and double it for Aftersun. Paul Mescal gives a performance that is if anything even subtler and sadder than even Nighy, despite coming after a career a fraction of the length. You could also make a comparison with Belfast in drawing on the creator’s own childhood to conjure a world that feels authentic and lived in. A similar use of a child’s perspective also makes this a sweeter and more poignant story than it otherwise would be. However, there’s also the interesting choice to make the viewpoint character a child who is now old and smart enough to see that despite her father scrambling to maintain a façade, he is deeply unhappy.

8. Prey

The consensus on Prey seems to be that it’s the best Predator film since the original. I demur. In my view, it’s the best including the original. For all its evident strengths, the first Predator’s roided up, OTT machismo tips over into cheesiness. It also rather undercuts the film’s more high-minded aspirations to draw a distinction between the Predator for whom killing is a sport and Arnie’s solider for whom taking life is only ever justified as a necessity. Without getting into spoilers, the mirroring between this film’s Predator and our protagonist, a young Comanche woman seeking to become a hunter (Amber Midthunder), is much cleaner.

This should be a star-making turn for Midthunder. She is seldom off-screen, often acting alone or opposite a guy in a suit, whilst providing the film’s emotional core, frequently having to deliver exposition through non-verbal cues, and executing a bunch of intense stunts.

My suspicion is that had this gone to the cinemas, rather than straight to Disney+, it would have been a breakout hit. This was a particular missed opportunity as it came out right in the middle of the summer lull. In any event, I suspect this may wind up being the film on this list I rewatch the most.

7. The Worst Person in the World

I’m not sure I can parse why this film works so well, but it does. There’s perhaps something about the way it steadily morphs from seeming like a series of episodes into something more like a coherent arc, which arguably is how memories of our own lives go over time. Or perhaps it’s something to do how the characters are as far as one can get from being stock characters. In any event, this is perhaps the definitive millennial film.

6. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Knives Out seemed like such a singular (and complicated) concoction that, as exciting at the prospect of a sequel was, it inevitably invited the question of whether Rian Johnon could repeat the feat. It turns out I needn’t have worried. While for my money, Glass Onion is not quite as ingenious as its predecessor, it is still near perfectly executed. It finds a fresh way to offer you the same things you liked about its predecessor. It manages to be both one of the year’s most entertaining films and deliver quite a satirical bite.

5. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Even in a year with RRR, this manages to be the most epic, extravagant film of 2022. But whilst its story transcends the multiverse, it is also grounded in the intimate, apparently mundane reality of one family. Even allowing for the so mad it’s genius premise, the outrageous action, the even more outrageous humour, and the astonishing visuals, it is these characters – and actors playing them – who are the key to the film’s success. The performances in this film are all the more impressive given that all the core cast are essentially playing multiple roles.

4. Decision to Leave

The label “Hitchcockian” mostly refers to filmmakers who want to make films like ‘the Master of Suspense’. However, Park Chan-Wook actually makes films which measure up to Hitchcock’s. This twisty cat and mouse tale of a detective pursuing a suspect – or is it the other way around – is as smart as it is compelling. Cinematographer Kim Ji-Young delivers probably the best-looking film of the year. He conveys energy crackling across the screen, whilst maintaining the chilly aesthetic of a neo-noir. In the process, he deploys perhaps the biggest innovation in showing phones on screen since Sherlock. English speaking viewers should also be thankful for the truly excellent subtitling. One of the central characters is a Chinese immigrant speaking Korean as a second language and that fact is central to the story. The subtle distinctions in how she uses Korean and how Koreans speak to her are lovingly rendered into the subtitles. Honestly, had I not found the very ending a bit unconvincing, it would probably be my film of the year.

3. The Menu

A phenomenally effective mix of thriller, horror and satire. It is almost perfectly cast, featuring amongst others Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes, Nicholas Hoult, Hong Chau, and John Leguizamo. It also relies on the very careful deployment of the etiquette around gourmet food to evoke a kind of social horror about being exposed for what you really are. It seems to get lumped in with films exposing the evils of rich people. This, however, is to unduly simplify a film of substantial thematic richness, that should genuinely challenge its audience.

2. Nope

Speaking of thematic richness, Jordan Peele’s latest film, a horror western is a bewilderingly dense latticework of ideas. Peele seems to delight in his capacity to do without the crutches that many horror writers rely on. In particular, he avoids characters making idiotic, reckless choices to power the plot. Indeed, the verisimilitude of the characters is a consistent strength of the film. The interplay between co-leads Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as a brother and sister is expertly drawn. Real thought has clearly been given to both how they grate on each other and the ways that under the right circumstances they complement each other.

1. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

This is a monumental feat of a film, even before you factor in that it was shot in a pandemic following the untimely death of its leading man. It manages to pay tribute to Chadwick Boseman, whilst also showing that Wakanda’s story can still continue. It also reflects that there being a new Black Panther must fundamentally alter that story. Boseman’s T’Challa was a man, both literally and figuratively, born to be both monarch and the Panther. Letitia Wright’s Shuri finds both mantles unnatural and her discomfort, exacerbated of course by her grief, is a source of dramatic tension.

Her internal turmoil is mirrored by the political turbulence affecting her kingdom. This is a truly grand plot. The clash of two mighty kingdoms and a succession crisis is the sort of material many fantasy show would spin out across whole seasons. Naturally, Wakanda Forever also continues using the idea of an African superpower to hold up a mirror to the power politics of the real world.

This is all brought together with great skill. The dialogue in a lot of blockbusters is embarrassingly bad – Jurassic World: Dominion being a prime example – but the writing here moves easily between being punchy, funny, moving and rousing. It also helps that there’s such a strong cast to deliver it. There’s deserved talk of Angela Basset getting an Oscar nomination for powerhouse performance. And naturally, a lot turns on Wright being able to show us Shuri in a very different role, whilst also convince us she’s the same character we saw before. I’d also particularly highlight how Winston Duke successfully plays both the film’s main comic relief and a voice of quiet authority simultaneously. Wakanda Forever is also technically impressive. Though Marvel is rightly criticised for poor quality of the effects in a lot of its films (and even more so its TV shows), and the definitely related issue of overworking VFX artists and giving them unrealistic deadlines, and there are some problems in Wakanda Forever, notably the muddy looking night-time sequences, in the main it looks fantastic.

Between Creed and now two hugely successful Black Panther films, Ryan Coogler is absolutely at the pinnacle not only of blockbuster cinema, but of cinema overall. I do hope he’s willing and able to keep returning to Wakanda. However, I do also hope that, that studios look at the precedent of Christopher Nolan’s career after directing a hugely successful set of superhero films, and start viewing him as a talent they can give latitude to explore projects they might not otherwise find too risky.

The best books I read in 2022

A pet hate of mine is the extent to which our culture conflates being a ‘book lover’ with being really into novels. This view tends to erase the literary merit of non-fiction. I would submit that the ten books on this list, all of them non-fiction, illustrate that nearly everything one could want from a novel can be found in non-fiction. There are compelling narratives that transport us through time and around the world: from our emergence as a species, to a China fighting its way out from under imperial domination, to the coffeeshops of Vienna during its heyday as the intellectual capital of the world, to the “North Korea of Europe”, and also right back here to the UK. We also have characters who were they not real, few authors could conjure: Robert Maxwell, Iris Murdoch, Chiang Kai-Shek and Ludwig Wittgenstein to name just some. We also see more apparently normal people – librarians, miners, printers, advertising executives, an aristocrat fallen from grace, and a schoolgirl – confronting what seems like the end of their world. Most of all these books have people making dramatic, in both senses of the word, choices: between their nation’s heritage and the demands of modern technology, about how to make sense of the horrors of Nazism, as to if it’s acceptable to take money for a good cause from bad people, over who to sack, and whether to let your enemies take your cities or to burn or flood them instead.   

In terms of what I’m counting as a “2022 book”, I’m taking it as a book I personally read this calendar month rather than one that was published this year. This is the opposite of what I do for TV, films and podcasts. However, I think it’s probably truer to the less immediate way we read books. That said I try to pick reasonably recent releases to avoid getting into “this Truman Capote guy has a really good turn of phrase” territory. Hence, the oldest book on the list is from 2016.

10. Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The Surprising Story of Britain’s Economy from Boom to Bust and Back Again by Duncan Weldon

It’s not exactly an original observation that 2022 has been one of the more eventful years for economic policy making in the UK. Though Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through was published last year, it nonetheless speaks to what has happened since. It points to the limitations of hoping that the country’s economic trajectory can be fundamentally altered through drastic policy changes. As Weldon demonstrates, both the challenges we face and the scope of the solutions to them are deeply rooted in our national history. They cannot be shrugged off or willed away. Without a proper grounding in this history, we have little chance of making the right economic calls in any year.

= 8. The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of Vienna by David Edmonds and Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhail and Rachael Wiseman

I’m pairing these two books together as their subjects are intimately connected. The Murder of Professor Schlick recounts the rise of logical positivism in interwar Vienna, whereas Metaphysical Animals tells the story of how a group of four women who studied together in Oxford during World War II recreate against logical positivism and proposed a blend of reinvigorated Aristotelianism and existentialist philosophy as an alternative.

Neither school of thought would accept the idea that philosophical ideas are simple rationalisations of their proponent’s interests. Nonetheless, both Edmonds, and Mac Cumhail and Wiseman show how it was more than chance that these movements emerged when they did. The logical positivists were often liberals/leftists and/or Jews living at a time when either of those identities were more than enough to provoke violent animosity. When one of the most influential logical positivists, Moritz Schlick, was gunned down by a disgruntled student who was likely suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, his killer was hailed as a fighter against ‘anti-German Jewish materialism’ and wound up serving just two years in prison. In this environment, logical positivism’s dismantling of ideas lacking an objective material reality made it a strong solvent against the kind of prejudice and superstition which reached their apotheosis in Nazism.

However, for the Oxford quintet, this went too far. The logical positivists had pared back our intellectual armoury to the point that they had lost the ability to say that Nazi atrocities were objectively wrong. Mac Cumhail and Wiseman also convincingly show how it was only possible for a group of young women to spearhead this counter-movement, because of the World War II. Oxford’s young men were conscripted en masse. Hence, at a stroke the acolytes of A.J Ayer, who by 1939 were the dominant force in the philosophy department, were removed. Left behind were older dons, shaped primarily by traditions which predated logical positivism, to teach philosophy to a student body of which young women were now a much larger part. This cleared space for the protagonists of Metaphysical Animals to pursue their interests in fields like ethics. And crucially, to do so not in terms of better parsing the language used to describe them, but on the assumption that they were studying something real.

It is worth mentioning that Metaphysical Animals is one of two books this year to tell the story of the same four philosophers. There was also The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin Lipscomb. Which is interesting and as a work of straight biography probably superior. However, I felt it did not engage sufficiently with the ideas of its protagonists, which meant, for my taste, it didn’t give enough sense of the significance of the lives it ably chronicled. For my money that makes Metaphysical Animals the superior book.

7. How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures by Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist best known for “Dunbar’s number”, the idea that our brains can only handle 150 friendships. He must be one of the few people with the breadth of expertise and skill as a science communicator to tell this story which stretches across the whole of human history. This does a remarkable job of highlighting the commonalities between what on the surface seem like wildly different manifestations of religious practice.

It also had, for me at least, some genuinely new ideas. For example, the central of role of synchronicity in religious practice is something that once flagged you’ll see everywhere – from hymns sung together to the choreographed bowing of Friday prayers at a mosque, from the shared silence of a Quaker meeting to the tribal rituals which use dancing to the same beat to induce trances.

The thesis that religion has evolutionary origins is something that many believers may be suspicious about. It might seem like an attempt to debunk faith. That concern is basically misguided. If one believes the universe has a creator who intended its inhabitants to one day recognise him, then it would make sense an instinct towards religion but be built into us. More fundamentally, if religion serves such a core psychological and social purpose, then maybe the question is not whether we have religion but what kind.  

=5. Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China by Jing Tsu and A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language by David Moser

These two books both tell the story of the evolution of the Chinese language. A Billion Voices manages the remarkable feet of detailing its 3,000-year history in barely 100 pages. Kingdom of Characters instead focuses in on the recent history of written Chinese and the struggle to marry a system based on thousands of characters with technologies like the typewriter, telegram and dictionary which were envisaged with Latin alphabet’s 26 characters in mind. It further zeroes on in the people who made it happen and makes tangible what was at stake for them in this endeavour.

I confess I have put them on this list despite not having finished either. However, they are making an interesting pair as they seem to be heading towards contrasting conclusions. Moser seems to view China’s twentieth century modernisation as a missed opportunity to follow Korea and Vietnam in adopting a phonetic alphabet, whereas Tsu appears to view the same story as an example of tenacious innovation preserving a vital piece of China’s heritage into the present.

4. Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter

The topic of this book is both remarkable in its own right and for being so little know in much of the world. The steps China’s Republican government took to prevent the invading Japanese army consolidating its hold on the country are also unimaginable. They fight not only the Japanese but a large collaborationist army with minimal (and often unhelpful) Allied support, they move their capital further inland multiple times as the multiple cities are captured, they flooded larges sections of the country to literally bog the invaders down, consented to the American firebombing of occupied Wuhan to prevent it being used a base by the Japanese, and, crucially and fatefully, put on hold their hostilities with Mao’s communists.

Mitter is an admirable guide through this tale. It involves genuinely epic history, encompassing some of the twentieth century’s most consequential events, yet Mitter manages not only to recount them, but also reflect their human consequences, and all in a single, medium-length book.

It’s worth reading Forgotten Ally in conjunction with Mitter’s recent book China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism, which looks at how these same events are commemorated and the political ends to which they are put.

3. Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston

Like anyone who’s spent time in Oxford, Maxwell often felt like a background character in my life. His grand house on Headington Hill became Brookes’ law faculty, people who’d worked in publishing long enough were frequently still not over what he’d done, and I even studied with someone rumoured to be a relative of his. And yet, while I knew about the pension fraud that prefigured his probable suicide, maybe accidental death, just possible murder, until I read Fall I had no idea of the the full extent of his life (and crimes).

Preston is unsparing about the fact that Maxwell is a bad person. He lies, cheats, bullies, manipulates, steals, is wantonly cruel, narcissistic, turns scientific publishing into a racket, and, in the early chapters, even commits war crimes. This is one of the few narratives in which you’ll be rooting for Rupert Murdoch.

Despite all this, Preston’s Maxwell is never less than a flesh and blood man with thoughts and feelings as human as anyone else’s. Almost despite himself there is something admirable about a refugee tenaciously clawing his way from nothing to the top of British society despite hostility, often rooted in antisemitism, from members of the establishment. There’s also something emotionally vulnerable or even sensitive about him at times. Preston makes a particular effort to uncover the extent to which Maxwell was a product of a foundational trauma: the loss of his entire family in the Holocaust. Clearly this neither excuses nor explain what he later did. It should go without saying that the vast majority of Hitler’s victims who survived WWII did not go on to commit grand corporate fraud. However, it is hard not to see his near sociopathic acquisitiveness – not only of money but of status, esteem and power – as at some level trying to balance out the extent of his early loss. Preston recounts one particularly telling moment, when Maxwell’s son arrived at Headington Hill Hall to find his father stooped over the telly, his face almost touching the screen. The BBC was showing a documentary which featured phots taken at Auschwitz and he was hoping if he looked hard enough, he might catch a final glimpse of his parents or siblings.

2. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Before reading this, my view would have been that Radden Keefe’s previous book Say Nothing, a Shakespearean tale of death, intrigue, compromises and secrets set amidst the Northern Ireland Troubles, was likely an unmatchable achievement. Well, it turns out literary lighting does strike twice.

Empire of Pain argues that the hundreds of thousands of deaths that resulted from the US opioid epidemic can be traced back to one family: the Sacklers. Across generations they have built a pharmaceutical empire, which came to rest on sales of oxycontin. This drug that was supposed to eliminate chronic pain, but instead created millions of addicts. Radden Keefe traces how much successive generations of Sacklers knew and how directly involved they were in the crucial decisions. Indeed, one of the most infuriating parts of the book is the notes on sources, which is full of details on how the Sacklers tried to obfuscate the truth and bully people into not telling it. That said, more than a story of direct guilt, it becomes one of complicity, of how people and institutions in the orbit of the Sacklers find themselves corrupted by the lure of the family’s wealth.

1. Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi

There is a famous feminist slogan: “the personal is political”. Free demonstrates that the inverse is also true. Lea Ypi was born in Albania, when it was still known as the “North Korea of Europe”. Her school days are filled with lessons on the genius of Enver Hoxha’s brand of Stalinism. She implicitly accepts that Albania is the one true hold out of socialism, and is unphased by her family darkly mentioning people going away to “university” for long periods for unspecified reasons, and even whispered rumours that the Soviet Union has collapsed. Then one day in 1994, it is suddenly announced that one party communist rule will end and Ypi is forced to confront the fact her government, her country, and even her own family are not what she thought they were.

Ypi is a professor of political theory at the LSE and though the book follows a narrative structure, there is also a cogent argument weaved throughout it. She wishes to challenge a triumphalist narrative that the fall of communism marked Albania’s liberation. This is not to say that she is apologising for Hoxha’s regime. She is unflinching about its repression. However, she presents the arrival of capitalism in the country as a destabilising force. The security of a planned economy was replaced by rapacious impersonal forces out for private gain – corrupt officials, criminal gangs, and the managers of newly privatised firms looking to cut costs. This marked the start of the exodus of Albanians to Western Europe that continues to the present and the country was only pulled back from the brink of a civil war by the deployment of thousands of Italian soldiers.

However, what makes this book so special is that even if you don’t agree with Ypi’s thesis, and personally I find a loss of state capacity a more convincing explanation than marketisation for the travails of post-communist Albania, it still transports you into a particular moment of history. To continue a theme, Ypi has a skill for manifesting people, places, relationships, and moments on the page which rivals that of most novelists. And it is used in service of conveying experiences which are clearly etched into the author’s memory. You thus get these rich subplots like how because her mother is part of a family that was politically influential in pre-communist times, a committed Thatcherite, and, apparently, rather formidable, her father winds up being elected as an MP for the right-wing anti-communist party, despite his socialist instincts. This contradiction only grows more acute once he is given a minister portfolio with responsibility for overhauling the nation’s ports and must grapple with the expectation that he will make them economically viable, even if that means laying-off the bulk of their primarily Romany workforce. This at once draws on the understanding Ypi has instilled in her readers of her father’s character and the dynamics within her family, whilst also guiding us through Albania’s recent history and pushing us to ask questions about our political principles.

The portrait of Albania which emerges by the end of Free is not a happy one. The recent stories throughout the British press about Albanians trying to cross the English Channel in small boats have unfortunately also probably contributed to the impression that it is a depressing place. However, Free also underlines what a deeply fascinating place it is and what a rich and complicated history it has. Mostly as a result of reading it, I wound up visiting for the first time. Between beautiful old Ottoman cities, the impressive mountains of the north, the vineyard and olive tree filled countryside of the south, and peculiar relics of the Hoxha era – not to mention people who seem to genuinely welcome visitors – it is, in my opinion at least, one of the best destinations in Europe. Hopefully Free will be a way into its history for many more people.