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Martin Jacques |
Powerful love story behind China author
GREAT thoughts buzzed around the bookshop Waterstones in Hampstead on Thursday evening as Martin Jacques expounded his views that by the middle of this century the dominant world power, political and economic, will be China. America would have sunk beneath the waves by then.
“And it’s not all that far away, when you come to think of it,” he said, warming to his theme before an audience of nearly 40.
Jacques, author and research fellow at the London School of Economics, built his forecast on the theory that China was a “civilisation state”, with the longest history in the world, accounting for one-fifth of humanity. Down the centuries, Europe simply broke up into nation states – while China had been knitted together by Confucianism and values that spanned more than 3,000 years.
Imagine, today our culture is shaped by the dominant power, the United States, tomorrow by China!
He was talking about his latest book When China Rules the World, which has set minds going at the Foreign Office.
But there’s a personal story in the life of Jacques that wasn’t mentioned in Waterstones but comes through in his acknowledgements at the start of the 435-page of the book.
Jacques, who lives in Hampstead, suffered grievously at the death nine years ago of his wife Hari.
He writes: “My greatest debt of all is to Ravi, our son,…who was just sixteen months when Hari died. It has been an unspeakably painful, sad and cruel decade but together we have found a way to play, live and grow.
“Ravi, you have been my reason, the source of such pride and pleasure.
“Thank you for putting up when Daddy has been, in our words, in ‘his prison’, otherwise known as my study. … This book is for you but, as you know, it is dedicated to the memory of your mother who I loved beyond all reason of belief.
“She cannot share this moment of pleasure with us. The aching emptiness of her absence stills any sense of elation.”
This book may be defined as a great prophetic academic study but, to me, it is, perhaps more so, a great love story.
What’s in store for complex?
IT may look like a “carbuncle” as a reader described it to me the other day, but whatever it is called, the new complex is puzzling neighbours in West Hampstead.
Rumours are buzzing in the Fortune Green Road area that Tesco are planning to move into a ground-floor unit remain simply that – rumours.
Adamantly, a worker on the site told me Tesco would “definitely” move into it.
But I was given the brush-off by a Tesco press official who said: “We don’t comment on rumour and speculation.”
A growing number of residents are worried about the “march of Tesco” who have opened two new stores nearby.
Objectors may have found the architect of the complex, Piers Gough, receptive to their dark thoughts. Gough has been designing iconic buildings in Docklands as well as the home of his friend Janet Street-Porter in Clerkenwell.
While he said he was not a “Tesco fan” and favours smaller supermarkets, he recognises that Tesco wouldn’t be so commercially successful if they weren’t getting something right.
Unfair to call his vision a carbuncle?
He hoped those against the design – it was rejected twice by Camden council before being overturned on appeal – would come round to his vision.
“New things just take time to be appreciated,” he told me.
Blair meddling in the legacy of Brockway
THOUGHTS of that amazing radical Fenner Brockway, whose pamphlets and books stirred politicos in the post-war decades, flashed across my mind this week.
I remember seeing him in the 80s being pushed in a wheelchair to political gatherings, often at the Town Hall, by his friend Camden councillor Joan Hyams – still chirpy and politically sharp, though then nearing 90 years of age.
For some reason Joan, an ex-BBC producer, who lived in Belsize Park, had become Fenner’s friend and help.
It was a story in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday that set me thinking about Fenner (pictured), a fine pamphleteer and orator, who helped to set up a body known as the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Both Fenner, who lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and MCF were naturally despised by the establishment as enemies of the British Empire.
Of all people, Tony Blair, hardly appreciated for leftie ideas, was presented last week with the “Fenner Brockway Medal” by – of all people – Peter Mandelson, another New Labourite.
Probably, Blair, not known for his knowledge of history, even contemporary history, would have been aware of who Fenner Brockway was. If he had known, would he have accepted the medal?
House rates a poetic injustice
CHURCHILL once said something along the lines that a nation can be judged by the way it treats its prisoners.
I’d simply add that you can also measure a nation by how it treats its poets.
Wasn’t it Shelley who wrote that poets are the true legislators of society.? Using this measurement what can one make of the latest move by officialdom at the Town Hall to insist the organisers of the Torriano Meeting House – for many years a place where poets regularly meet – now pay the full business rates for their premises.
At the moment they pay a subsidised rate – the latest decision would compel them to find another £65 a month.
Not a large figure, you may think. But, considering the annual rent is £10,000 – a subsidy was withdrawn three years ago by the old Labour incumbents at the Town Hall – the churlish increase now being pursued by the Tory-Lib Dem administration seems all the nastier.
Obviously, thousands don’t rush every Sunday to hear our latest poets so revenue must be hard to find to meet Town Hall charges.
But, however small the audiences at the Torriano Meeting House, poets merit a sympathetic hearing among councillors. Although politics and poetry don’t go together, I’m sure councillors would not wish to be thought of in some quarters as small minded, unimaginative administrators.
Man on moon... Jackson walks tall
AMIDST all the hype about Michael Jackson this week, youngsters at Haverstock School seemed less affected. When a colleague dropped in at Haverstock’s annual Summer Music Festival on Friday, she was told by the teachers that the pupils hadn’t got caught up in all the emotion of Jackson death – though they were fascinated by his Moonwalk.
“We showed some YouTube clips in class, they weren’t so much upset as really interested,” said music teacher Steve Kite. |
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