Reply to comment

Published: 12 November, 2010

THE passing of a monarch or a statesman brings forth effusive – often very stuffy –  homilies at a state ceremony.

But no state occasion can compare with the political extravaganza in honour of Michael Foot at the Lyric Theatre in the West End on Monday evening, where the full portrait of the great man came out in music and words. Reminiscences and jokes flowed.

Joke: Geoffrey Goodman, the doyen of journalists, now more than 90, remembered how Michael, then editor of the Labour weekly, Tribune, wrote a sharp letter to George Bernard Shaw, telling him his article was 20 years out of date.

A contrite Shaw replied: “You are right, I wrote it 20 years ago, but it was then 40 years ahead of its times.”

Or what about the writer Francis Wheen, who rose to the occasion, cracked jokes, then looped over to the piano and tinkled the keys, Noel Coward-like, with lyrics about Michael that Sondheim would have approved of.

Then on came the party’s stiff, praetorian guards, a surprisingly fit Gordon Brown, the urbane Neil Kinnock and, hanging on, Cherie Booth.

But when they spoke what a disappointment. No fireside chat from Kinnock and Brown about the man they knew.

I don’t know what comes over big politicians when they stand in front of an audience but somehow they seize up and go into the Public Speaker mode – eloquent, well, perhaps, fluent, definitely, and here and there a bit of oratory, but in this case, where was Michael the man? Not there.

Big politicians, all of them, big on speechifying, as if it had been ordained somewhere that only a “political speech” would do.

What was needed was the human touch – we didn’t get it from Brown or Kinnock. As for Cherie, all she could do was read a message from her husband, which went down with a thud!

Still, Brown, did one good thing, he read a wonderful poem from our great William Blake, and here are the first three stanzas:

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill’d?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

The fruits of artist’s labour

I WAS drawing a pineapple at the weekend, says Royal Academician Stephen Farthing, as if to underline his credentials as a “real” artist.

You won’t see the pineapple at The Back Story, the new show from the research professor in drawing at the University of the Arts, who spends his time criss-crossing the Atlantic between studios in Pimlico and at the eastern end of Long Island.

Farthing has always taught – there have been prestigious posts from Oxford to Manhattan – and he says: “What’s important to me is how informed, clever people talk about art.” 

That’s what the show, part of the Royal Academy’s Artists’ Laboratory programme which opened on Wednesday and runs until December 19 at Burlington House, aims at allowing artists to “take risks and explore new ideas”. 

Farthing explains: “This is what I wouldn’t put in the summer [exhibition] show, you need to have a discussion about this, you need a dialogue.”

The title itself refers to how knowledge of its subject affects viewing an artwork and a reworking (with text telling the story) of Francois Boucher’s 1752 nude depicting Marie-Louise O’Murphy at age 14, before she became a mistress of Louis XV, illustrates this.

Muslim ‘spy princess’

THE story of Noor Inayat Khan – an Indian woman who spied for the Allies in the Second World War and died in a concentration camp – is little known.

In these days when the very word Muslim conjures up – for some people – disturbing thoughts, this story is more than significant. Thankfully, only a minority have such thoughts about Muslims.

Now, the name of Noor Inayat Khan, will, hopefully become better known, for a memorial in her memory is planned to be unveiled next year in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury – a stone’s throw from the house she lived in as a child. Shrabani Basu, the author of a book about Noor, (Spy Princess, Sutton Publishing, £9.99) told me the memorial would be a tribute to an unlikely hero.

Noor volunteered to spy for Britain when she was in her mid-20s. She spoke fluent French, and, as France was under Nazi occupation at the time, was dropped behind enemy lines to help aid the Resistance.

She was captured and tortured but refused to give information about her collaborators. Even the Gestapo officer who caught her testified to her braveness at his trial after the war, apparently crying when told of her eventual fate at the Dachau concentration camp.

Shrabani told me: “When I started researching her life I was interested in her primarily because she was an Indian woman. Her being Muslim was secondary – but in the times we are living in now it turns out to be quite significant.”

Those trying to erect a memorial to her in Gordon Square now need to raise £60,000 to pay for the scheme.