Moomintroll

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Reading Graham Farmelo’s Hawking: His Life and Work for the Telegraph, 14 September 2026 

Eight years have passed since the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died, aged 76, of complications caused by motor neurone disease. It was a condition that everyone expected would kill him in his mid-20s. Hawking faced down his gathering weakness and paralysis from a “ghastly prison,” as Graham Farmelo puts it in Hawking: His Life and Work, and from there issued, over 50 years, a stream of extraordinary intellectual accomplishments.

Hawking conducted most of his research at Cambridge University, but travelled constantly. Working at Caltech in Pasedena in the winter months were a fillip for him as his health declined. Hawking’s intellectual odyssey was launched on the idea that the universe must have had a starting point. In the midst of trying to understand this starting “singularity” to the universe — a dimensionless point from which both time and space emerged — and in eventually abandoning the idea, Hawking also, by-the-by, predicted just about everything we have since observed about black holes (and quite a bit that we haven’t). But who needs physics when you’ve got celebrity? His famous work of popular science, A Brief History of Time, was a bestseller, and broke a record for appearing on the Sunday Times charts for 237 weeks. His funeral was attended variously by Eddie Redmayne (who played him in the 2014 biopic, The Theory of Everything), Brian Cox, and, curiously, Hawking’s longtime fan Elon Musk.

No-one has ever been so crass as to suggest that either Hawking’s accomplishments, or the accolades that attached to him could ever redeem the ghastliness of his ineluctable condition. And yet they serve as a testament to the willpower of a man who doubted (and was given plentiful reason to doubt) that there is a special meaning to human life.

Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, with an ‘enormous head’ according to his mother, Isobel, and ‘one of the loudest voices I’ve ever heard.’ His sister Mary found him to be ‘one of the most self-centred people I’ve ever met.’ He stood out at St Albans School in 1952, if only for his ineptitude and physical awkwardness, and at 17 he entered University College, Oxford, where he coasted through his three-year degree by doing an average of only one hour of work a day. His friends nicknamed him Moomintroll because he was intensely excited by everything and constantly getting into scrapes. Then, in his second year, the early symptoms of his motor neurone disease began to manifest — not least a terrifying fall down a 30-foot wooden college staircase. He was so afraid he might have sustained brain damage, he took to falling asleep at night to a tape loop of his own voice endlessly reassuring him: “You are a genius.”

Hawking met his future wife, Jane Wilde, an English teacher, at a New Year’s party in 1962, just as he was beginning postgraduate research at Cambridge and shortly before he was diagnosed with ALS, the most common and least forgiving form of motor neurone disease. They married in 1965 and had three children. Hawking’s mother Isobel never felt easy about their life together. As early as 1970, and as Hawking resorted for the first time to a wheelchair, she wrote in her journal: “I don’t know whether the Stephen-Jane business is a happy defiance of the fates, or an unnatural pretence, whether there is real value in it or only a stubborn refusal to believe in the tragedy of life.”

That “stubborn refusal” led Hawking and Jane through a series of ever-evolving, ever-more dysfunctional domestic arrangements. In 1977, as Hawking’s condition deteriorated, Jane brought family friend Jonathan Hellyer Jones into the house to help her care for her husband. He became her lover, while Hawking grew ever closer to his nurse, Elaine Mason. Jane and Hawking’s parents fell out horribly.

The emotional gimcrackery of this arrangement blew up in everyone’s face once Hawking divorced Jane and married Elaine in 1995. The Sun and The Daily Mail ran sensational pieces about Elaine’s alleged abuse of her new husband, and the police even got involved (the couple strongly denied the allegations and the police dropped their investigation in 2004). When this second marriage ended in divorce, Hawking was left helpless and having to spend his nights alone — something he abhorred. Newspapers reported he fell for another of his carers, Diana King, who was 39 years his junior — but in his new biography of the man, Graham Farmelo does not give the story the time of day. He also dispatches persistent rumours around what Hawking got up to on Jeffrey Epstein’s island (nothing, because he was never there).

Even with the tittle-tattle set aside, there’s little victory to be found in Hawking’s relationships – unless and until you accept that leaving behind a messy and messed-up reputation was itself a triumphant human act. Hawking snatched at happiness, did work of consequence, screwed up his marriage, lost his edge, his good conscience and his every source of comfort, and ended up an embarrassing parody of himself: all this, at least, makes him like the rest and best of us.

Farmelo’s “authorised” biography is no snow-job. His portrait acknowledges that Hawking was never an especially nice person. Hawking was more than happy to point this out himself: in The Simpsons episode They Saved Lisa’s Brain, broadcast in May 1999, Hawking – and it really is Hawking – says to Homer, “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is intriguing. I may have to steal it.” Farmelo’s access to the family archive enables him to explore several intellectual feuds over attribution, though none are what you could call juicy.

Above all, Farmelo wants us to look past Hawking the Man to understand Hawking the Project: a determined mass effort, extending across decades, to maintain one human spirit against huge physical odds. It’s clear enough why the Hawking Estate would consider Farmelo a safe pair of hands: 2009’s The Strangest Man is a stunning biography of Paul Dirac, at once one of the most important and least personally engaging physicists of the 20th century. The more pressing question is: do we need another biography? Jane already gave us Music to Move the Stars (1999) expanded eight years later into Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, which formed the basis of The Theory of Everything. More recently, in 2021, we had Charles Seife’s very good Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity.

What can Farmelo bring to such a groaning table? He spends his early chapters dutifully paying homage to every family connection. But the book does eventually get going, and Farmelo handles Hawking’s scientific accomplishments with trademark economy and precision. His main achievement is to bring something of Isobel Hawking’s unsparing clear-sightedness to his warmly sympathetic account of Hawking’s life. Isobel refused to let her son’s scientific genius excuse his self-absorption, writing in her diary: “I suppose what in other people would just be bad manners is excusable great-mannishness in him. Certainly I should not put up with the way he treats me, if it were [done by] anyone else.”

While Farmelo’s book may not be essential, in the strictest sense, it is certainly worthwhile, and meets head-on the challenge set by a subject who, having lived an entire life under an immediate death-sentence, has already worked out its punch-line.

It was a line Stephen got so fed up repeating to people, he even pre-programmed it into his computer: “It’s not as if I had a choice and deliberately chose a difficult path,” he would say, through the machine that, after a tracheostomy in 1985, enabled him to speak. “I have just done the only thing open to me in the situation.”

“Like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing”

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Reading The End of Everything for the Telegraph, 27 June 2026

What kind of end, what kind of everything, is this?

The iGhetti arrived by accident, pouring “like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing” out of New York, Dubai, the great banking cities of China. They’re not of this world, but they’re not unworldly, either. In their own reality-breaking way, they’re not so different from us: “All projects, the iGhetti believe, are inherently good. They are good because they are projects.”

The iGhetti have filled Earth’s oceans with amorphous artefacts of uncertain use that swell up and adapt to whatever environment they end up in. Tennent, an Oxford PPE drop-out turned beachcomber, fishes one out of the Hastings surf (maybe Hastings, maybe Hythe, maybe some point in between – since the iGhetti arrived and broke things, who cares for geography?) and within days it’s grown limbs and a face and the rudiments of language: “Hello, nice,” it says.

Tennent’s aunt Marnie wants nothing to do with the thing; neither does Tennent’s sometime lover Alice. He tries selling the thing to Hampson, “the beachcomber’s call of last resort”, who uses iGhetti artefacts as organic batteries, or maybe sentient transmitters, or maybe none of the above, in an effort to communicate with the “invaders”. But Hampson is a creep, and Tennent changes his mind. Alice catches a passenger ferry into the impenetrable sea fog that stands, in this broken world, for the future. Sooner than accompany her, Tennent and the thing wave her goodbye and then fetch up at a seaside gallery where they find Marnie sleeping “in a corner of the inevitable gift shop, under a pile of Mondrian-themed cycling jerseys”.

Things are mounting to a tragic crisis. Newcomers to Harrison’s work will have immense difficulty articulating how. It is the end of everything. It would take a novel to explain why.

Toxic praise has dogged the forty-odd year career of M John Harrison. He’s so weird, his fans sigh; he’s one of a kind. If you insist you can read The End of Everything this way – as a pretty ribbon, tying together much of what Harrison has made before. The iGhetti are the same existential bumblers we met in 1980’s A Storm of Wings. Alice and Marnie might have wondered out of 1992’s metaphysical puzzle-box The Course of the Heart. The Great Rift of Harrison’s sly space opera Light and its sequels is implicit here in the Strip – a stretch of post-apocalyptic High Weald coastline where, along with the teashops and antiques fairs, “there was a lot of poured cement and half-functioning neon, a lot of territoriality”.

But this would be to miss much that is new, or at any rate, whetted to a finer edge.

Now the iGhetti are here, people don’t quite know what to do with themselves. But – this is a point Harrison has been orbiting around for a while, and this time he nails it – they never did know. Reality is big and humans are small. Apprehending the world in its fullness would annihilate them, so they have always taken care to wear blinkers. Back before the iGhetti arrived there was something called “the economy”, and that made no sense either, and “life had been like a huge silent beautiful blossom opening to the economic light, with its roots deep in a mysterious, self-fulfilling growth medium and its leaves outstretched to welcome each new opportunity, untroubled and hothoused…”

Harrison understands the novel is merely a score: that it’s the reader who does all the work. The End of Everything is constructed like an overheard conversation – the reader can’t quite credit that they heard what they thought they heard, or that it means what they think it means.

It takes an extraordinary amount of engineering to carry off this effect. Harrison isn’t weirder than most other writers; he’s better. Writing at this level of intensity takes its toll. For the first time, and writing ostensibly about his protagonist, Harrison allows himself what amounts to a life statement: “What had begun as his desire to see and understand the end of the world,” he writes, “had decayed first into a kind of adventure sport, then a profession, and at the last, a burden.”

Most of this burden is being lifted from the reader’s shoulders: reading The End of Everything, you feel you’re not so much reading as dreaming. I’d call this a painterly effect, if calling a novel “painterly” wasn’t itself a kiss of sales death. But what the hell: The End of Everything is like a painting by Paul Nash – chalky, degreased, illumined – as the man himself says – by “a pure 1930s light, from an imagination stocked when people could use words like ‘spiritual’ and still mean something.”

The entirety of our human state

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Owning the ageing process at the Wellcome Collection, London, for the Spectator, 11 March 2026

More than thirty contemporary artists — Anna Maria Maiolino, Tam Joseph and the like — contribute to Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as often so happens at Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first.

“These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power — energy — the will to succeed. The other is listeless — tired all the time — it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.”

The point being, ageing is a process, not an event. It is as much a matter of style, and manners, and even morality, as it is a matter of medicine. Ageing is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other.

In 1972 Simone de Beauvoir nailed this point beautifully in her still rather neglected book La Vieillesse (the American edition translated that as “Coming of Age”; a revealing cop-out). As she sets out to break the conspiracy of silence around old age — this ‘forbidden subject’, she calls it — she demands her readers use their imaginations and recognise themselves in the aged other.

“If we do not know what we are going to be,” she writes, “we cannot know what we are: let us recognise ourselves in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state.”

Like those good fellows at Kellogg’s, curator Shamita Sharmacharja wants visitors to own their ageing process, and value the prospect — if not indeed the present reality — of old age.

It’s a Quixotic enterprise because, as Philip Roth once quipped, “In every calm and reasonable person there is hidden a second person scared witless about death,” and there are few reminders of death more terrifying than the one that confronts us in the mirror each morning. “About a year ago,” wrote the American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, “I suddenly realised that I could not face walking toward myself again in the morning because here is this strange, uncouth, ugly, kind of toad-like woman… long thin legs, long thin arms, and a shapeless little toad-like torso and this head at the top with great staring eyes. And I thought, Jesus, why do I have to do this?”

Shock and outrage find their visible expression at the Wellcome in Paula Rego’s bruised and twisted self-portraits, made in 2017 after she fell. (Awakened to our society’s ubiquitous ageism, I am absolutely *not* going to write “after she had a fall”).

William Utermohlen’s visual record of dementia is only marginally more muted: an achingly articulate series recording his steadily disintegrating impression of his own face.

How do you weave a worthwhile life-stage from such gloomy material? The older I get, the more I am struck by the profound wisdom of Eric Idle’s song at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Looking on the bright side of life are Kimiko Nishimoto and Shiro Oguni. Oguni’s Restaurant of Mistaken Orders — represented here by a few knick-nacks, aprons, menus — is a pop-up dining experience employing servers with dementia. By accepting from the outset that orders might be incorrect, the restaurant fosters patience, empathy, and joyful human connection over cold, technical perfection.

Nishimoto, meanwhile, began taking self-portraits in her seventies, using Photoshop to stage herself left out with the bins, or hanging from a washing line, or drifting serenely from a tree. The moral being, I suppose, that if life discards us at the end, we may as well have some fun with the idea.

Maija Tammi’s photographic print Immortal’s Birthday Party conjures up a space that’s part 18th-century Wunderkammer, half child’s bedroom, like the lair of a particularly naive Nosferatu. The trouble being, of course, that age is real, and there really is a moment when we have to put away childish things, and even middle-aged things, in time.

Why?

Well, look to The Way of Things — the world’s first (and, to everyone’s secret relief, last) verse-form book of popular science. In it the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius argued that it’s not just life that’s finite; life’s possibilities are finite, too. Yes, you can fall in love any number of times — but you can only fall in love for the first time once. By the time all gratifications have been experienced, living endlessly is futile. “Do you expect me to invent some new contrivance for your pleasure?” Nature sneers. Growing up and ageing always incurs a loss, but refusing to grow up — remaining perfectly innocent and untouched by the world — is an even greater loss. As J.M. Barrie understood, Peter Pan ultimately represents Death.

Am I arguing that, for all Sharmacharja’s efforts, I came away thinking that ageing is a uniformly bad idea?

Not at all. For women it’s much worse. (Or as that All-Bran leaflet has it: “These 2 women are the same age. One has the bloom of youth. The other is wrinkled, gray, careworn, far older than her years.”)

The depressing fact is, it takes more effort for women to camouflage their temporal nature. They’re the ones who bleed, who give birth, who feed infants, and who, at no great age, cease to be able to give birth.

Wellcome‘s approach to exhibition-making can get a bit modish. The desire to connect science to medicine, and medicine to society, and society to politics, and politics to technology, and back to science again, can induce — in this visitor, at any rate — the sort of dazed passivity I associate with getting dangerously drunk with anthropology graduates.

In this show, however, I think medium and message come together superbly. Ageing, in general, leads to old age, and old age leads to death, and death leads to terror, and terror leads to meanness, especially towards women, whose capacity for childbearing is so painfully and obviously truncated half way through life. No wonder women, just as much as men, judge other women harshly if (by dropping a tampon out of their handbag, say) they reveal their animal nature. (That’s a genuine psychological experiment, by the way — and a genuine result.)

Is this intimate connection between death-terror and misogyny in any way fair? Of course not. But as a fact of life it’s the very devil to get around. Serena Korda’s striking and powerful ceramic installation Wild Apples tries to reframe the menopause as a powerful moment of transformation, but how does it do this? By reclaiming, for hard-done by women, the archetype of the hag and the crone. So much for the escapist power of art.

The Coming of Age wants us to make that Beauvoir-esque imaginative leap and think our way into aged skin. We probably ought to give this a try. The world is getting older by the day; soon it will be getting emptier, as working-age adults find the costs of elder care so burdensome that they can’t afford to have children. I suppose we’d better make our peace with a rapidly ageing world, and make the best of it.

But let’s be frank here: empathy is a bore. And other responses to ageing are available.

The ancient Greeks (at least according to Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 book The Human Condition) developed a surprisingly hard-nosed view of ageing and death. They believed that being remembered was the nearest they could realistically come to immortality. So they revered fame, and the moral and physical excellence that would inculcate fame. Needless to say, they were vain to a fault.

Remember this, once it dawns on you that The Coming of Age is as much about sex, and fashion, and death, and our roles in society, as it is about its proper subject. People are like that around ageing, and have been for the longest time. Get them on the subject of ageing, and they will end up covering everything else under sun, in a frantic bid to evade thoughts of where ageing is leading them (and dress it up how you like, it’s nowhere pretty).

Evasion is the point. And meanwhile, and as it says on the T shirt (also part of the exhibition, and I desperately want one): “DON’T DIE.”

Teen hackers and vampires at the Oxford Literary Festival

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This year at the Oxford Literary Festival I’ll be talking to John Blair about killing the dead, and learning from Joe Tidy how to hijack the internet.

Sunday, 22 March 2026
12:00pm
Joe Tidy
Ctrl+ Alt+ Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet

Wednesday, 25 March 2026
10:00am
John Blair
Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World

“Madam, you are cured”

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Exploring the intersection of health and the arts for the Financial Times, 3 March 2026

As if his careers in politics, philosophy, engineering and the army were not enough, Benjamin Franklin also found time to invent the armonica. Thirty-seven glass bowls of different sizes, arranged along an iron spindle and turned by a foot pedal, produced a quavering sound, much like you make when you run a wetted finger around a wine glass. When Princess Izabela of Poland had a nervous breakdown in London, and started composing teary lines of farewell to friends and family, Franklin nipped round with his armonica to cheer her up. “Madam” he announced, when he was done, “you are cured.” And up she leapt, her melancholy quite dispelled.

In the 250-odd years between then and now, germ theory, pharmaceuticals and public health measures have improved public health and roughly doubled the human lifespan. Our poor gellid brains now have twice as many opportunities to go wrong. Alongside depression (or melancholy, or ennui, or whatever you want to call it) a host of new conditions has emerged. Many set in late in life, and have to do with wear and tear. In the UK, more than one in ten of us now die with dementia, and drugs alone cannot deal with the spectre of neurological decline.

Who would have thought that at the end of our long road of medical progress, we would find Benjamin Franklin waiting for us, poised over his armonica? And yet, at a Tefaf summit on culture and public policy on March 16, a panel of experts will pay unconscious homage to Franklin as they set out what the arts can do to delay, soothe and manage our physical and mental decline.

In her recent book Art Cure, as well as telling us about Benjamin Franklin, Daisy Fancourt traces the history of the relationship between the arts, medicine and mental health.
The absence of the arts in healthcare is, Daisy reveals, a largely post-war phenomenon. To see how central the arts were to medicine in general, and mental healthcare in particular, we need only look back at the Victorian era, whose asylums were, contrary to cliché, hotbeds of humane innovation. Hospitals in Dumfries and Montrose employed artists and maintained studios for painting, sculpture, and woodcarving. Worcester City and County Lunatic Asylum employed Edward Elgar to compose dance sets specifically for its patients.  In Germany, the Illenau “Cure and Nursing Home” maintained a house choir, a marching band, and a chamber orchestra, hosted 140 performances a year, and published specially composed hymns for other asylums to use.

Fancourt, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London, runs clinical trials to test the medical impact of the arts, and advises governments on how to integrate community support activities into their national health systems. In 2017 the World Health Organisation commissioned her to write an evidenced report on the arts and health. Published in 2019 and cowritten with her colleague Saoirse Finn, it ended up being downloaded a quarter of a million times, says Fancourt, “and this led to the realisation that this is not a niche thing.” The WHO’s forthcoming technical reports and resolution are milestones in the effort to get the arts back into healthcare. Fancourt, UNESCO’s first-ever Chair in Arts and Global Health, is appearing at the Tefaf summit in Maastricht and, through her keynote speech, to talk up a new era of arts-based complementary healthcare.

She can expect some push-back. “If you’ve trained for seven years to be a doctor,” says Giles Wilmore, Director of Community for the chamber orchestra Manchester Camerata, “you don’t necessarily want to be told that somebody with a box of percussion instruments can achieve just as much as you can.”

But with a long career in the Department of Health and the NHS at his back, Wilmore reckons that the clinical case for therapeutic arts is as compelling as the economic one. (Social prescribing alone brings a return on arts investment of between £2 and £9 for every £1 invested, mostly by lowering demand on GPs and the pharmaceutical system. Arts interventions are uniquely cost-effective because they provide multiple health benefits simultaneously.

Now Wilmore is transforming the Camerata’s musical work with people who live with dementia into something like a national movement. Camerata is training hundreds of volunteers, and providing the know-how for any city in the UK to replicate its care work using the same data-backed methods.

To see what the arts can do for people with dementia, one need only visit one of Camerata’s “music cafes”, where improvisational techniques are used to engage both clients and carers in activities they can lead themselves. Camerata CEO Bob Riley recalls one woman, brought along by her children, slumped and unresponsive, who had just come out of hospital. “We were told she had barely eaten, and hadn’t been out of bed for three weeks. The musician saw a gentle bouncing in her knee — a tiny thing, you almost wouldn’t have noticed it. The musician started mirroring that movement, and all of a sudden her head rises, she’s back in the room and her eyes are open. The flautist improvises on the shake in her knee — a tango-esque melody — and after five minutes she’s dancing around the room.”

This is touching, but what is art actually doing in these situations? Fancourt recalls, “We went through a phase where we had a lot of laboratory experiments on arts activities that tried to dissect which element of an artistic intervention was responsible for which therapeutic effect. But that was completely missing the point, which is that the arts offer the brain the equivalent of a whole-body workout.”

Fancourt is referring to art’s effects on the mesolimbic system, the neurochemical engine in the brain that keeps us engaged with the world by constantly testing our perceptions against our expectations.

Whenever there’s a mismatch between what we expect and what we get, dopamine is released, encouraging the formation of new neural pathways. Music exploits this phenomenon on an almost bar by bar basis, since when we listen to a new song, our brains are constantly trying to guess where the melody is going based on every other song we’ve ever heard. The trick is not to release dopamine into the brain any old how, rendering us all addicts to bovine pleasure, but to control the release of dopamine to promote its most therapeutic effects.

Art establishes some visual or auditory or narrative pattern and then violates it. When we see blue water lilies emerge from Claude Monet’s seemingly chaotic canvases, aesthetic pleasure arrives on a wavelet of dopamine. Art stimulates the release of dopamine in a measured and sustained manner that dopaminergic medicines cannot even begin to match. This is probably why artists often possess structurally “younger” brains, with greater grey matter density (thicker neural connections) than you would find in the brains of non-artists. It’s an effect that seems to resonate through the rest of the body. Adults who are active in the arts are biologically around 9.5 months younger than those who never engage.

More important, people with greater grey matter density, nurtured by arts involvement, may delay the onset of dementia symptoms by years. The arts’ effects on the mesolimbic system makes them particularly useful in the treatment of that other great neurological scourge of our times, Parkinson’s disease.

In the UK, partly due to an aging population and longer survival times, Parkinson’s is a serious and increasingly common contributory cause of death. Bas Bloem, professor of neurology at Radboud University in the Netherlands, argues that art acts as a “lever” that can help overcome the frozen, dopamine-depleted motor patterns associated with the disease. Right now he’s midway through a rigorously designed 18-month study comparing the experience of three groups of people with Parkinson’s: a control group who aren’t exposed to art, a group that get free trips to the galleries of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and a group who actively make art.

His results will be analysed closely. One of the more curious findings in the field recently has been the discovery that enjoying art as a punter is quite as therapeutic — and maybe even more therapeutic — than “doing” art. A large-scale study led by Monash University published in late 2025 followed over 10,000 older adults and found that those who regularly listened to music had a 39 per cent reduced risk of developing dementia. Surprisingly, those who played an instrument had a slightly lower (33 per cent) reduced risk.

Another study last year, using Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data, asked the question: “How much art is enough?” It turns out that engaging in arts activities for up to one hour a week yielded cognitive benefits comparable to vigorous physical exercise. As Fancourt says in her book, “I’m really not convinced that the arts are so much less enjoyable than eating broad beans or sweating in the gym.”

Fancourt advocates for a future that values the arts as much as it values sport — as a social institution that sustains public health even as it nurtures and celebrates elite excellence. “We manage to have leisure centres and climbing walls and indoor skiing, just for the fun of it. And at the same time we have exercise-on-referral programmes and we integrate exercise into clinical care. And while all that’s going on we have Olympic-level training programmes. I feel we can surely get to that same point with the arts.”

The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of British woodland

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Reading Ancient by Luke Barley for the Spectator, 3 March 2026

You’re up an oak tree somewhere between Ashtead and Epsom. Wet lichens glow as you hunt for a footing on slick limbs. From the top of the canopy, the land turns to sea, and glades appear as “oceans between continents of trees.” A ghostly armada of dead oaks lies becalmed in a clearing: a bleached collection of hulks left from a fire decades ago.

Like the titular character of Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book The Lorax, Luke Barley speaks for the trees, and his not-so-secret ambition is to make armchair woodlanders of us all. Ancient is his history of British woodlands, which turn out to be a lot more ancient, and a lot less wild, than the neophyte reader might expect.

And if the history doesn’t grab you, there’s always the memoir; Luke Barley’s account of his years as a ranger are beautifully turned. What’s not to enjoy about lying face down with your cheek against rough bark, staring into a forest of oak twigs just a few centimetres tall, steeped in miniature groves of sporophytes and haunted by scurrying woodlice?

Barley was studying American history and literature at university when he got caught up with activists and loggers in California, fell in love with redwoods, and decided to pursue conservation. Back in Britain he’s learned the traditional craft of coppicing at Spring Park, a fragment of hazel coppice perched on a gravel ridge between Bromley and Croydon. He’s pruned ancient oak pollards at Ashtead Common, managed Dodgson Wood — a temperate rainforest in the Lake District — and fought ash dieback in the White Peak. Barley’s account of himself would have us believe he’s a perpetual apprentice confronting one desperately steep learning curve after another, before huddling up with fellow rangers and contractors to drink tea from a dented flask in the pouring rain. Even his chainsaw’s a charmer, the smell of oak dust pluming from its teeth “pungent and sharp, but not unpleasant to anyone who appreciates builder’s tea or an earthy red wine”. Sampled like this, the prose is a bit fulsome, I suppose; in context it’s mesmerising.

Before the arrival of humans, ancient British “wildwood” was never tangled, tall and dark; it was a kind of savannah, “crashed around, broken and browsed by… super-elephants, super-rhinoceroses and super-horses”, says Barley, channeling the prose of his hero, the ecological historian Oliver Rackham.

As a consequence, most of our native tree species, once felled, are able to spring back to life from dormant buds beneath the bark of the stump. If you want to keep a tree producing wood in perpetuity — for firewood, charcoal, fencing, furniture, plates, bowls, boxes, you-name-it — simply chop it at ground level (coppicing) or at head height (pollarding). There’s almost no ancient tree, even in pockets of supposed wildwood, that hasn’t been harvested for its wood at some time or other, and this industrial but sustainable system, says Barley, had the unintentional side-effect of replicating conditions between 65 and 10 million years ago, when British flora and fauna evolved. Such is the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of British woodland, it’s at its healthiest and most diverse when managed, but loses all charm, health and variety when left alone.

That “leaving alone” — neglect would be a better word — began with acts of enclosure, which by physically separating the population from the land, caused British “wood culture” to collapse.
Post-war “scientific forestry” replaced complex native woods with monocultures of non-native conifers like Sitka spruce precisely because they were uniform and required less skill and fine judgement to harvest than the idiosyncratic native trees. Farmers and landowners, focused on intensive food production, came to view woodland as “waste”. Coppiced woods grew dark and uniform, and ancient pollards at places like Ashtead became top-heavy and prone to collapse because the cycle of cutting them was broken in the nineteenth century.

At his bleakest, Barley conceives of contemporary rural Britain as a “binary landscape” of dark woods and open fields, managed by a society suffering from a uniquely severe disconnection from nature.

What can be done? Where most authors escape into well-meaning generalities, Barley brings real heft to a vision of Britain reawakened to wood. Working healthy savannah-like wood-pasture produces small, crooked, or irregular timber that today is often only sold as firewood. Advances in processing, though, allow strips of this smaller wood to be glued together into laminates that are incredibly strong. The Black & White Building in East London uses a frame of laminated beech that is stronger than steel, while the Sheffield Winter Garden uses curved beams of laminated larch. By turning low-quality wood into high-quality structural components, engineered timber provides a financial incentive for landowners to manage woods that might otherwise be too expensive to maintain.

Barley the memoirist, meanwhile, is by his own admission a melancholy chap, “off on my self-absorbed spiritual quest.” But he’s only teasing. Ancient is imbued with a powerful sense of community. Britain’s woods are for people — because people, whether they know it or not — are the woods’ life-blood.

Not successful, not celebrated, not pleasant

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Reading Sergio Luzzatto’s The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès for the Spectator, 30 January 2026

The Marquis de Morès was a man of many abilities, but balancing a cheque-book was not one of them. Bested (savaged, frankly) by the Chicago meat-packing lobby, frustrated in his attempt to build a railroad across Indochina, the French soldier, duellist and self-styled “economist” returned home in 1886, caused absolute havoc, and invented fascism (if we let the author have his way) — only to meet nemeses much closer to home. His father-in-law went to court to seperate his daughter’s finances from those of her husband; a family council took charge of Mores’s money; at last it came out that this tireless scourge of Jewish usury had borrowed from lobbyist and conman Cornelius Herz, one of the leading (and Jewish) players in the Panama scandal. Publicly embarrassed, Morès took himself off to Algeria and set about planting an unsanctioned French flag further and further into the Sahara, where he and his small party came to grief at last, massacred by local tribesmen.

It was the Jews what really done it, or so his admirers claimed, just as it was Jews had blighted Morès’s innovative bid to transport already slaughtered beef cattle, rather than live ones, across the Mid-West.

Butchers in New York and Paris, bankers, politicians, officers in the French army (this book reaches its climax, and Morès his nadir, amidst the Dreyfuss affair) — if they were Jews, you can be sure they were out to get him.

Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto assembles historical vistas in pointilliste style, through the details of lives of carefully selected individuals. This is not so much Carlyle’s “great man” theory as “A History of Europe in 100 Foibles”. With Mussolini and Primo Levi hanging off his belt, Luzzatto now turns to Morès — and what a peculiar choice he is: not a thinker, not an intellectual, not a writer, not a “creative” of any sort, not successful, not celebrated, and, to top it all, not pleasant.

More timid intellects might trace the roots of Europe’s far right to syndicalism, corporatism, anticapitalism and medievalism. Luzzatto turns his back entirely on the sort of history that would turn politics into a sort of bloodless debating club, and goes for the jugular. The far right makes no sense without antisemitism; and Luzzatto lays out the accidents, contingencies and affordances that have baked antisemitism into any and every attempt to unweave time and undream the market-driven world.

The First Fascist is a book that shines more in retrospect than in the act of reading: a book of minutiae that, once ingested, may change your view of fin de siecle history.

Napoléon III’s disastrous six-week war against Prussia in 1870 sent the French government lurching from one crisis to another. There were so many different factions in its Chamber of Deputies, all governments ended up being coalitions, and it was quite usual to find a new government boasting nearly all the same ministers as the previous one. Extremist factions of wildly different stripes agreed on this: there had to be a more direct and visceral connection between the state and its people.

Morès was one of several who threw their hat into that particular ring. (A butterfly flaps its wings, and Luzzatto finds himself writing about Boulanger, or Barrès, or Déroulède, or Delahaye). Was Morès the single pivot on which European history turned? Luzzatto is too measured to claim anything so crass.

But I’m not, and here’s the Hollywood version: Mores’s nationalist-sociaist ideology — a synthesis of vigilante violence, anti-capitalist populism, and the cult of the “strong man” — did not form in the salons of Paris, but in the slaughterhouses of Medora, North Dakota. He backed to the hilt (and damn-near into prison) the Montana Stranglers’ ruthless killing of cattle rustlers. Technically, this was murder. Practically, it was the removal of murderers and very useful to mankind (and don’t take my word for it, that’s Morès’s neighbour Teddy Rooseveldt speaking). Morès viewed the badlands as a space to resurrect a feudal order where he was the lord, the cowboys were his serfs, and the law was irrelevant.

Bringing the “cowboy style” to the refined streets of Paris (down to the revolver and the hat), Morès tried to recreate the Montana Stranglers in Paris using newsboys and butchers…

Ah, but here, sad to say, the wheels of our gay little cart come flying off, because, as Luzzatto himself observes, although Morès brought an distinctly American sensationalism to French politics, and surrounded himself with butchers and newsboys, this Chicago-hardened populist thug ”seemed disinclined to organise them into real squads with any real purpose of action — into a kind of paramilitary that could be deployed in the streets to exercise a systemic use of force.”

One can only deplore the way Luzzatto lets the air out of his tyres in service of the truth — does he not want to shift copies? But one can only admire his rejection of “intellectual history” in favour of the real thing: a history composed of actions (inescapably bloody) and consequences (irretrievably dismal).

A speculative fiction on a meaningless condition

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Talking to Pierre Huyghe for the Financial Times, 10 January 2026

“I don’t care what you say about these quantum technologies,” the French conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe told Berlin-based curator Bettina Kames, “I don’t buy it.”

Quantum sensors and quantum computers exploit the blurriness of the world at the smallest achievable scale, where, among other oddities, unobserved particles may share properties and occupy more than one position at once. By exploring many possibilities in tandem, they can perform calculations and take measurements that are otherwise fundamentally impossible. With them we’ll revolutionise drug discovery, secure global communications, understand the climate and accelerate artificial intelligence.

But what use is all that to an artist? “People are usually fascinated and intrigued by this field,” says Kames, the co-founder of LAS Art Foundation in Berlin, a roving gallery of future-facing, interdisciplinary work. Kames was out to commission a piece on the quantum realm but found Huyghe “quite critical.”

“Quantum science and technology is a battlefield,” Huyghe tells me from his studio in Santiago, Chile. He says this with some relish: whatever his artistic reservations, there’s no denying his appetite for a field notorious for its “weirdness”. “Everything about it gets cast as analogy and metaphor because the researchers are still having a hard time putting their achievements into words and formulas. There is some agreement, but also a lot of argument.

The problem, I suggest to the quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco — architect of the European Union’s quantum strategy, and collaborator on Huyghe’s latest artwork — is that we can’t simply point to the odd things happening at such a tiny scale. The quantum realm involves structures smaller than the wavelength of light, so there’s no way we can actually experience them with our senses.

Only it turns out — as Calarco explains with a grin — that we can.

An atom throws off a photon whenever one of its electrons jumps with seeming randomness from one orbit to another; the human eye is sensitive enough to detect this constant flickering. “It’s the only time in your life you will ever see an effect without a cause.”

Back in the lab, Calarco’s job is to protect the parts of quantum computers from this sort of interference. He wondered how you could visualise working, not just with one atom, but with dozens arranged in a lattice, as in a quantum computer. “I had no idea Bettina had Pierre Huyghe on her list of potential collaborators. When I heard, I said: I’m catching the first plane to Chile.”

In Paris in 2013, Calarco, at a loose end, had wandered into Huyghe’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. “I was blown away by the depth of each piece, by their variety, by their overarching coherence.” Huyghe had retained the walls and labels from the previous exhibition (a retrospective of artist Mike Kelley), arranging his work so that new art appeared to grow out of the decay of the old. One piece, Zoodram, featured a hermit crab living inside a bronze replica of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. Rather than have a museum display his art, Huyghe’s art had taken over the museum. “It was overwhelming.”

Kames set up a Zoom call between the pair, and witnessed their instant connection. Huyghe talks now about Calarco’s “beautiful mind”; Calarco talks about Huyghe’s “genius”.

The proof will be in the piece, a large-scale installation dominated by a “monstrous unthinkable” — the faceless protagonist of an enormous hour-long, 9X9-metre film.

In Halle am Berghain, a vast industrial space adjoining the notorious Berlin nightclub, quantum properties will be transposed into sensory information, encompassing sound, vibration, dust, and light. “Pierre embraced the idea of using the quantum computer as an actual instrument,” Calarco explains. “We pluck the machine like a string.” The “string” here is the energy field between atoms. Pulling atoms away from each other yields a reverberation that can be picked up by an electrical circuit.

“For the first time, we’ll hear the sound of a quantum computer,” Calarco says. “It’s one of the biggest achievements of my career.”

“Liminals” is merely the latest stop on Huyghe’s magical mystery tour of a charming but indifferent cosmos. For Huyghe, fiction is the lens through which we see reality most clearly — that idea has provided the artist with rich pickings throughout his career. Take 2002’s “L’Expédition Scintillante”, the fictional tale of an expedition to Antarctica, told through an epic exhibition comprising indoor fog, a melting ice ship, and a twirling ice skater.

Other pieces have been artfully daft. In 1999, Huyghe and frequent collaborator Philippe Parreno purchased the rights from a Japanese design compay to AnnLee, a wide-eyed purple-haired female manga character, for a few hundred dollars. They then handed over the avatar to other artists to use in any way they wished, creating animations in which AnnLee wanders a lunar landscape, or recites Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Finally in 2002 AnnLee was “terminated”, buried in a coffin constructed out of parts from Ikea’s Billy bookcase.

In the last decade or so, Huyghe has been less interested in creating fictions; now his artworks pretty much force you to make up stories of your own.[are there quotes from Huyghe we can bring into this section or around it, just to bring his voice more into this biographical bit?] “We construct fiction to turn chaos into cosmos. Fiction is our tool to survive,” he says. “Without it, we would be confronted with the reign of contingency. The world would be quite literally unthinkable. Fiction is a mask we put on everything, but at the same time it’s the lens bringing to world into focus.”

At the Documenta 13 exhibition in 2012, in Kassel, Germany, he created “Untilled”, a “live construct ecosystem” in a compost heap, populating it with ant nests, psychotropic plants, a sculpture of a nude woman with a live beehive for a head, and an albino dog with a pink leg named “Human” that roamed the installation. The idea behind “Untilled” was to create an artwork that possessed a life of its own, separate from human attention.

Huyghe has been refining this proposition ever since. For 2018’s Uumwelt at London’s Serpentine Gallery he collaborated with informatician Yukiyasu Kamitani at Kyoto University, Japan, to look into our minds. Images conjured to mind by volunteers in MRI scanners were used to train learning models, and these models then tried to interpret what a diffferent set of volunteers were thinking about. Keeping up with the blizzard of disjointed, surreal images spilling from five huge screens forced viewers into an hallucinatory state. People stumbled out convinced they’d seen something. No one could agree what it was.

Huyghe’s 2014’s film “Untitled (Human Mask)” features a masked monkey, dressed as a young girl and trained as a waiter, tootling about an abandoned cafe. It is Huyghe’s most celebrated piece, and also the most misrepresented. Yes, it’s “about” being unaware of the role one plays in the world. But it’s much more a trap for the viewer: you can’t help but read human intentionality into what that monkey’s up to. You can’t help but make up stories.

“I think we are deeply chimeric and deeply monstrous and we’re made out of bits of mask. That is what I was trying to say,” Huyghe explains. “But it’s not a discovery that should be depressing! There’s joy to be had in being artificial.” Artifice is our species’ special talent, after all: “Was it Mallarmé called us ‘feux d’artifice’ — fireworks?.”

There’s no getting at the real; the trick is to find joy in the attempt.

In an enormous industrial space that resounds to the twanging of quantum-scale strings — a cacophony of causes without effects — Huyghe’s gigantic filmic protagonist tries to know itself. This generated figure, says Huyghe, is “a speculative fiction on a meaningless condition — a human-like membrane inseparable from the environment it is in.”

A modish idea? Perhaps: but it’s bread and butter to the physicist Tommaso Calarco. You look into the quantum realm and you see a world that doesn’t need you. So you try to understand it. You tell stories about it, come up with analogies, metaphors. You engage with it, “and you feel alive. You wake to your own agency, your own consciousness,” Calarco says. It’s what made him such an admirer of Huyghe’s art. “The work doesn’t try to sell you anything. It doesn’t need your attention. It interests you, and you make it yours.”

Superficially efficient and fundamentally amoral

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Reading The Score by C Thi Nguyen for the Telegraph, 2 January 2026

In the Domesday Book of 1086, C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the “hide”: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. A useful measure, obviously; but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others. So how much land, exactly, would the average English family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.

If decisions are taken locally, there’s little issue. But as soon as authority begins to centralise, units such as the “hide” disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge becomes forgotten. The more centralisation advances – and in our modern age, it has only advanced – the greater the problem grows.

The Score is part-polemic and part-philosophical inquiry. Nguyen’s argument, in essence, is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets, and built rules around them. The result: our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral – not to mention inescapable – game. Nguyen himself is a philosopher, but also a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing and yo-yoing: in other words, he understands the utility of rules. But, he writes, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we’ve let metrics twist our values.

Skateboarders can spend an afternoon competing to come up with the coolest tricks, and go home satisfied without ever having had to definitively settle on who actually won. In formal skateboarding competitions, though, nature of the activity changes: aesthetic elements are discarded in favour of clearer, more quantifiable goals, such as jump height and number of spins. As with sports, so with the Church: Nguyen mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. And Academia, to no-one’s ggreat surprise, is far from immune. Nguyen argues that the U.S. News & World Report’s university rankings have suppressed diversity because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the U.S. News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice, or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you’ll apply to the same law school — the one at the top of the list.

The dean and the pastor and even the professional skateboarder at least work in settings where these problems can be aired. For the rest of us, fixated on their annual targets at work, the number of likes on their social media, and the number of steps recorded on their fitness doo-dad , the external metrics work beneath their notice to replace their original values. I have a thousand friends and took ten thousand steps today — that makes me healthy and popular!

More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US Department of State metric called TIPS, which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. We know that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and as a result reduces sex trafficking, the TIPS report’s metrics indicate failure – because the conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric only “incentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.”

Nguyen’s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, “our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things”. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge–for a few minutes or a few hours–from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of ending.
So how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books! Take up the violin! Stick it to The Man wherever you can! This doesn’t sound like much of a call to revolution to me, and I’m not sure Nguyen’s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their individual agency, and this book will help them do so, but it’s hard to see why businesses, governments and bureaucracies of all stripes would ever abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of “objective” metrics.

Early on, Nguyen says: “I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” This is well put, but if I had a criticism of this otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, it’s that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre so very closely. Like every “popular thinker” on the shelf, he can’t resist sharing with us his personal journey to enlightenment. If you’ve ever read The Hungry Caterpillar to children, you’ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to me, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. If you’re even roughly up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.
But don’t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which “we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.” It’s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. If we truly want to understand our civic plight – and not just tick off some talking points – then we should read The Score. We’ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with skill.

Lumpen corpses and lustful hyena-women

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Reading Killing the Dead by John Blair for the Telegraph, 13 November 2025

St Cuthbert lived on the island of Lindisfarne on a diet of raw onions and died (with what sense of relief we can only imagine) in 687 CE. Four centuries later his coffin was opened, and his revealed corpse looked for all the world like a living man. Some duly proclaimed a miracle, but archaeologist and medievalist John Blair can’t help wondering: “Might his lifelike corpse have raised concerns?”

Comprehensively surveying the world’s undead was, Blair says, a project he saved for his retirement. Killing the Dead speaks to a lifetime’s storing up of mischievous treasures; also to Blair’s sheer enjoyment now, that teeters often (and who can blame him?) on unholy glee. What’s not to love about discussions of China’s “lumpen corpses and lustful hyena-women”, or about a book with chapter titles like “Lying Undead in a Ditch: England, 700–1000”?

Dullards will call “cheat”, since the title mentions vampires while the book embraces all varieties of the undead. But be patient: Blair’s global history of the dangerous dead (restless dead, undead, revenant shroud-chewers — call them what you will) is structured to address this very point.

Blair reckons that vampires, commonly conceived, are a literary invention, and comparatively youthful. Our first true vampire novel is a pamphlet from 1600, now lost, featuring the widely florid tale of Johann Kunze of Bennisch.

Everyone knows that vampires are Slavic but, says Blair, “the intensity of a phenomenon at a late date does not prove that it existed from an early one;” also that historical discussions of the phenomenon “have hugely over-emphasized bloodsucking.”

Blair’s history begins around the 8th century BCE with the Neo-Assyrians, whose remarkably laid-back attitudes towards the restless dead found their way to Greece and from there to Rome, where they cross-fertilised with some Asian ideas (“veering between pathos and bawdy comedy”) about predatory female shape-shifters. These folkloric strains twisted and darkened as they head north, giving rise to some magnificent Icelandic monsters.

Scandinavian colonisation cast these “Viking-style revenants” across northern Europe, where they shaped beliefs in northern Germany, Poland, and Bohemia (witness “an intensive corpse-killing epidemic, which erupted during 1546–1553 in a series of small Saxon towns”). This lore then intensified and spread south-eastwards, eventually linking up with more oriental-flavoured Balkan beliefs. So while vampires are younger than we think, there’s no need for disappointment: their ancestry is much richer and more various than we ever could have imagined.

Some huge questions are being begged here, and Blair is assiduous in addressing them all. (Blair’s book’s over 500 pages long, and he wastes not a single one.) First and most important: are the undead a story we tell each other, or a real phenomenon?

For the phenomenon to be real, Granpa doesn’t actually have to leap up from his bier and chase us around the parlour. It would be enough that we shared some cognitive glitch that made us susceptible to belief in the undead. Perhaps we’re all inclined to see signs of life in post-animate matter. And it is true that corpses do not say still, they groan and fart, stiffen and flex and, when they finally decay, do so at rates that are far from normative.

These days we consider death a singular event — ironic, really, given how our medicine repeatedly brings us up against the processes of death. Earlier societies didn’t have quite so much understanding of coma, anoxia, brain death and vegetative states, but they steered much closer to reality (and offered infinitely more comfort to the bereaved) in viewing death as a process, not an event. “The cessation of breath, the laying-out, the liminal stage at the wake, the burial, and the ensuing physical decay are steps along a road that must be followed precisely,” Blair observes of the rites that grow up in these societies — the only wrinkle being, “if that journey is impeded, the implications can be horrifying.”

Except when it wasn’t. After all, the most memorable resurrected body of all belongs to a much-loved and still revered religious visionary who got up and left his tomb after actually dying. Solid enough — an animated corpse if ever there was one — Jesus Christ nevertheless also managed, in true vampiric style, to pass through the stone stoppering his tomb. No wonder some of the first Christians “found the bodily Resurrection problematic”.

Blair is less interested in picking holes in what people saw; he’s more interested in how people interpreted what they saw, and what this says about their ideas of life in general. In Shamanic societies, fluid spirits flow promiscuously in and out of matter: to be animated at all is to be possessed. Christians and Muslims pack the souls of the dead off to various divine resorts, so can only explain reanimation through the mischievous activities of unearthly (presumably devilish) agents.

Generally, though — and with the notable and quite niggling exception of the Resurrection myth — the phenomenon proves too slippery for dogma to easily attach itself: “One event gives rise to multiple folkloric forms,” Blair explains, “which, when reformatted by the observer… take on forms that we may not even recognize as the original event.”

In other words, whatever psychological universals underpin our experiences of the undead, they’re ever so quickly drowed out by all the inventive stories we spin around our experiences. Are the undead psychically real, or are they just an old wives’ tale, endlessly reglossed? The answer, frustrating as this is, is “Yes.”

A more productive question: what summons the undead? They get about a bit, it’s true, but they’re hardly an everyday occurrence. In the book’s single sophomoric moment, Blair says that their appearances are “triggered by attitudes, perceptions, and fears that are not automatic, but spring from social, economic, political, religious, and cultural variables.”

Don’t anyone panic: he’s quick to put flesh on these modish bones. Wars, plagues and religious controversies unsettle us enough that the walls between the living and the dead start to shiver. There’s also the well-documented abuse and tyranny dished out by Slavic matriarchs, right up until the early 20th century, to consider. Deliciously inconvenient, politically speaking, they have also generated the most recent outbreaks. The latest undead-mother-in-law-killing — a proper stake-through-the-heart affair — took place at Vâlcea, Romania, in 2019. Most vampires are a public nuisance, but undead babushkas are worse: they come after their own.

Ultimately (and somewhat incredibly) Blair’s history of the vampire provides inspiration and comfort. Digging up the dead and decapitating them with an iron spade is a gruesome business, for sure, but a sight less disgusting than treating a living human being the same way. Blair argues convincingly that corpse killings are prophylactic against the kind of mass hysterias otherwise burn witches or throw children into ovens. “Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards,” is Blair’s insouciant conclusion: corpse-killing is “mainstream”.

Blair leads us through innumerable vales of terror and out again, trembling, yet unharmed, and even enlightened, with the elan of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka (who, now I come to think of it, was another pretend retiree). No apologies — if I don’t deliver this crushingly obvious paean, who will? — Killing the Dead is a book to die for.