A.S.H. Smyth | The Spectator columnists & writers

Proof at last that the Great Pyramid wasn’t built by aliens

Because I once made the mistake of dabbling in Egyptology, some ‘friend’ will schwack me every other week with a meme, cartoon or article about people who still believe the pyramids were built by aliens. I have longed for a handy single volume to present to these loons, full of unarguable evidence putting this business past dispute – and Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner have provided it. In 2013 excavators in Egypt’s Eastern Desert on the Gulf of Suez uncovered the world’s most ancient harbour installation at Wadi el-Jarf. Here they unearthed a cache containing the oldest extant inscribed papyri (c.2607-5 BCE). And in that they found ‘unique and unprecedented testimony relating to one of the world’s most famous monuments’ which has inspired and perplexed visitors for almost five millennia: the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Why did the Allies dismiss the idea of a German resistance movement?

In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in American Literature. In the febrile, polyglot atmosphere in the city at the ‘crossroads of Europe’, the media was still mocking Adolf Hitler and few took him seriously. Mildred saw, close up, the brokenness of American and German capitalism and, distantly, the apparently level playing fields of communist Russia. As the Nazis gained increasing control over the body politic, she taught an overtly socialist syllabus — Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiseret al. When, halfway through her dissertation, the university fired her, she promptly started teaching at a night school for working-class students. ‘Should Hitler be chancellor?’ she asked her pupils.

A pawn in the Great Game: the sad story of Charles Masson

‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander the Great’s empire.’ By the early 19th century, though, very few had been identified. Moreover, the prevailing scholarly view was that there remained ‘not a single architectural monument of the Macedonian conquests in India’ — let alone in Afghanistan, which had, ‘for more than 1,000 years... been a blank space in western knowledge’. So finding one would be ‘a world-changing achievement’. At dawn on 4 July 1827, Private James Lewis of the East India Company’s Bengal artillery walked out of the Agra fort and into history — or at any rate into some amply trodden historical terrain.

The scholars who solved the riddles in the sands

In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from Nubia. Each bore the name of Tutankhamun — not that anyone had ever heard of him. All serious understanding of the millennia-spanning Nilotic civilisation had disappeared before the last hieroglyph was carved in 394 AD. In the mid-18th century the most advanced ‘scholarship’ on the subject consisted of ‘pinpricks of insight in an enveloping fog of misapprehension’, and by the early 19th century the Egypt of the pharaohs was still largely buried in the sand. The word ‘Egyptology’ did not exist. Yet within 100 years Egypt would no longer be known as a land of biblical-classical myth but ‘the crucible of great feats of artistic and architectural achievement’, thanks to what Toby Wilkinson calls a ‘golden age of scholarship and adventure’ — between Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics and the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922.

How to scale a mountain without leaving home

In January a friend visited me at my home in Colombo, and I promised him that we would climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (twice, actually), and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things changed. When lockdown came to Sri Lanka, I found I was already bored and irritable in the first week. Then I saw a cheery Facebook post about some chap called David Sharp who used his time in isolation to calculate how many stairs he would have to climb in his home to ‘top’ the various mountains of the British Isles. Virtual mountaineering, if you will. Well, I thought, why don’t I do the same with Adam’s Peak? At 2,243m, Adam’s Peak — or Sri Pada (‘sacred footprint’) in Sinhala — is not the highest mountain in Sri Lanka (it’s fifth), but it is certainly the most famous.

Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is certainly no Abyssinian Andy McNab

In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years earlier. Initially largely uncontested — thanks both to Emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles — when ‘war’ eventually did break out it was so one-sided that Ethiopian women were gathering spent bullet casings for reuse while Italian planes (the older Ethiopians believing these were dragons) dropped poison gas on them. Selassie, meanwhile, fled to England. The conflict inevitably degenerated into guerrilla tactics on the one side and terrible reprisals on the other.

The great American trauma in minute detail

Why, I asked some months back in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about? Well... everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport. Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of one Ohio housewife, a former college teacher who now bakes pies for money, attempts to keep her household shipshape, feels the pinch of post-bail-out America, is frustrated in the usual ways, and frets persistently about the physical, moral and emotional safety of her offspring (other people’s too) in those ostensibly United States. Song lyrics, boarlets, clickbait headlines, bits of her children’s homework, first world problems, Schubert, shopping, getting cancer, the Amish, things she’s forgotten, assassinated presidents, FOOSH injuries, actors’ names, wordplays, her mother’s death, Revere Ware pots (me neither), the life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, styptic sticks, lines from Shakespeare, fake-brick wallpaper, captions for YouTube videos, her husband’s fear of bridge-collapses, her own Midwest gosh-darn-it lexicon, the plots of classic movies, ‘Indian’ burial mounds, lists of places/diseases/brandnames/pies (Umberto Eco would have very much approved).

More dystopian futures

Only Helen DeWitt would start a book with an epigraph of her own pop-culture mash-up poetry and end with an appeal to buy the writer coffee. The author of just two previous published novels (about a multilingual child prodigy, and an encyclopaedia salesman turned sex-peddler, respectively), DeWitt keeps a pure flame, and doesn’t want to hear why others won’t. She and her characters inhabit an intellectual, emotional and physical triangle between New York, Berlin and Gloucester Green bus station, Oxford. ‘It would mean a lot to me to work with [an editor] who admired Bertrand Russell,’ one of her narrators remarks... about her children’s book. Another one has ‘views on the Kaddish of Mr Leon Wieseltier’. And DeWitt’s endnotes reference the cost of pigments in Renaissance painting, the clever-clever comics website xkcd, and a proof found in another of her own unpublished novels, on the distinction between X and x.

A story from a grain of sand

In 1945, on a Putney side street, in a city full of darkness and half in rubble from the Blitz, the 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister are abandoned by their parents into the care of men they think may well be criminals. Their father is still troubled as a result of the war; their mother close to stories from the present. Left to his own devices, Nathaniel sees the world in terms of shipping routes, and learns London’s geography (or an earlier form of it) by barging on the Thames with smuggled greyhounds. In a house full of odd comings and goings, and ‘dangerous with secrets’, his new confrères include an Aramaicist ethnographer, a lusty St Lucian pot-washer and a girl whom Nathaniel names, out of necessity, after the street on which they first met.

The weird world of the hapax legomenon

Today is National Indexing Day (#indexday) – at least according to the UK's Society of Indexers. 'Celebrating book indexes, indexers, and the profession of indexing.' As I write, they're wrapping up their annual jamboree, at London's Foundling Museum. A few months back, I was out walking the dog and listening to Dracula on my phone when I could've sworn I heard a character described as 'indexy'. Now, audio recordings are not always perfect, and glitches – digital or human – do creep in (I recently heard one narrator trip over a word, say 'sorry', then repeat the word and carry on – all of which remaining in the finished version). But I thought I'd give Greg Wise, narrating, the benefit of the doubt. I rewound the tape.

Cannon law

Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull discovered at The Lord Clyde, Walmer, complete with brief biography: Skull of havildar ‘Alum Bheg’, 46th Regt. Bengal N. Infantry... blown away from a gun. From this grisly starting point, Kim Wagner, lecturer in British imperial history at Queen Mary University of London, narrates how, in the swelter of mid-1857, following outbreaks throughout British India, native Bengal Army units at Sialkot mutinied, killing officers and civilians and looting the cantonment, and then set out for Delhi to join Bahadur Shah, the briefly-minted ‘Emperor of India’. They didn’t make it. All but wiped out by ‘Nikal Seyn’ Nicholson’s moving column, the survivors fled into the Himalayas.

Fair tradesman

Ole Thorstensen has been a carpenter for 25 years. A master craftsman, in fact. He is busy working on a minor job — ‘replacing a few windows, putting down decking and doing a number of other odds and ends’ — when he gets invited to bid for a loft conversion in a 19th-century apartment block in Oslo. ‘The Petersens have mentioned their desire for quality while avoiding unforeseen expense.’ No shit. The conversion will include a bedroom, bathroom and an office mezzanine and has all to be insulated, plumbed, wired, plastered, painted, floored and fitted out with furniture before a staircase can connect it to the floor below. This is 1,000,000 kroner project (about £120,000) — ‘600-700 man hours needed in carpentry alone’ — and the job will represent approximately half of Thorstensen’s annual income.

Swash and buckle aplenty

A feeble king and his scheming minister, a hunchback noble and the Daughters of Repentance, a botched assassination and a walled-up prisoner, some comic horse-sex, cross-dressing valets, a handful of gay jokes, a dwarf, and a literal éminence grise. The latest instalment of Game of Thrones? No, actually: a sequel to The Three Musketeers. December 1628, mere weeks after the great siege of La Rochelle, and attention has now turned to the goings-on in Italy, where France is being outmanoeuvred by Spain and the Austrian Habsburgs. The childless Louis XIII is forever said to be at death’s door; Queen Anne still mourns her departed lover Buckingham; the Queen Mother plots to put her second son upon the throne; and Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duke of Richelieu and of Fronsac, is, as usual, trying to keep his head atop his shoulders in the most difficult of circumstances.

The spell of the pharaohs

Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen’s (updated and reissued) Egypt: People, Gods, Pharaohs ‘aims to answer some basic questions about life in Ancient Egypt and whet your appetite to find out more’, and achieves both in appropriate abundance. It looks great, reads well, even smells nice — and is positively jam-packed with wonderful things. Citing the fundamental continuity of 3,000-plus years of pharaonic culture, the Hagens tuck away a (very) concise chronology at the back of the book, and then get on with the business of showing us what Ancient Egypt looked like, and who/why/how/when/where. The Valley of the Kings; mummification; daily life: the structure is, perforce, not particularly original.

Heroes in error

In the first year or so of the Iraq occupation — or ‘big Army goatfuck’, as it is not quite specifically referred to in former US Army soldier Roy Scranton’s debut novel — three central storylines move through and around each other. Specialist Wilson, whose commanders can’t read maps but watch Black Hawk Down for ‘pointers’, and who is so frustrated he actually wants to be attacked by the Iraqis; Qasim al-Zabadi, a timid maths professor who lives with his Baghdadi uncle, enduring the attentions of unnamed government officials and of his Michael Jackson-loving cousins; and Aaron, who’s ‘just come back’ — too recently, in fact, to be breaking tofu with civilians who ask him questions until he tells them what they don’t want to hear: ‘Not that it’s any of your goddamn business, but no, I didn’t kill anybody.

Missing in action

‘Missing in action is the worst state to which we can lose a human being,’ avers Commodore (Ret.) Ajith Boyagoda — and he should know. A not especially academic young chap from the hill country, Boyagoda joined the then Ceylonese navy for the glamour of it; progressed fair-to-middlingly; saw Southampton, Suez and South India; and, in September 1994, on his final voyage, found himself in command of the Sagarawardene, Sri Lanka’s biggest warship, on the night that it was sunk by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Hauled out of the sea by his assailants, he became a ‘show-prisoner’ — the LTTE’s highest-ranking military captive — and, abandoned by the nation on whose behalf he had been fighting, he and a dozen or so compatriots were left to rot in the malarial jungle of the Tigers’ northern sub-state.

Spare a thought for us choral singers during carol season

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and I’m sure you’re all looking forward to a damn fine sing-along at your respective local carol services. Spare a thought, though, at this time of year, for the pros and semi-pros who will, like as not, be charged to fine-tune the outpourings of your festive cheer. For the great majority of choral singers, the 24(ish) days of Advent are, more than anything else, a matter of counting down just how many services are left before a day off in what is bloody nearly January. Singers do enjoy the Christmas repertoire: of course we do. But Advent hadn’t even started when I set out for the first of four musical engagements in one 24-hour window. By the end of Sunday I’d sung ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ three times.

What Afghan soldiers really think - the same as us

‘The NATO Commander in Eastern Afghanistan has said that this year 54 foreign bases have already been closed...’ Last December Channel 4 aired a documentary entitled Billion Dollar Base: Deconstructing Camp Bastion, the predominating ‘takeaways’ from which were a) what phenomenal amounts of money we’d spent on our eight-year operation in and around Helmand Province, and b) how unimpressed the Afghan brass were by what ‘little’ we were leaving behind. I found myself watching most of it through gritted teeth; but it was hard, nevertheless, not to have some sympathy for the incoming Afghan soldiery. A new documentary film has now taken up that very story. Tell Spring Not to Come This Year (dir. Saeed Taji Farouky and Michael McEvoy) offers us a rare glimpse of the Afghan National Army – specifically, the heavy weapons company of the ANA’s 3/3/215 Corps, in Nahr-e-Saraj – as they take on the continuing Taliban (et al.

Blessed are the speechmakers?

As the election season finally gets its boots on, office-seeking motor-mouths of every creed and colour would do well to remember the tale of William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States of America, who died on this day in 1841, exactly one month after taking office. The ‘pneumonia of the lower lobe of the right lung’ (plus complications) was said to be brought on by a cold, contracted on the day of his inauguration when Harrison gave a two-hour speech – at 8,500 words, the longest in American history – on a freezing wet day, rode to and from the ceremony on horseback (rather than in a carriage), and refused at any point to wear a hat, gloves, or even an overcoat. Both the clothing business and the length of the address were, it seems, fatally misguided attempts to demonstrate that Harrison was neither an intellectual backwoodsman nor - coming out of rural semi-retirement at the age of 68 (another record, till Ronald Reagan) - past it as a warrior hero.

‘Magna Carta Unification Event’ at the British Library: a magna balls-up

Early last month I tripped on up to the British Library for the 'Magna Carta Unification Event'. Manuscripts had been choppered in from Salisbury, Lincoln, and indeed (x2) from the British Library’s own collection. It was my chance to catch 'all four surviving original 1215 Magna Carta Manuscripts in one place for the first time’. Now, I don’t have any strongly-held views on how you pull out all the stops when it comes to exhibiting a handful of 800-year-old documents. But given the much-vaunted constitutional impact of King John’s power-wrangling at Runnymede, the Magna Carta’s reputation as ‘one of the most famous documents in history’, and the habitual cross-referencing to other momentous world events such as the Civil War (English), the Declaration of Independence, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – well, I was expecting a bit of a show.

Night Will Fall review: the Hitchcock film they didn’t want you to see

At the synagogue where I happened to be singing last Saturday, the rabbi wrapped up her regular notices with a timely exhortation to her congregants to try to watch the André Singer documentary Night Will Fall. In 1945, as the Allied forces fought their way across Europe, in the process uncovering the hideous network of Nazi death and slave-labour camps, film producer Sidney Bernstein was despatched by the Ministry of Information to lead a few dozen army cameramen tasked with documenting the astonishing extent of the German atrocities. The project was intended to serve not merely as a current affairs update for the edification (and/or mortification) of the British public, but as evidence for the criminal trials which were certain to follow and an incontrovertible document to be placed before the (now occupied) German population.

A day in the life of Britain’s sexiest man

There are, presumably, a great many people who dream about what they will say when the day comes that they get to meet David Gandy – but I have to confess I wasn’t one of them. So when I found myself, six months back, sitting across from him in the ‘interview room’ of the Sun Hill police station, I felt somewhat under-prepared. I mean, it’s not like this was actually supposed to be an interview. If memory serves, we ended up discussing dogs (with reference to Battersea?), weddings (mine; his in theory), foreign travel (Africa, I think), British manufacturing (he’s bought a boot company), the rights and/or wrongs of the Canadian Tuxedo (he’s fine with it), and yes, the fact that David Gandy would genuinely rather wear a suit every day of the week than do almost anything else.

A reverend at war

This evening – Armistice Eve – Ben Fleetwood Smyth (no relation) and Hugh Brunt will be putting on their annual British Art Music Series concert: this year, in aid of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Narrated by Judith Paris, and interspersed with Victorian and Edwardian music from the BAM Consort and the BAM Ensemble, the event will tell the story of one London community’s life, both at home and abroad, across the full span of the First World War, focussing on extracts from the parish magazines of the time, read by the current vicar, Fr Alan Gyle, and by yours truly. The Rev Wilfrid Hannay Gibbins is my guy: a St Paul’s assistant clergyman who spent a year or so after the outbreak of hostilities as the chaplain of HMS Tiger, before being invalided out on the grounds of ‘an old illness’.

On the road with a long-distance morris dancer

‘I’m morris dancing to Norwich and I need someone to captain my road-crew. You’re the only man for the job. Yours, Tim.’ Tim FitzHigham, Bt. BA Hons. Dunelm. FRGS (all Ret.) is a man so wildly different even Ranulph Fiennes thinks he’s a little crazy. And Sir Ranulph is by no means alone. When Tim rowed the Channel in an original Thos. Crapper bath (one example among many), Marcus Brigstocke felt duty-bound to ask him if he was aware that ‘most of us just stay at home and write our jokes from there’. Naturally, I took the job (who the hell else was going to?) and thus found myself playing Jeeves to Tim FitzHigham’s Wooster as he attempted his latest mad challenge: a re-enactment of William Kemp’s stunt of 1600, in which, after falling out with Shakespeare over the dramatic value of a ‘humorous’ dog-on-wheels (in Hamlet, of course), Kemp amply demonstrated who was the sharper wit by morris dancing home to Norfolk.

Pullman gives God a break for Easter

The author of His Dark Materials talks to A.S.H. Smyth about the latest episode in the saga in which he turns towards politics — with a nod to The Magnificent Seven along the waySeveral years ago, Philip Pullman wrote that ‘“Thou shalt not” might reach the head, but it takes “Once upon a time” to reach the heart.’ Now, the prizewinning author and self-appointed scourge of God is preparing to unveil the latest episode from the universe of His Dark Materials, called Once Upon a Time in the North. With Easter upon us, the Church might be relieved to hear that God doesn’t get a look in. The writer whom Peter Hitchens once called ‘the one the atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed’ is leaving Him alone for now.

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