Cutting edge stuff

To minimise exposure to the royal wedding, I spent part of the weekend reading Gabriel Weston's short semi-autobiographical memoire-cum-collection of short stories Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, the tale of an English graduate turned surgeon and how things really look from behind the surgeon's mask. Its a finely described, slightly detached account of  surgery; life and death, good and bad decisions by doctors; and medical and social hierarchies that structure their world. There are also beautifully written and finely gory passages about surgery. Most striking though is that surgeons need not only steady, sure and fine hand in cutting people open and quick and calm judgements in critical situations - the biggest danger when things do not go according to plan seems to be patients bleeding to death on the operating table - but also to know precisely their level of competence and incompetence: the  moment when they need to recognise their limits ask for help and call in someone more specialised (who may in turn need to go through  the same process and call up someone still more specialised).

Academics, of course, do not cut people open - although I have eviscerated a few books and PhD theses in my time - and, generally speaking, do not kill people, if they do things wrong. But I couldn't help wondering if academia and academic research there  not be an equivalent mechanism.

Election diary

I tried very hard not to be interested in the election campaign, avoiding the historic TV debates and most of the day-to-day media flim flam - although 'Bigotgate' offered a grim confirmation that politicians are exactly has depicted in the TV satire In The Thick Of It. In the end, however, the apparent Lib Dem surge, sheer uncertainly of the result and intriguing possibilities of hung parliament hooked me and pulled me and there I was on election night mug of coffee in hand up till 4am watching the TV results, pausing only to switch off the sound and dip into a Swedish crime novel when politicans and pundits came on to fill in a temoorary lack of any news. I, like they, could not work if it was a hung parliament, a Tory majority or another variant of hung parliament we were in until just before dawn the patter (or patterns) became clear: huge Tory gains against Labour in the South and Midlands, largely gains elsewhere, no gains in Scotland,; no Lib Dem surge, but a successful defence, with the odd exception, of seats held against Conservative challengers.

The oddest exception, of course, was North Irish-Estonian Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik, whose celebrity status on the chat show circuit and pop star Cheeky Girl girlfriend seemed no longer to endear him to Welsh voters he represented and he was overhauled by well established local Tory, who probably paid more serious attention to bread and butter issues. My colleague Allan Sikk mischeviously suggests that Opik could add a splash of colour Estonian politics by entering the race for the Estonian parliament in 2011 (party to be confirmed). Indeed, there is even a Facebook Group urging Lembit to enliven the political life ancestoral homeland with his own brand of eccentric liberal reformism. So far, however, it hasn't exactly gone viral (supporters 3 including me). There is always an issue as to whether Lembit's Estonian is as a good as Nick Clegg's perfect Dutch.

A couple of days before the election I answered a journalist's questions about the differences between British and UK parties for a mini-interview for the Czech financial freesheet E15. It wasn't the first time I had chewed such things over but it was an interesting exercise. My thoughts? There is less more of an ideological divide in Czech politics, although not the gulf you would think from Czech parties in-your-face campaigning, and the UK has a post-Thatcherite consensus on certain fundamentals; the Czech Social Democrats' high profile campaign defence of the welfare state and avoidance of the issue of how and when not if to make cuts makes it a very different political animal from the British Labour Party - although not necessarily less genuinely social democratic; the closest CEE equivalents to Blairite New Labopur were probably the market friendly ex-Communist parties of Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, but in the end they all got electorally roasted; if there is no Czech or Central European Nick Clegg is it probably because swathes of CEE voters tend to recognise themselves more in blunt spoken pugnacious strongmen like Orbán, Fico, Paroubek or even Topolánek than the role of clean cut middle class everyman (and, of course, it's always a man) that British politicians seek to play - and English voters to go for. Interestingly, explaining the Liberal Democrats through a Czech prism is a convoluted and difficult exercise.

At 8 o'clock in the morning of 6 May, I walked down to polling station with my daughter before school, past a mass of Lib Dem hoarding that seems mysteriously to grow in size every day - perhaps a side effect of 'Cleggmania' - still wondering who to vote for. If there is a rising Lib Dem tide there is, the Guardian's online poll-and-seat calculator suggests, an outside chance of this fairly solid Conservative seat changing hands.

There are no queues and I cast my vote, but instantly have h a vague presentiment that I had not quite done the right thing.

The Straight Choice online UK election leaflet archive

I came across a very interesting website mapping UK election leaflets - The Straight Choice | The election leaflet project. Voters are invited to photo or scan election material that comes through their letterbox. Interesting, as it picks on variation in party organization and strategies characteristic of Single Member Distrcit contests and as a do-it-yourself, networkde way of building up an archive of historical material. Surprising, that no research institute thought of asking people to do this. And, of course, it would be an interesting exercise for other countries, CEE states included. Pity, I binned all the leaflets a week ago as part of my general UK-election-campaign-ophobia.

Flexible friends

SSEES is visited by two members of the much re-constituted but officially legendary Plastic People of the Universe, the underground rock groups whose trial in 1976 spurred the formation of Charter 77: Vratislav Brabenec, one of the founding originals, and Eva Turnová who has been the Plastics' bass guitarist since 2001. As this is, in Czech dissident terms, the equivalent of a royal visit, the current Czech ambassador to the UK, translator, Havel confidante, one-time politician - he led the Civic Democratic Alliance in its terminal breakdown phase in 1997-8, but enough of that - Michal Žantovský introduces proceedings in Masaryk Common Room. He sensibly sticks to water, leaving the red wine to the visiting Plastíci, chipping in the occasional translation, but like the good diplomat he is otherwise listens and doesn't say much.

An array of armchairs and Peter Zusi's relaxed and informal moderation give the event something of the feeling of an intellectual chatshow and we get a variety of observations and recollections: how the group was named after a Frank Zappa song, but, Brabenec later discovered, in exile in Canada slightly suggested the flexibility of a talking credit credit in aTV ad;
how records were smuggled in and traded on black market burzy in the woods near Prague in 1970s and 80s; how musicians made amps from electrical hobby kits; how boring the 1976 trial was; how capitalism is indeed the same as communism; how Brabenec fell over into middle of a performance at the National Theatre, but was forgiven.

The final question, from the Masaryk Society's Michael Tate, who has brilliantly organized both this event and the Plastics' concert in London at the South Bank in January, asks whether the group has not become too disneyfied as kitsch cultural icon. But it's late in the evening and they need a cigarette, so all we get from Brabebc is a rather zen answer to the effect that the group's credo is "Don't be Stupid" - which would also make a good slogan for a university, I thought. Eva Turnová more straightfowardly explains that they are somewhat allergic to ageing hippies, who remember the group from 1970s and prefer to play for young people and international audiences. She can speak Chinese.

Brabenec was also interviewed this morning on the radion in the slightly unlikely venue of the BBC's Midweek programme - listenable here.

Update: Tom Stoppard who was in the audience at the event (note to self: he was probably the bloke with the white manbag) and has played a big role in enabling the Plastics' gig at the South Bank - has written a profile of the band and its music in the Times.

Fairtrade with Josef Vissionovich

Tesco's fairtrade coffee bears an image worrying reminiscent of a youngish Stalin. Somehow, I don't think Josef Vissonovitch would have approved of Fairrade - as we know, he was not one to approve of petty bourgeois commodity production. Still, no doubt this will encourage the friend of mine who always turns down the fairtrade option and asks for a cup of capitalist-explotation filter coffee, though perhaps some kind of rebranding might be in order. Freedom Blend? Capital Coffee?

Universities: A Wordle in your ear...

I read an article in the new giveaway Evening Standard on the train yesterday. It was by Steve Smith, Chair of Universities UK, writing about the future of higher education. At first just it seemed a meaningless jumble of jargon and buzzwords. Now, however but having fed it into Worldle.net, I find I understand it perfectly.

Pooling resources

The Czech Republic is, as ever, distinctly short of things for children to do in the summer. So the only real option when the weather's hot - and bar a few thunderstorms it has been continually sunny - is to head for the local open air swimming pool: health and safety and the big leisure department of big councils have pretty much eliminated the local lido as phenomenon in England. You can find them, of course, especially in nooks and crannies of London boroughs, but they are curiosities hidden away or forgotten about or turned into urban lakes where swimming is definitely not on the agenda.

Not so the Czech Republic. Despite tougher hygiene regulations pretty much every municipality has its koupaliště or plovarna and they are still a firm fixture of any Czech summer. Indeed, so much Civic Democrat leader Miroslav Topolánek, is kicking off his campaign to get acquainted with the voters of South Moravia - where he will head his party's list - with a tour of local koupáky just to convince all and sundry that he is a normal down-to-earth Czech bloke on his second marriage and not a corrupt, sleazy politician who hangs out with lobbyists for big electricity companies and spin doctors on expensive yachts in Italy awhen not walking around in the buff on Silvio Berlusconi's poolside. Perish the thought.

It's a clever strategy. Unlike Klaus - who can wow and work a crowd and charm opponents, but whose efforts to join the victorious Czech football team and be one of the lads was one of the more excruciating things I remember seeing on Czech TV - the Ordinary Bloke role is one Topolánek can do very well. Equally, cleverly there's no need to do much politics: no party programme (as yet) to defend and no big billboard campaign to annoy people and remind them they'll have to go and: just the occasional swim or game of volleyball in lidos and sports grounds across various factory towns interspered with a bit of well publicized cycling between locations (taking the limo for the hilly bits, you understand). And, of course, Topol's change of scene also leaves Karel Schwarzenberg - staring down lugubriously down from posters everywhere like some kind of aristocratic Big Brother - and the very boouent TOP09 party a free run in Prague, where they are likely to do well and, where, conincidentally Topolánek's main party rivals are based.

Our own tour of Moravia also takes in every koupák and swimming lake (otevřené koupalište) for miles around- we even drive across the border into Slovakia and sample Trenčin's large and clean municipal kupalisko sandwiched between fooball stadium, castle and main railway line - although less political reasons than to ensure the kids have something to do. We end, as we began, with the municipal lido in Starý Liskovec , the village on the outskirts of Brno long, which has since swallowed up by the high rise housing estate of Nový Liskovec built in the mid-70s. And, on balance, it is probably actually the best one. Not as clean Trenčin. Slightly less to do for kids, than some of the lidos renovated by ambitious mayors in increasingly sleek and prosperous looking villages around Uherský Brod. And certainly rather less genteel than in spa town of Luhačovic. It's no high rise ghetto, but most people who could afford to do so have long since moved out of the estate and the pool attracts poorly off people who don't have the money, time or paid holiday to go elsewhere. Much to my mother-in-law's disapproval, there are chuge louds of cigarette smoke rising up in the air from the poolside area, as if there was some small factory there. Still, it's shady; there's enough space to swim in the main pool; the children's pool has enough squirtly fountains to please the kids and they do do excellent hotdogs.

I keep my eyes peeled, half watching the kids, half wondering if Topolánek will turn up. Perhaps he has already turned up, incognitio? There is a bloke who looks a bit like him sitting on the lilo on the other side of the pool. But then again, he is reading the crime page of left-wing daily Právo, where would probably be a step too far even for this new style of low-key, politics-free summer election non-campaign.

In cold blood

Last night I killed an intruder. He had been lurking behind the lace curtain by the open glass doors to the balcony. When he came into the room around 1am, I was ready for him. Shone a torch in his face and, before he could react, struck him with a metal shovel I had got from the grate in case he showed up again. He dropped to floor with a surprising heavy thud.

Emboldened, I went downstairs to deal with his mate, who I knew was waiting down there in the dark.

Damn pesky blighters hornets... But the kids are terrified of them.

This happens so often, it's time I learned to decline the word properly: sršeň, noun (animate), masculine. Zabil jsem sršně

One funeral and a christening

My wife's grandmother died at the age of 96 in January. She is to be laid to rest in a short ceremony in her home village near Zlín. Relatives from various branches of my wife's family gradually assemble in the muncipal cemetry. It is sunny and the atmosphere is sombre but low key.

Introductions are made, there some conversation and then the priest arrives. He says what his has to say in a straightfoward and dignifed way. There are short speeches by relatives. Flowers are laid, candles are lit. The priest departs and mourners drift off in small groups toward the local pub-restaurant where my mother-in-law has arranged a meal.

The children, who have behaved well throughout, want to walk around the the graveyard, so I agree. It is a municipal cemetry, not very near the church and there are relatively few crosses. One grave belongs to 32 year old who died in December 1914. A small photo set into the grave stone shows a man with a moustache in high collared uniform. Presumably he was killed in the early fighting on Serbian or Galician front which annihilated much of the pre-war Austro-Hungarian military at the start of the Great War. His wife, who died in 1930, and daughter who lived in 1980s are buried with him. There are some recent looking flowers on the grave.

We get to the restaurant. Very oddly, when we get there it is pulsating with very loud, live Gypsy music. Two policeman from the Municipal Police walk out. I assume we've probably got the wrong place, but we walk in anyway to find out what's going on, despite disgruntled local drinkers outside that the place is full of Gypsies.

We are in the right place - and it is full of Gypsies. The pub, has somehow booked meal arranged by my mother-in-law to following the laying to rest alongside a Roma christening celebration There is an interesting kind of symmetry and the music supplied by 2-3 musicams with keyboard and synthaszier is foot-tappingly good, but the noise and ingruousness of it are too much for most of our party, who walk off - despite the landlord's protestations - to see what can be arranged at the village's other hostelry. Unsurprisingly, nothing can done for a party of twenty, so discontented mourners drift back, grumbling that the Roma - while not all of them are bad - have no consideration and shouldn't even be there because they are not local.

Luckily, the landlord has indeed now rescued the situation and agreed with the Roma , there will be no music for an hour and a half while we have our meal. The musicians stop. While my wife talks to elderly great aunts and cousins, I have nothing much to do except keep an eye on the kids and my attention increasingly wanders to the Roma party, who are sitting around a large table in covered courtyard just by the pub's main function room where we are. They seems to have provided their own food: huge quantities of fried or possibly breadcrumbed meat. The women have sequined dresses and one is wearing a satin dress that ressembles a sari, many of the children are dressed in a kind of Sunday best, white-shirts or ribboned party dresses. Most of the men seem to be sitting next door in the bar. There is a lot of raucous sounding conversation, much coming and going, and huges amount of smoking.

It is a world away from the more restrained Czech way of doing things : like some kind of Greek or Middle East event catapulted into Central Europe. Just after 12.00 as we are beginning to leave, the Gypsy music re-starts in earnest. A very large Roma man with moustache pork pie hat and fantastic voice fills the pub with a reverberating and haunting song.this time guests at the christening head into the pub to dance.

"Where did you learn to dance so well?" my wife asks a Roma girl of 7-8 in white frock.

"From my grandma" she replies.

My wife's grandmother would almost certainly not have approved of all this, but both events seem to have gone well.

Twelve Not Very Angry People

For the past couple of weeks, I've been sitting on a jury, an interesting but ultimately rather draining experience. The jury system is being as one of the few well established channels for mass participation in the British legal and political system, and a hallowed and traditional one at that. So it makes for an odd experience to roll up at a government building one morning as a member of the public and get the the usual friendly and slightly causal British bureaucratic processing, but not actually be in the usual passive role of service user, patient or customer, but as also to be someone integral to making a real decision.

The first stage sitting - the Jury Assembly area – has the feel of a hospital waiting room or the departure lounge in some small provincial airport, although unlike these situation no one is in any particular hurry to be called. When you and the rest of a fifteen person jury panel do get
called you then suddenly find yourself standing awkwardly in what seems to be television set: a courtroom, which seems oddly small, but otherwise straight out of Rumpole, Judge John Deed with judge, lawyers, clerks and prisoner all sitting in costume and read to go at the press of a button.

And without further ado (small matter of jurors swearing an oath to return a true verdict – in about half the cases, including mine this means affirming minus the bible) the trial kicks off with the prosecution's opening statement. The sense of unreality gradually lifts, although it is
for the most part a little like looking in a play. You watch, you listen, you make notes, the court rises and you can go home or go downstairs and buy coffee and teacakes from the staff-and-jurors counter of little stall staffed by retired volunteers (proceeds go to charity – this week an
animal sanctuary).

For anyone who likes social science methodology, there is a lot get into the trail process: evidence, inference, causation and argument. Indeed, what academic could fail to admire - and enjoy anticipating - the barristers' unfolding arguments, ultra-polished presentation skills and
carefully planted sound bites? There is an emerging human story. Over the several days of the trail witnesses take the stand and names or blank faces in the dock and public gallery slowly emerge into compelling cast of dramatis personae.

Then there is the bit everyone has not been looking forward to: deliberation. The defence case closes and we are sequestered in a Jury Retiring Room and have to reach a verdict. We are not allowed out, but can make tea and coffee and knock on the door for the jury baliff to bring
more milk. Friends who had done jury service warned me that this was the worse bit: "Be prepared to meet some very thick people". But, in fact, I didn't. Most of my fellow jurors were well educated and with, one possible exception, anything but thick. So the atmosphere was more Twelve Very Reasonable People than Twelve Angry Men. This didn't make it any easier to
reach a verdict. I realised that, unlike in the movies, even a simply chain simple events involving a small number of people may never yield up all its secrets. In the end though, we did agree a verdict which seemed to fairly reflected the evidence - and thinking back over the complexities,
possibilities of the case I still think it does.

The local paper reported the end of the trial and our verdict the next day, rehashing the more sensational bits of the evidence and soap opera elements of the case.

I can't believe I just did that...

I can't believe I just did that...

Secluded in the polling booth, pencil poised over ballot papers for local and European elections, on impulse I voted for a despised minor party. I mean I should have known better. All that 'British Jobs For British Workers' stuff was obviously rubbish and, yes, the party's leadership is a bit thuggish. But, you know how it is , mainstream media vilification does push some poeple into protest voting for fringe parties - and I was truly fed up with both the big parties locally.

For the first time in 21 years, I voted Labour.

Leaflety surburbs

I've been leafing throught the combined pile of Euro- and local election leaflets slowly building up on the windowsill. Perhaps on the back of early poliing, the Greens seem to be nervous about losing their one Euro MP in the South East of England, although the latest polling suggests a surge in their vote on the back of public disgust about mainstream parties' MPs' dubious expenses claims.

The leaflet of the pro-withdrawal from the EU UK Independence Party - now predicted to repeat their impressive 16% national poll share in 2004 and seemingly the second party in this part of the world - features Winston Churchill, as does a UKIP billboard outside the local hypermarket. Odd, as Churchill was an early advocate of European union. The far right British National Party goes for a similar leitmotif. Its leaflet has with a picture of a Spitfire and some stuff about a new Battle of Britain and a bloke dressed in a doctor's white coat telling us that immigrants are wrecking the National Health Service. Again odd, as the NHS is more or less kept afloat with immigrant label and the BNP's leaders all cut their political teeth of neo-Nazism and would probably have been locked up during the real Battle of Britain. This, of course, doesn't matter a jot, as they they are tapping into something else: a Churchillianism' that less historical fact is a distinct brand English/British nationalism that permeates the national culture - ably analysed by Anthony Barnett way back in the 1980s in Iron Britannia.

However, the BNP leaflet does have a certain political sophistication, recycling Gordon Brown's ill considered 'British jobs, for British workers' tag and - in trying to project the party as a 'normal' party just like the others - going in for some classic 'dog whistle' politics. Everyone knows the the party is xenophobic and racist, so there's absolutely no need to upset us by to mentioning it, is there?

This alas eludes the Liberal Democrat leaflet for the local elections which follows a mind numbing and predictable 'pavement politics formula, which is almost a parody of itself: a dodgy bat chart claiming the Lib Dems are breathing down the necks of the Tories plus some photos of local Lib Dem candidates posing various parts of the town to convince us they have been campaigning on every conceivable issue and project in the community backed up by some scepticism-inspiring claims to have personally brought about every minor bit of tree planting and road resurfacing in the locality that has gone on in the last six months.

The local Tories deliver an almost identical leaflet the next day which is in colour and ever so slightly more convincing as they do actually run the council. Indeed, sensationally, I am canvassed by the local Tories the next day when putting out the recycling , having mistaken their balding clipboard-in-hand activist for a gas meter reader and not ducked into the house and returned to my exam marking quickly enough. I tell him I never vote Conservative. "That's fine" he says amiably and ticks me off his list.

From ECPR to A&E...

It's Monday morning. My head still feels bad and I feel terribly tired. I go the doctor, who decides I should go to hospital in Brighton to have my head scanned. It's modern and clean. Everyone's very professional and pleasant. In the course of the next four hours, I move through a series of assessments and examinations: accident and emergency nurse; junior doctor; Senior House Officer; and finally the Registrar. My headaches have subsided, but they decide I do indeed need a scan. Under Health Service targets, no one should spend more than four hours in Accident and Emergency, so they transfer me to another part of the hospital, the Medical Assessment Unit. This houses some pretty sick people with drips, oxygen masks and monitors , but also seems to serve as a kind of overflow for A&E. Two hours later I get my CT scan, It is instantly uploaded onto their system, they tell me, but I still need to wait another five hours before they can get a radiologist's report about what it shows.

I pass the time reading the entire Casebook of Sherlock Holmes and listening various human dramas unfolding around me. A man with a Middle Eastern accent seems to be comforting a child, but is in fact talking to his Spanish boyfriend who speaks limited English and may have an appendicitis. An old lady says she has collapsed because of heart problems, but it turns out that her daily alcohol consumption is the real issue. Her son comes in. He is very pleasant sounding. and doesn't seem surprised when told she will be referred to the Community Alcohol Team. Perhaps she know then already. She is discharged. Two policeman come in accompanying a man on a trolley. He is a prisoner serving a jail term and they are escorting him. They joke with him about whether the beds are better in hospital or in prison. In hospital he says, but the prison pillows are better. He dozes off and the policemen quietly start grumbling about the 4-5 hours they will be sitting around escorting him.

At last, a registrar appears. The scan shows no acute injuries, she says, so if I have no headache now I can go home when the senior registrar formally OKs it. I am to rest and come straight back if I have more headaches or am sick, however. She's bleeped him, she says, but doesn't know when he will get onto it. He could be in the middle of cutting someone up, she explains. Two hours later, I am officially discharged.

A burly security guard sees me off the premises. It's 1 o'clock in the morning. I have been in the hospital exactly 12 hours.

Lisbon diary: my conference from hell

I have spent the last few days in Lisbon attending the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops. It wasn't a good trip. On the whole, what can go wrong does go wrong. I take the airport shuttle to a stop near the main mosque and step out into a rainstorm. I had naively imagined there would be sunshine, so I have brought only a thin jacket. I quickly get soaked. I also get lost and spend half and hour so wandering around in the dark, rainswept streets. It's an unprepossessing area with an odd mix of new hotels and apartment blocks and run down shops and bars. I catch a glimpse of Lisbon's fllodlit central Mosque across the street. Finally, I realize I am heading in the wrong direction.

At last, I get to the hotel. Here they tell me I have been moved to another hotel, the impressively named VIP Grand, due to some mix-up by the agency running the conference arrangements. Ironically, I had walked passed the Grand in the pouring rain 20 minutes before. Duly transferred, I find myself in a nice hotel with a jarringly modern interiors : strange lighting, stark blacks, whites and strikes, plenty of mirrors and glass. Apparently, it was designed on Zen principles in a building that was once the headquarters of Portuguese TV and radio. I walk down a corridor, which is lit like something out of Star Wars, half expecting Darth Vader to come round the corner, and make it my 12th floor room. I go to take a shower and slam straight into a glass partition between bathroom and bedroom, mistaking it for an open doorway. My head gets an almighty bang. I bleed all over the place. It's very late. I can't face the thought of seeing a doctor.

By day 2 of the conference, however, I am having headaches and I'm starting to feel sick. Not a good combination. I end up sitting in the accident and emergency department of a private hospital. Here they check me out, relieve me of 100 euros and decide that I've caught flu and that my head is not a cause for concern. I feel pretty grotty for most of the rest of the conference, however, fortifying myself black tea and Portuguese bica expressos. Academically, things go rather better. The workshop on Generational Politics is animated and has a sensible balance between presentation and discussion - a good system of double discussants - and civilized regime of breaks.

Easyjet round off a difficult trip by laying on the return flight from hell. At the last minute, passengers are herd to different departure gate. A long queue stands for an hour gradually getting more restive. Portuguese passengers start laying into the local Easyjet staff. Finally, they tell us they have had to get a new crew or a new plane, but we can now board. Once on the plane, however, we learn that they need a 'competent engineer' to sign off some technical check and they can't find one. We spend another hour sitting on on the plane. Children start screaming. My head is still aching. In the end, we take off 2 hours late. There is the usual cattle-truck-of-the-skies experience, this time of the added bonus of the smell of the toilets wafting through the cabin ventilation.

At Gatwick airport at midnight, there are no stopping trains, so I have to fork out £50 for a taxi home. Perhaps next time, they should just run the ECPR over Skype.

Cloudy blue

Kevin Degan-Krause's Pozorblog highlights the joys of Wordle, a site which will artily mash will any text as a arty looking 'word cloud' and, as it homes in on key words, tell you straight out and direct what the book is really about. Fed into the site the text of my book The New Right in the New Europe comes out pretty much as you might expect, although my tendency to overuse the word 'however' is rather brutally exposed.

However, I think you can probably forgive me that...

Bar to advancement

I'm sitting in a hotel bar with colleagues, nervously watching the time so I don't miss my train and talking about party patronage and academic specialization. Like so many studies of parties, the one we're discussing tends to tell us less about the effects of parties and more about the problem of the very notion of the political party, in both advanced and transitional democracies much less the bounded formal organization of the political science classics than fluid elite network overlapping with other networks. We lament the fact that intellectually curious political scientists are, as often as not, punished in career terms for asking new questions and shifting to new areas: to gain reputation and stature, we agree, you need to keep mining the same seam even when it's pretty much exhausted.

I am myself pretty much exhausted when I get to St Pancras and I narrowly miss my train.

Memories Russian back

I spend part of the weekend clearing boxes of old possessions, some dating from my student days, from my parents loft: amid the pots and pans and dusty electric kettles, I uncover two boxes of rather good quality Russian language classics dating from my time doing a French and Russian Studies degree at Leeds University. Sadly, I won't have the time to (re-)read, they go onto E-bay. to find good homes. Any Russophone readers with a literary bent check them out here Oddly, beyond a copy of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and a Russian translation of Djilas's Conversations With Stalin - which I remember reading on a train going to or from Kiev - there is nothing about much on politics. Pausing for a cup of tea, I dip into a novel by Chingiz Aitmatov, one of our second year set texts as I recall. Pleasingly, I can still more or less follow it.

Imperialism and anti-imperialism in the small hours

It's early morning but I'm wide awake and I can't sleep, so I go downstairs to read. I finish off a couple of books I was reading, and almost got through, over the holiday. I always to try and read couple of non-academic books wholly unrelated to Eastern Europe, usually an impulse buy when I'm Christmas shopping or an impulse borrow from the local library. This year's selections are a biography, Tim Jeal's Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer, and Stefan Aust's recently reissued book about The Baader-Meinhof Complex about the far left terrorism of the Red Army F(r)action in 1970s West Germany.

Henry Morton Stanley turned out to be neither the pillar of the British upper classes nor the go-getting America newspaperman I had variously imagined (although he played both roles) but someone born poor and illegitimate in provincial Wales. Abandoned in a workhouse for most his childhood, he made his way, emotionally withdrawn but very determined - through the

the expanding late Victorian world and ended up in the USA, where he reinvents himself as Henry M. Stanley (assumed names, but later backed by a concocted story of adoption by a wealthy cotton planter); had a series picaresque not to say bizarre series of adventures as trader, gold prospector, deserterfrom both sides in the US Civil War before finally making it at the age of 30 as journalist and heading off to Africa for he journalistic scoop of the century: 'discovering' missionary and explorer David Livingstone, whom his best selling book subsequently mythologizes as a saintly figure.

He then turned explorer himself making two epic journeys (in opposite directions) between Zanzibar and the mouth of the Congo, sorting out the true source of the Nile and opening up central Africa for European colonialism. His candour and exaggeration of his ruthlessness in his books, says Jeal, left him with a reputation for brutality, argues, was basically undeserved. Despite laying the some of the foundations of King Leopold's Congo Free State, he can't, says Jeal reckons, be held directly responsible for the atrocities of Belgian colonialism in Congo, which later transpired, but was guilty of some political misjudgements.

This thoroughly documented shades-of-grey interpretation and mildly revisionist agenda came across as basically plausibe, although left the question of how (and if) we should judge Stanley, - as well as much of the psychology that drove him - hanging in the air. Most interesting (if underplayed in the book) was the political and social context of the time that emerges: public and political attitudes to Africa is far from the gung-ho imperialist racism overlaid by a patina of religiosity that we perhaps imagined. Indeed, what is striking is how strong altruistic, humanitarian and liberal impulses seem to have be, albeit it mixed with Realpolitik and economic self-interest. Uncomfortably, recasting some of the politically incorrect language of the time, Stanley (in Jeal's account, at least) and others emerge as a worrying modern figures concerned to deliver failed and/or underdeveloped states on the global periphery from local warlords, bringing them the benefits of development ('civilization'), open and global markets and combating mass people trafficking (abolition of East African slave trade).

Anti-imperialism in West Europe, this time in the form of protest against and outrage about the Vietnam War and depredation of the Third World were also a driving force the story of the Baader-Meinhof group and the radical left in 1970s West Germany, as told in Aust's reworked The Baader-Meinhof Complex, now, of course, a glossy and violent new film. Unlike Jeal's biography which loses a bit of readability by dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's, Aust's book has fragmented episodic structure, making for a fast and compelling read . It's easy to see why it was filmed as blockbusting political thriller-cum crime story-cum reconstruction of the 1970s.

Aust clearly knows his stuff, however, having been personally acquainted with some the leading dramais personnae and obsessively followed up the RAF story through the three decades worth of research and interviews with cops and terrorists alike. Without being too didactic, the book debunks much of the (self-)mythologization of and violent chic of the RAF as misguided but pure martyrs, showing them as a strong on verbiage, low on ideology and strategy, high on brutality (emotional and physical) and at key moments sustained by East European secret services and factions of the PLO.

There are gaps in Aust's vividly but briefly sketched account of the West German radical and ultra-radical left of the 1960s and 1970s . However with forty years' hindsight the sociological and ideological sources of the RAF seem clear enough: orthodox Leninist vanguardism, Maoist voluntarism; anarchist 'propaganda of the deed' and New Left notions of radical political engagement as a form of personal therapy; the moral ambiguity of incompletely de-Nazified West Germany and the German Social Democrats' coming to terms with it (many RAF members were briefly members of the SPD youth); and the New Left project of students, lumpenproletariat and Third World as a substitute for the Western working class's definitive failure to show up (again) for its appointed historical role of revolutionary vanguard.

The psychology and background key RAF personalities, however, remain as much of a cipher that of the compulsively driven Stanley and his fellow explorers/adventurers, although both seem to share a self-destructive urge and strangely toxic mix of overblown moral certainty and callous brutality. However, I couldn't help the rather odd feeling that world of the Baader-Meinhof Complex was utlimately more distant and unfamiliar - perhaps the word I am looking for is irrelevant - than of that Stanley and late Victorian imperialism/globalization in the making.

If I only had a brain...

In the wake of a not too well received panto last year, this year he theatre Royal Brighton has the Wizard of Oz as its big festive show . For copyright reasons, they stick closely to the film script with only a few panto-ish touches supplied by producer (the Good Witch of the North looked suspiciously like a Good Fairy) and audience (the Wicked Witch of the East got roundly boo-ed on every appearance).

"You'll be blown away" the poster said. Well, not quite. But it was a good time was had by all. My daughter and my niece knew the story and liked the songs, munchkins, flying monkeys, melting witches and other fairytale stuff. I liked it, of course, Wizard of Oz is actually a political allegory. A populist parable about the advance of financial and industrial capitalism in the late 19th/early 20th century US and a covert pre-Keynesian appeal for economic reflation by issuing currency backed by silver (as well as gold). As Hugh Rockoff of Rutgers University explains in The Journal of Political Economy (98: 739-60, 1990) Dorothy represents traditional rural American values, Toto the Teetotalers, an influential compoenent in the US Populist movement, the Scarecrow the farmers; the Tin Man the industrial workers; the Cowardly is Lion William Jennings Bryan the Populist Democratic and unsuccessful four time presidentiial candidate; the Munchkins are the citizens of the East Coast the Wicked Witch of the East is Democrat Grover Cleveland; the Wicked Witch of the West is Republican politician and later US President William McKinley; the Wizard Marcus Alonzo Hanna, chairman of the Republican Party; the Yellow Brick Road is the gold standard; Oz is, of course, the abbreviation for an ounce of gold (or anything else).

Others see the 1939 film, a Depression era musical concoction with multiple writers which drew on various of the many Wizard of Oz books written by L. Frank Baum earlier in the century, as a a satire on the New Deal and the technocratic Keynesian fixes it (the fraudulent Wizard adulated by the people being FDR, whose magic is less effective than good ol' family and rural values that finally will Dorothy back to Kansas). And, of course, there are more recent parallels. Rajiv Chandrasekaran's devasting reportage of the inadequacies and self-delusion of US occupation administrators cocooned in Iraq's Green Zone, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, also has a WoOZ allusion (Is George W. the Scarecrow or the Wizard, though?).

For anyone interested, there's an excellent overview of economic, political and religious allegories in the WoOZ by Quentin P. Taylor of Rogers State University, as well as a Wikipedia article on the same subject, and useful hub site with links to various critics' essays here. And, if you're really interested there's also an academic book on the subject: Ranjit S. Dighe (ed.) The Historian's Wizard of Oz — Reading L. Frank Baum's Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory, (Praeger Publishers, 2002). Wow.

In truth, however I was most taken with bit of social satire at the end when the Wiz tells the Scarecrow not to too worry about his lack of brain:

"Why anybody can have a brain - a very mediocre commodity. ( … ) Back where I come from we have universities - seats of great learning - where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. But - they have one thing you haven't got - a diploma!’. "

He then awards the Scarecrow a Th.D., Dr. of Thinkology (Mind you, only an honorary one. - nothing too unethical here). Not sure if this is promoting wider participation in higher education drawing attention to the problem of degree inflation or just a good of populism anti-intellectual smack in the face. Still, I laughed anyway and was still smiling when forked out for some very overpriced magic wands on the way out...

Update: And, for anyone, who doesn't like political and social allegory, there is a more or less politics-free radio essay on the Wizard of Oz, by Salman Rushdie for next week here on the BBC Radio 4 website.

Twilight robbery

We live in a fairly low crime suburban neighbourhood in the South of England. Still, this didn't stop someone making off with our pumpkin jack o'lantern from the house during the course of Halloween night. A backhanded compliment to my pumpkin carving skills I suppose - it was stolen, after all, not trashed - but downright infuriating nevertheless. After all, an Englishman's pumpkin is his castle. Seems to be another social problem imported from the US - YouTube is full of irate videos like this - and at least one US jury is deadlocked over the issue of whether the right to defend yourself and your home extends to blowing a pumpkin thief away with a deadly weapon. No doubt Barack Obama will improve things along with the rest of the world situation when he gets elected tonight.