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Over de Auteur

Francis Wheen is an award-winning columnist for "The Guardian" in London, & the deputy editor of "Private Eye". (Bowker Author Biography)

Bevat de namen: F Wheen, Francis Wheen

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A Modern Utopia (1905) — Introductie, sommige edities382 exemplaren

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Algemene kennis

Gangbare naam
Wheen, Francis
Officiële naam
Wheen, Francis James Baird
Geboortedatum
1957-01-22
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
UK
Opleiding
Royal Holloway, University of London
Beroepen
journalist
broadcaster
Relaties
Jones, Julia (3) (partner)
Smith, Joan (1) (ex-wife)
Hitchens, Christopher (friend)
Korte biografie
Francis Wheen is a prolific freelance journalist and broadcaster, and has worked for the New Statesman, Independent, Mirror, Gay News, Today, New Socialist and Tatler. Having presented News-Stand on BBC Radio 4 for a number of years, Francis has appeared often on ITV's What the Papers Say and more recently on BBC2's Have I Got News For You. He is now the writer of Wheen's World a regular column appearing in the Guardian – for which he was voted Columnist of the Year.
His previous books include The Sixties (1982), Television (1985), The Battle for London (1985), Tom Driberg (1990) which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award, and the bestselling How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World (2004). Karl Marx was published by Fourth Estate in 2000 and was shortlisted for numerous awards including the WH Smith Literary Award; the Samuel Johnson Prize; the Orwell Prize; the Silver Pen Award; and the Marsh Award.
Francis Wheen lives in Essex. [from www.harpercollins.co.uk]

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I rarely write reviews of books I don't finish reading but I refuse to finish reading this one. Name-drops aplenty but entirely superficial. Doesn't answer its title; doesn't offer anything profound at all. Simply a hotch-potch of things in the last few decades which its author finds ridiculous, often unfairly and without context, and ends with a single paragraph summary that the Enlightenment offered a lot but people acting in bad faith frustrated its promise and that frustration may continue. A meaningless conclusion. Look elsewhere for commentary of significance. The question that leaps out at the reader, of course, is whether the Enlightenment itself was flawed, but that would require a depth of thought not evident here. Has made me distrustful of Wheen. Tabloid, albeit post-graduate. Next.… (meer)
½
 
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Quickpint | 24 andere besprekingen | Oct 26, 2023 |
Tom Driberg is fascinating because he inhabited so many different worlds at once. This book could easily have been called The Lives of Tom Driberg. At Oxford in the 1920s he was part of the dandy aesthete circle which included Brian Howard, Harold Acton and Cyril Connolly: bottle-green suits, raspberry crêpe de chine shirts, poetic gibberish recited through megaphones and young men openly in each other’s embrace. All that kind of thing. At the same time he was a member of the British Communist Party, which he joined when he was fifteen and still at his public school, and being arrested for attempting to distribute pamphlets on their behalf during the General Strike of 1926. In the 1930s, as the original William Hickey, he became a famous gossip columnist for the Daily Express. The militant socialist and Lord Beaverbrook’s staunchly conservative newspaper were strange bedfellows indeed, but he did his best to smuggle his heretical views into the columns. Driberg moved freely up and down the social scale of a rigidly stratified class society. He dined in the finest restaurants and grandest houses and cruised the rather less stately ‘cottages’ of England in search of rough trade. He was as openly gay - not to mention recklessly so - as it was possible to be in a society that put gay men in prison (as Driberg very nearly was on more than one occasion). He was a left-wing Labour MP who adored the Royal Family, was a social snob, liked to hang out with aristocrats and lived in a mansion which he couldn’t afford (Driberg was simultaneously sybaritic and impecunious). He was a devout Anglo-Catholic and a friend of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast himself. Driberg ‘acquired’ Crowley’s diary, eventually flogging it to Jimmy Page for a princely sum. His list of friends and acquaintances was dizzyingly eclectic: Evelyn Waugh, Guy Burgess, Edith Sitwell, W. H. Auden, Lord Mountbatten, Aneurin Bevan, Allen Ginsberg and the infamous gangster twins, the Krays.

It should be clear from all this that, if Tom Driberg hadn’t existed, no novelist would have dared to invent him; he simply wouldn’t have been a credible character. Given that the actual man was so fantastical, it’s hardly surprising that many myths have accumulated around him. It has been alleged that he was an MI5 informant who ratted on his socialist brothers and sisters and also a KGB agent who betrayed his country (accusations rebutted with sober factual authority, I thought, by Francis Wheen. On the other hand, who knows? Driberg’s life blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction so comprehensively that it might be safest to assume that everything said about him is both true and false). In his introduction, Wheen compares him to Woody Allen’s chameleonic character Zelig, and not without reason. Think of a key 20th century event and chances are that Tom Driberg was there or thereabouts: the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, the liberation of Paris, the relief of Buchenwald, the Korean War, swinging London in the ‘60s. He was in America when Pearl Harbour was attacked and in 1956 he went to Moscow to interview the Soviet double agent and defector Guy Burgess. His life was so inextricably bound up with world events that this biography also serves as a useful primer to twentieth century political and social history.

Despite his opulent habits there was nothing insincere about Driberg’s socialism. As Wheen points out, extreme case though he undeniably was, there is actually no contradiction: socialists believe in greater equality and justice, not asceticism. Driberg was a lifelong opponent of colonialism and racism and one of the first British politicians to advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament. He was a constant thorn in the side of the establishment, not least that of his own party. Wheen argues convincingly that his Christianity and socialism were reflections of each other; a belief in fellowship and justice being at the root of both. And, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, there was no drift to the Right in later life. The rebellious spirit of the 1960s chimed perfectly with Driberg’s eternally rebellious spirit. Despite entering his own sixties mid-decade, he had a fine old time: singing the praises of pirate radio (unlike his own government which eventually outlawed the pirates), signing petitions supporting the legalisation of cannabis, contributing to the satirical magazine Private Eye, defending the countercultural press, speaking out against censorship, and trying to persuade his friend Mick Jagger to become a Labour MP.

Tom Driberg was clearly no saint. This upper-middle-class man of the people could be appallingly rude to ordinary people and woe betide any waiter who had the vulgarity to put a sauce bottle on his table. He was also a less than ideal husband. Driberg married in 1951 and, predictably, it was not a happy liaison. Wheen dismisses the suggestion that it was a cover for his continuing gay adventures (discretion was certainly never his thing) while failing to provide a plausible alternative explanation. Despite his faults, or possibly partly because of them, I found myself liking Driberg enormously. He had an admirably independent spirit, was never in the slightest danger of sliding into respectability (even when unexpectedly elevated to the House of Lords shortly before his death, where true to form he immediately proceeded to cause trouble) and possessed a rare gift for èpater la bourgeois. His profound love of the arts, and often avant-garde art, also stands out in a notoriously philistine Westminster. He was destined to remain a parliamentary backbencher but nowadays such a natural anarch would be unlikely to get past any party’s candidate selection procedure.

This biography is full of funny stories about Driberg’s often outrageous behaviour which sometimes give it a gossipy flavour that, as a former ‘gossip king’ himself, he would surely have approved of. But it’s more substantial than this suggests. Wheen provides a nuanced portrait of a complex and paradoxical man while also casting a sharp eye on the moral hypocrisies and legally sanctioned prejudices of mid-twentieth century Britain.
… (meer)
 
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gpower61 | Aug 30, 2023 |
I was eight years old when the 1970s started and my abiding memories of the decade revolve around Raleigh Chopper bikes, glam rock and Monty Python. There are plenty of books which indulge such fluffy nostalgia but this isn’t one of them. Francis Wheen uses the theme of paranoia as the departure point for a walk around the dark side of the seventies.

Wheen is an amiable tour guide to a wide range of sinister scenarios and characters: Richard Nixon - a president so paranoid he bugged his own conversations; the FBI and CIA operating as secret police forces against their citizens in order to safeguard the land of the free; terrorist groups determined to liberate people from their ‘false consciousness’ by blowing them up; Britain having a collective nervous breakdown and, of course, the curious case of Rupert Bear’s penis (otherwise known as the Oz trial).

Wheen’s contention that the 1970s was the decade in which paranoia became generalised throughout society is debatable. What were the thousands of people persecuted by the McCarthy witch-hunts of the late forties and 1950s if not the victims of a paranoia run rampant through the body politic? Nonetheless, this is a compulsively readable book that is simultaneously unsettling and entertaining. It certainly proves that the old countercultural adage ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean the government isn’t out to get you’ was nothing more than the plain truth.

Most disturbing is the thought the reader (this reader, anyway) is left with that the nightmarish, dangerously unstable, crisis-ridden and deranged world portrayed in this book looks less like the last century than a parallel present.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
gpower61 | 23 andere besprekingen | Aug 29, 2022 |
Nem tudom, elgondolkodott-e már valaki azon, mennyire felülreprezentáltak a nyugati civilizáció meghatározó figurái között azok a szakállasok, akiknek a neve „M” betűvel kezdődik. Mózes, Marx, Mikulás…* Wheen a legkönnyebb utat választotta, amikor hármuk közül azt pécézte ki magának, akinek a létezése legkevésbé szorul bizonyításra – viszont ezt fényesen meg is oldotta. Könyve egyszerre pergő humorú életrajz egy izgalmas mozgalmárról (vagy mozgalmas izgalmárról?), és ugyanakkor egy nyomasztó hatású filozófiai-közgazdaságtani életmű közérthető gyorselemzése. Az első szempontnak Wheen hibátlanul megfelel, remekül rajzolja meg a fickót, aki a személyes vita közben sosem riadt vissza ellenfele lezsidózásától (egy rabbi leszármazottjától ez meglehetősen derék dolog), Engelstől pénzt kunyerál, gigantikus elméjével földbe döngöl minden elvtársat, aki szembeszáll vele, ugyanakkor még fájdalmas kelései sem akadályozták meg abban, hogy családi körben nagy átéléssel alakítsa a tökéletes nagypapát. Sokszínű fazon, semmiképpen sem az a kannibál, amilyennek konzervatív körökben ábrázolni szokás.

Ami Marx eszmetörténeti munkásságát illeti, itt már érezhető némi elfogultság Wheen részéről – mindenesetre mindent megtesz, hogy megvédje A tőké-t és társait az elhamarkodott ítéletalkotóktól. Az bizonyos, hogy Marx személyében rendkívül eredeti gondolkodóval állunk szemben: mindaz, amit a tőkéről, mint társadalmi viszonyról, a munkaerőről, mint áruba bocsátható termékről, vagy épp a világpiacról és a kapitalizmus ciklikusságáról mond, alapvetően átírta a társadalomtudományi gondolkodást. Amikor kifejti, hogy a burzsujok** önön sírjukat ássák, amikor a városba csábítják a leendő munkaerőt, mert ezzel lehetőséget teremtenek nekik a szervezkedésre, ezáltal arra, hogy megdöntsék őt – hát ez fenemód logikus következtetés. Nem jött be, az igaz, legalábbis ott nem, ahol volt munkásság. Ahol volt, ott a munkások inkább korrigálni igyekeztek a rendszert, nem leönteni benzinnel, aztán pfff… meggyújtani – de hát akkor is: logikus. De ilyen tévedések minden autoriter gondolkodóval előfordulnak, aki nem hajlandó mások aspektusaiból megvizsgálni a problémát, ellenben hajlamos a prófétálásra. Ahogy Wheen tündökletesen jegyzi meg: Marx összetévesztette a kapitalizmus születési fájdalmát az agóniával. Van ez így – velem is gyakran megesik. Vagy az agóniát tévesztem össze a születési fájdalommal? Majd ötven év múlva kiderül.

* Ha Machiavelli szakállt növesztett volna, Jézus pedig felveszi az anyja nevét, még tökéletesebben ülne az elméletem.
** Akikről egyébként Marx meglepő respektussal beszélt – nagyon hálás volt, amiért átvették a hatalmat az impotens arisztokráciától, és felszabadították az emberiség káprázatos teremtő erejét. Más kérdés, hogy mindezt a nyílt kizsákmányolás eszközével tették, így csak átmeneti lehet az uralkodásul. Elméletben. A gyakorlatban viszont a kapitalizmus által alkalmazott nyílt kizsákmányolás fokozatosan egyre kevésbé nyílttá vált, és úgy fest, ezzel ki is fogták a szelet a forradalom vitorlájából.
… (meer)
 
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Kuszma | 6 andere besprekingen | Jul 2, 2022 |

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