A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
JOHN HOLLOWAY
Suddenly, we have news from Pakistan again. The unpredictable disappearance of news items from our papers has long in- trigued me. Some months ago the papers were full of the atrocities and so-called breakdown of order in East Pakistan. Then, Yahya Khan (our cat has the same name, by the way), brought in the military, and all was total silence. Now, we have a few snippets about re-forming the government, and taking over the principality of Swat (the subject incidentally of some verses by Edward Lear). Why the sudden fade-out? In this case it might be censorship; but other examples that occur to me, out of many, are Anguilla (recently, after another long silence, we learnt that the island is to have a new chief administrator, as if that was what we wanted to know) and the student 'sit-in' at Bristol last year. Why is it that disorder makes news and the other thing not?—as if I didn't know.
I don't feel the same way about revolt- ing court cases like the Brady trial. So far as I remember, another affair came up not long after that one, and was pretty thoroughly hushed up; for which I was glad. Those who deny that the gory pub- licity incites others along the same lines may be right; but nobody thinks it acts as powerful discouragement, and until it does, my position's unadjustable.
French leave
The French devaluation reminds me of one good mark, anyhow, that I'm prepared to give Harold Wilson: by doing the deed in winter-time, he avoided wrecking people's £50 holidays as much as he might have done. At the time of the previous British devaluation, which came during my first visit to Italy, I remember leaping off the train and sprinting the length of Florence railway station, frantically doing mental arithmetic as I ran so as to change, all in one go, as much as we were going to need for the whole trip. I got the sum nearly right and beat devaluation by one day. Such financial speculations as I've been able to engage in since then have done less well. The French have done the job very neatly, with no pomposities after the event, and to christen devaluation 'realignment' is a coup de maitre. Unless we monkey about with the pound now (which I rather fear, in view of the denials) I shall be able to go to France this autumn, and it wasn't till I'd thought of that, that I realised how much I wanted to.
I once heard Sir Con O'Neill, now
senior official in our EEC team, praised in unusual terms. The man whose judgment I most respect at All Souls told me how he thought him the most gifted Fellow he'd ever known in that talented place. My own reason for wanting us in is a frivolous one: it might just possibly lead to reform of the English pub. Imagine a continental café where you couldn't drink wine or coffee, couldn't take your children, read a book, write letters, or get anything to eat except those infamous packets of cheese and plaster, and couldn't go at all for break- fast or in the afternoons. Of course, English pubs have a very special charm. Yes. It's remarkably like that of branch-line railway stations before Beeching.
Breast stroke
I have never really been able to master Adorno's writings, but his death from heart failure recently is a notable loss to all those concerned with criticism or literature - -or politics or philosophy either, if it comes to that. The great continental tradition that a critic is a man who brings a comprehen- sive intellectual position and informedncss to bear, not just a literary one, is some- thing that makes our own most impressive critics seem bellettrist even as they con- demn that very thing. On a visit to Frank- furt University some time ago, 1 learnt that after being the students' hero. Adorn° had fallen from favour and was having his lectures disrupted. One of the disrupters was a young lady who leapt up on the plat- form and bared her breasts.
One of the resolutions put down for the thirty-first national conference of the Com- munist party next November stresses the importance of trying to bring 'the left-mov- ing students into alliance with the left pro- gressive forces in the Labour Movement'. Educational radicals can easily find them- selves in a difficulty over the present fusion in the university world of radical educa- tional pressures and left-wing political ones. Many academics are not well equipped to assess long-term political objectives, and so to grasp how far they arc or arc not in- separable from educational ones; and the gendal public still seems unconscious that in effect it is leaving important political decisions, in a key sector of society, to those whose professional duty is to leave political issues as open as they possibly can. Some say that there's no such thing as doing that: but if not, by what process of free-ranging and unconditioned inquiry did they find out?
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