All in a Don's Day (22 page)

Richard, I never said ‘nobody should tell a historian to shut up′, I said that just because Starkey′s specialist subject is the Elizabethans is not a good reason to shut him up.

Just for the sake of completeness, this is what D Lammy said: ‘Yes, I have now seen what he [
sc
. Starkey] said. His views are irrelevant – he′s a Tudor historian talking about contemporary urban unrest′s

I would like to see Starkey′s views well and truly quashed … but we have to quash them for the right reasons.

As one of my Oxford mates said to me, the worst thing that Starkey has done is to have given us a sense of moral certitude in opposition to him.

MARY BEARD

As a historian, Beard should be consulting the evidence before she writes her blog.

LIZX

Liz, If ′Beard′ followed your rather rigid prescriptions, she might be writing good history, but it wouldn′t be a very entertaining blog.

LL

Starkey′s was a complex point, easily misinterpreted (as we have seen), and it certainly does not deserve to be ′quashed′, which is a surprising choice of word from someone who claims to be holding out for free speech. I dare say what makes him ′undistinguished′ in your eyes is his refusal to kowtow to the liberal orthodoxies of the quad and court. Or maybe it is just the gentle envy of one media don for another with a bigger telly contract.

HAMPSTEAD OWL

18 August 2011

The icon of Brussels is (to judge from the souvenir shops at least) the bronze fountain/statue of the little boy pissing, the Manneken Pis. It is an image that, in Brussels, goes back to the seventeenth century; but the idea of a fountain spouting water as if it was peeing goes back at least to the Romans, and probably before. It's not a hugely imaginative idea.

Anyway, you can now buy battalions of this little guy, most made I guess in China. (A few blazon ‘Made in Belgium', but most are not homegrown – has anyone ever gone to one of these Chinese factories where miniature images of the great monuments of the West are churned out?) And if you don't fancy a key-ring, you can buy him in chocolate, or see him in a more than life-size pretend-chocolate model. Every tour group is brought to admire.

My question was: why has
this
become the icon of Belgium? Most cities have a much more visible symbol (Big Ben, the Parthenon, the Eiffel Tower), but this little boy is barely a metre tall and in what would have been a back street, if it hadn't been for him. He is supposed to go back to the early seventeenth century (stolen and broken up in the nineteenth, and remade from a mould of the pieces), and there are all kinds of urban legends about what he might stand for. The one I was told years ago was that he was a lost rich child, whose father vowed a statue of him doing whatever he was doing if and when he was found. But there are plenty of others. I rather like the idea that it reminds us of the brave kids of Brussels who ensured their city's victory by pissing on the enemy from trees.

What I hadn't realised till we went last week was that he also had a wardrobe.

Kept in the Musée de la Ville de Bruxelles are the many and varied costumes he has been presented with by local and visiting delegations. Where these are made, heaven knows … but I have never seen the little chap dressed up.

Anyway, we couldn't resist going to see his kit when we were there last weekend. And as we going out of the Museum we couldn't help notice some packs of what looked like repro 1950s' postcards. These confirmed the sense of wonder – because they foregrounded the sexuality of the image that most modern renderings would ostensibly disavow. OK, they were sexualised only at one remove, but sexualised nevertheless. The repeated joke (and it came in various forms) was the one about the middle-aged lady who sees the statue of the little boy and suddenly gets horny … to the distress of her middle-aged husband, who sees that he is in for an energetic night.

You couldn't sell these now. Or could you? And in what form? We imagined that we were buying repros of historic souvenirs. But getting them out on the train back home, they looked more like the real thing. There was nothing printed on the back about what they were copying, and the edges were decidedly yellow. Were they actually still flogging old stock?

And still no one had quite explained why this pissing toddler was the icon of the city. Is it really just, as the guidebooks would claim, an encapsulation of the ‘irreverent spirit' of Brussels … a kind of Tintin
avant la lettre
?

One of the most often repeated stories about Manneken Pis is that he saved Brussels. As the story goes, a plot to destroy the city was forged, explosive or incendiary devices left in place and a primer set alight in order to let the terrorists flee. But the young man came along and extinguished the primer, thus saving the city. The other speaks of a very young duke taken on a battlefield where he came out of his bed at a time when the battle was going badly for his forces, the sight of him pissing toward his enemies giving heart to his men, who went on to win the fight.

In any case, a version of the statue has been in the city since at least 1388. It has been part of the history of the city for so long that it became a symbol of resistance, especially after Brussels′s siege by Louis XIV′s armies, during which the statue was hidden and after which the inscription ′In petra exaltavit me, et nunc exaltavi caput meum super inimicos meos′ was engraved. As for the clothes, it seems it became a tradition just after the siege
when the Spanish governor-general Maximilien-Emmanuel de Bavière gave its first set of clothes to the boy.

Signed: A Classical-period historian and digital humanist living on top of the highest tower in the less than fashionable area just behind the Covent Garden in Brussels. (Yes, culture and science may bloom in the most unexpected areas.)

PASCAL LEMAIRE

1 September 2011

In case you don't know, the ‘REF' (the ‘Research Excellence Framework', which sounds like the higher education equivalent of a ‘record of achievement') is the new version of the ‘RAE' (the ‘Research Assessment Exercise', which was at least honest enough to admit that it was judgemental … more like the old ‘school report'). It is the process by which the government evaluates the research ‘output' of university departments (and indeed of the individual academics within those departments) and then distributes (or not) money accordingly.

No surprise that I have little sympathy with this process. It's not that I think university academics should not be in some form accountable to those who (in large part, but not wholly) pay for them. But this process is overall a block on good, imaginative research in the humanities (and maybe in the sciences too). It dominates the thinking of university administrators. Try appointing someone to a university job who – whatever good reason – doesn't look as if they are going to have a ‘robust' submission (that is new uni speak even among the dreaming spires) for the REF. And it sets a load of ingenious people off on the chase of clever ways to come out on top … so that the government can thrash us all, or rather some of us, again. Divide and rule, it used to be called.

No department wants to be a three-star (or whatever it will be called this time), else some slasher VC will come in and
slash them (or, if they are VERY LUCKY INDEED, will give them extra research leave, and two new super-star colleagues (no teaching duties) so they can do better next time … dream on).

I realise, of course, that many of my own colleagues have done valiant jobs and spent weeks of their life in evaluating all this research activity in past assessment exercises, to ensure that the process is still a peer review, not some metric exercise – which would reward the popular and bad (and to be fair the popular and good) at the expense of the brilliant and unfashionable. (A bit like Cambridge University Library thinking you can judge the value of a periodical on the basis of how many times it has been borrowed.) Don't think I'm ungrateful to them. But all the same, I don't like the system.

Today, though, it isn't the higher principles, or ‘the system', that are annoying me. It is what the REF has done to my summer.

Now I haven't been research-inactive over the last few years; indeed I have written a lot, had quite a bit of ‘impact' (another bit of uni new speak) and I have given two big series of lectures in the states (Sathers and Mellons) which took a hell of a lot of work to do, which other people would long to give and which I am dying to write up. What I wanted to do this summer was to get down to Roman Laughter (the Sather topic) and get it pretty well finished … but hang on.

I have to submit four ‘outputs' published between 2008 and the end of 2013. My Pompeii book is an obvious one, as is a big article about to come out on nineteenth-century travel to Pompeii. After that I have a variety of things, including a new article in an exhibition catalogue on the secret cabinet in the Naples Museum, a total rewrite of a piece on ‘Oriental Cults' I did a few years ago (this is effectively a new paper, but will
it count?), some stuff on Roman Britain in the late nineteenth century, plus a Darwin lecture on Risk … and a paper on Samuel Butler that didn't actually appear till 2008, although the title page is dated 2007 etc. etc.

What I ought to have done this summer was get down and conquer my Laughter book. That would have made the most intellectual sense, and it would have been best for the subject, and for me. But I sat down and thought, hell – if I get to it now, it still might not come out by the end of 2013, there might be all kinds of hold-ups, and the University of California Press doesn't quite get the REF issue …

What I need to be safe, I thought, is another sure-fire article. So I wrote an article on the history of the Fitzwilliam Classical Collection, which I have enjoyed (a lot actually), and which I had promised … but in the end I only really did it because of the damn REF, when I should have spent the summer on Laughter.

So if anyone ever tells you that the REF doesn't skew people's research plans, I for one can tell you that it does.

Then, just as I was reflecting gloomily on this subject, I was told that the most recent consultative document for the rules for the REF proposes normally giving women who have had kids no allowance in the evaluation unless they have had more than 14 months' maternity leave in the 5 years. (For most of us, who can't afford unpaid maternity leave, that would mean having had 3 kids in 5 years.) The idea is supposed to be that you have your maternity leave and then are back to normal. (An alternative and, in my view, much better suggestion would be to credit women with an output for each baby … so one child born in the period and you would only need 3 outputs, 2 and you would only need 2.)

This idea of not recognising the research effects of young babies is surely mad. I have tried writing articles with two kids under three. It isn't about just the official maternity leave. What you need to write good articles and books in my subjects is uninterrupted thinking time. So what blights your productivity for a good while are the trips backward and forwards to feed the baby, the fact that you can't go to all those seminars you used to go to (people forget about you and what you might be doing) – and you certainly can't go to conferences (unless you fancy sitting in the bog and expressing the milk for what seems like hours on end, while everyone else is networking).

If there had been a REF on these terms in the mid-1980s, I would have been a casualty (i.e., I would have been a failure) … and I probably would have left the University and got another job. Twenty years on (and it takes 20 years), I am confident enough to say that that would have been a loss.

Where are our equal opps people when we need them?

I′m going to get lynched for saying this, but …

I have two kids aged three and under. I breast-fed them both (still feeding the youngest) up to a year or so. I am a senior academic at a top university in the UK. I took a year off on maternity leave with each. One of them has woken up every 2.5 hours through the night since he was born.

And I′m scratching my head at what to put in to the REF (my manager has just asked for preliminary suggestions) as I have 14 things which count, and more in the pipeline.

I planned ahead.

And quite frankly, I′m narked that my hard work on top of my leave (and difficult pregnancies, births and recovery) isn′t going to be rewarded, and that nothing takes into consideration my high level of high-class output. No, I do not want my input to be reduced to two items! Judge me on my real performance!

I could do with some sleep, though.

MONKEYBEAR5000

4 September 2011

According to this morning's papers, Tony Blair, who had been sent a chunk of Saif Gaddafi's thesis, wrote back to him thanking him for showing him his ‘interesting thesis' and giving him a few examples that might help his research (ill-fated research, as it turned out, in more ways than one). This has apparently been revealed in documents that have turned up in Tripoli, and a Blair spokesperson has explained that (although the letter was signed by TB) he hadn't actually read the thesis and the whole thing had been drafted by ‘officials'.