Krige at Bonhams

HAVING UNEXPECTEDLY been granted a day off (two, actually) I was quite content popping over to New Bond Street yesterday just in the nick of time to see Bonhams’ South African Sale before they went up for auction today. Out of pure ignorance, I used to think South African art was all mediocre before slowly discovering its small but noteworthy patches of brilliance. Francois Krige is one of them. Of the three galleries at Bonhams devoted to the South African Sale (Part II, strictly speaking) one of them darkened with individual lights highlighting the particular pieces hanging on the walls. (more…)

The 8th Earl of Wicklow

William Cecil James Philip John Paul Howard, 8th Earl of Wicklow (styled Viscount Clonmore from his birth until succeeding to the earldom in 1946) was received into the Church at the age of thirty in 1932. Having attended Mass with the family’s Catholic servants, he was banished from visiting the family home on Sundays in addition to being disinherited. He later married the architect Eleanor Butler who served in Seanad Éireann from 1948-1951. Above is one of three photographs of Viscount Clonmore in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

The Arrival of Autumn

Here in London, after a long Indian summer, it has finally turned to autumn. One’s mind turns automatically to autumns past enjoyed, and I can’t help but think of that splendid season in the Western Cape. Of course, as the recent coverage of the royal visit to Australia reminds us, it’s not autumn at all in the Southern Hemisphere but rather warm and summery.

The other day, however, I stumbled across this photo on Flickr (more…)

The Major-General’s Statue

Die staanbeeld van Maj-Gen Lukin in die Kompanjiestuin

While Afrikaans is a mild obsession of mine, I do like finding those holdouts of what they used to call “High Dutch” — in contrast to the ordinary South African spoken Dutch which, because of its differences in grammar and spelling, was eventually recognised as the language Afrikaans.

One such old Dutch holdout can be found on the statue (Af: staanbeeld; lit.: ‘standing-picture’) of Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Timson Lukin in the Company’s Garden, Cape Town. The pedestal proclaims in a very handsome font the General’s rank, name, and orders. In Dutch: Majoor-Generaal Sir Henry Timson Lukin, KCB CMG DSO, Commandeur Legioen van Eer, Orde van de Nyl.

Most of this works perfectly well as Afrikaans but for two slight differences. First: The lack of ‘i’ in de always indicates Dutch rather than Afrikaans, but because of the relative youth of Afrikaans, de can sometimes be employed as an antiquating device. For example, when translating the name of Captain Haddock’s ship in the Afrikaans translation of the Tintin book, the translators chose De Eenhorn (the Unicorn) rather than Die Eenhorn. Obviously an old-fashioned sailing ship would belong to a Dutch-speaking era rather than an Afrikaans-speaking one.

Second is the military rank. Here translated as majoor-generaal, in both Dutch and Afrikaans this evolved into generaal-majoor. Just one of those things. The South African Defence Forces has a history of experimental military ranks which did not last: Commandant-General (for General), Combat General (for Major General), Colonel-Commandant (for Brigadier), Commandant (for Lieut. Colonel), and Field Cornet (for Lieutenant).

There’s your random bit of Afrikaans arcana for the day.

An-Nahar Redesign

We don’t pay much attention to newspaper design in the Middle East as their newspapers do not often show up on our radar. Al-Ahram still has a certain cachet, and I’ve always had a soft spot for L’Orient-Le Jour despite its ugly design mostly because I love their doubly old-fashioned hybrid nameplate. The Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar recently underwent a bit of a redesign which might be worth taking a brief look at. (more…)

Nature Diary

by ‘REDSHANK’

With the prolonged fine weather, all kinds of exotic creatures have appeared in our part of the countryside for the first time in living memory. Hummingbird hawkmoths are plentiful. I have seen not one but a dozen at a time hovering over the snapdragons in our flower garden.

Not only hummingbird moths but hummingbirds have appeared. Calling at the Three Tuns, I found the regulars in an uproar as a whole bevy of these beautiful little creatures hovered over their pint pots, causing the less wide-awake to drop them on the floor.

At last Old Ted, the landlord, fairly lost his temper. “Get away, you pesky little varmints!” he shouted, lunging at the glittering little beauties, then chasing them across the room until he tripped over an antique horsecollar he keeps for grinning through and fell heavily to the ground, cursing all tropical interlopers.

There was a big laugh at this, and Old Jim, who always keeps a stuffed magpie on his person to avoid bad luck if he should meet a single magpie, annoyed the landlord even more by producing it and waving it in his face.

Meanwhile, the hummingbirds were hovering over the shove-halfpenny board, putting Old Frank and Old Amos off their game. Rustic oaths bombinated about the smoky room, growing ever more archaic and outlandish as I tried to make hurried notes in phonetic script.

Nature Diary

by ‘REDSHANK’

Once again, Spindlemass is with us, when the country folk compete in collecting the largest possible quantity of pretty pink spindleberries and displaying them in traditional patterns in their cottage windows. The origin of the Spindleberry festival, or Spindlemass, is like most things in our part of the countryside, lost in the mists of antiquity.

Some old herbal books recommend spindleberries for their purgative qualities and others for their binding effect and some for both at the same time. Many country folk are addicted to them. But old Dr Higgs, who retired from practice in Bournemouth and previously in west Africa, to live at “the Hollies”, an ivy-grown villa subject to subsidence at the outskirts of our village, maintains that this is contrary to reason, and that he could think of many other substances which are equally without any effect on the digestive system.

This is regarded with scorn and derision yet I often think that the traditional beliefs of the country folk, illogical as they may seem, are worth more than any rational argument.

Loriot

Bernhard Victor Christoph Carl von Bülow, one of Germany’s most highly regarded humorists, was born 12 November 1923 and left this world on 22 August 2011. He was better known by his nom de plume of Loriot, the French translation of his surname Bülow, which is German for the oriole bird. Vicco (as his Christian names were shortened to) von Bülow began drawing cartoons for Stern in the 1950s. From cartoons he moved into television in the 1970s and films the following decade. Loriot’s humour focussed on the peculiarities of German people including the awkwardness of everyday situations and miscommunication in human interaction.

Asked in 2007 to describe what his influences were, he said: “I remember that, when I started studying, I was living between a madhouse, a prison and a cemetery. The location alone explains everything, I think.” Lexicographically, he will be remembered for introducing into German the term ‘yodel diploma’ signifying a worthless degree — what in Britain is known as a ‘mickey mouse degree’.

Loriot fans will miss his knowing eyes peering out from behind those familiar reading glasses. R.I.P. (more…)

‘I Have Prussiandom in my Blood’

Loriot on Prussia and Prussianness

November 2003

The Viennese weekly Falter interviewed Vicco von Bülow — better known as Loriot — in November of 2003. In part of the dialogue, Loriot explored the Prussianness of his family and upbringing, musing upon some aspects of what it is to be Prussian, turning away from the simplistic categorisations. Via Günter Kaindlstorfer.

…

Loriot: I am committed to my Prussian roots. I was born a Prussian, I have Prussian, so to speak, in my blood. That this defines you for yourself is not new. One is born there, so one has to accept it.

Prussian vices have caused too much harm over the past 150 years.

Loriot: That’s right, I will not deny it at all. Nevertheless, I am proud of my native town of Brandenburg; I am also proud of my country of origin. Here I will not deny, however, that I have been occasionally affected by the disaster that this country has done throughout history, time and again. Only: Which country has, over the centuries, not caused many evils? I will not have the Prussian reduced only to its negative sides. (more…)

Choral Concert in N.Y.

Manhattanites and denizens of the neighbouring boroughs and counties might be used to going to the Church of St Thomas on Fifth Avenue to hear the best choir in New York, but this evening the house of worship is hosting the Westminster Cathedral Choir, the best choir in London. If you haven’t made plans for the evening, there are still tickets available here.

Tonight’s concert will feature some Victoria, some Elgar, some Guerrero, and more, but most appealing to me is the Christus vincit by James MacMillan — Scotland’s greatest living composer. If you share my tastes, you avoid music by any composer who hasn’t been dead at least half a century, but MacMillan is good enough to be elevated to the realms of the honorary deceased. He’s also commented on this blog in the past!

Fr Z Comes to Town

I have singularly failed to attend any Fr. Z ‘blognic’, whether in New York or in London, but I was glad my friend (and this blog’s editor emeritus) Tim Conroy let me know the world’s most famous blogging priest was in town. Over lunch I managed to introduce the Reverend Father to Scotland’s national soft-drink Irn-Bru (once advertised as “Made in Scotland. From Girders.”). But of course Fr. Z is fond of his coffee as well. You can just about make out a Cusack in tweed and tie behind the can of sweet Caledonian ambrosia.

Visit Denmark

Having previously explored the world of Finnish travel posters, I happened to come across various posters advertising the happy kingdom of Denmark, whose current monarch is a Cambridge-trained classical archeologist, vestment designer, and published Tolkein illustrator. Click the little numbers to view the posters.

Previously: Come to Finland

Best Universities in the World

From north to south, a completely arbitrary and biased accounting

WHILE UNIVERSITY rankings within countries have been popular for some time now, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, it’s only been in the past decade or so that worldwide rankings of universities have come to the fore. The most widely known is probably the Academic Ranking of World Universities produced by Shanghai Jiaotong University, alongside the QS World University Rankings from the firm Quacquarelli Symonds, and the T.H.E. World University Rankings from the weekly magazine Times Higher Education. All such ratings employ varying statistical matrices and methods of divination obscure to the outsider but which, one supposes, must have some form of merit. They are more useful for gaining a general impression of the place of a university rather than comparing and contrasting two or more particular institutions.

The aforementioned ranking structures are rather to formal for us to gain all that much knowledge from. Personal interactions, reputation, age, style of architecture, and other such factors carry much greater import when I judge universities. Oxford and Cambridge, whether you like it or not, are still the top universities in the world, even if they might not be our favourites. You just can’t beat them. While they might not be as much fun as other places, they come closest to achieving the balance of age, tradition, interesting people, serious research, good location, and general niftiness.

For a certain type of person, Harvard remains paramount among American universities, but to be a Harvard undergrad has carried a certain social stigma in our quarters for the past two or three decades. Harvard Business School, however, remains perfectly acceptable. In the Ivy League, Yale, not Harvard, is king, followed by Brown (not thanks to its radical professoriate but rather due to the strong Continental infiltration amongst its studentry). Dartmouth is the fun #3 of the Ivies, while the rest are forgettable (well, Princeton’s not bad really — it has the Whitherspoon Institute — but Cornell, Columbia, and Penn are yawn-worthy).

Up to this point, we have been speaking generally, but there are topical institutions of course. If you really must study ‘business’, then there’s Harvard Business School or INSEAD. Are there any other business schools of actual note? In the military realm, Sandhurst is the unquestionable king. The École royale militaire in Brussels is up there — being Catholic, Francophone, and monarchic attracts good elements from outside Belgium. In the States, there is the Citadel and VMI, but not much else (the federal ‘service academies’ have poor reputations except for Annapolis). One doesn’t hear much about Saint-Cyr these days.

Speaking of France, the reason one can’t come up with proper rankings is because some institutions or groups of institutions would be entirely outside it. The grandes écoles are the best example. They are superbly elitist, the absolute top, but they mostly exist in that little French world, with all its delights and limitations.

But for ‘topical’ institutions, the University of London has plenty: SOAS, LSE, the Cortauld, the various institutes of the School of Advanced Study, etc., etc.

There are also those interesting little schools of art history and conservation, attached to museums like the V&A or auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The École du Louvre, however, must be the queen regnant of these schools.

Charles Taylor’s presence at McGill alone makes it worthy of note, but one suspects there are other strengths at the university. At any rate, it is still a perfectly respectable place to be an undergraduate. Boston College is also quite strong at the postgrad level, except in the theology school where heresy is widely believed to be thriving. Given the wealth and particularity of America’s universities, there are small and unknown centres of excellence in many unexpected places (for example the quite strong literary translation centre at the University of Rochester).

Rome’s universities of both church and state have shabby academic reputations but still attract for being Roman. One always hears seminarians complaining about the Gregorian, but no one can never really complain about Rome, and being a student or a seminarian is as good a reason to be in Rome as any. Rome also has John Cabot University, an ‘American’ institution divided between Americans on their semester abroad and the full-timers (often the layabout members of larger European families, who also frequent the American University of Paris).

And of course many of the Italian universities are not so much places of learning as conspiracies for the avoidance of unemployment on the part of their academics and administrators. Regrettably, much Italian talent moves abroad for higher salaries and better working conditions (Cavalli-Sforza, to name but one, at Stanford), but the handful of scuoli superiori (e.g. the Scuola Normale in Pisa) still maintain their dignity.

In Spain, Salamanca is well-regarded, and there are a number of newer, private, properly Catholic entities that have been created. Of course, Opus Dei are very proud for having created the University of Navarre ex nihilo. Portugal, meanwhile, has yet to recover from the Marques de Pombal’s disastrous eighteenth-century reform of Coimbra.

If you’re one of those people who actually wants a proper education then, for better or worse, you must go to America. Thomas Aquinas College in California and St. John’s College in Maryland might be the last genuine places of higher learning in the European world. Attempts are being made to found a British Catholic version, and many imitations (Catholic, Protestant, and secular) exist around the United States.

If I could name some other honorable mentions in addition to those featured below, I would add Dublin (Trinity, that is), Bristol, the Collège d’Europe, Leiden, Leuven, Utrecht, Uppsala (and all the old Scandos), Heidelberg (and a dozen other German universities), King’s Halifax, Trinity College in Toronto, some parts of Berkeley, York for graduate study but not undergrad, the C.E.U. in Budapest (despite being a Soros project), and Exeter and Warwick aren’t bad really. Some universities, like the Jagiellonian in Kraków or the Charles in Prague, must be mentioned due to age, but I have to plead ignorance as to any knowledge of their current state.

I’m probably leaving out a dozen places that deserve a mention but I’ve forgotten; such are the limits of our fallen human nature. Here follows, arranged from northernmost to southernmost, our completely arbitrary and biased accounting of the six best universities in the world.

St Andrews

The University of St Andrews, Scotland

It’s almost needless to say that St Andrews is the greatest university on the face of God’s green earth, even if it is known as the ‘auld grey toon’. It’s cold and grey enough during the winter to build character but nothing could be more delightful than a stroll down the West Sands on a late spring afternoon — especially if preceded by a five-course lunch amongst friends. Tweed, the after-chapel sherry, the cathedral ruins, the names of departmental buildings that read like a roll of the inhabitants of Heaven: St Katharine’s Lodge, St John’s House, St Mary’s Quad. With balls galore, and more in Edinburgh if you’re bored, four years at St Andrews will definitely wear out your dinner jacket, and an evening of reels will keep you in good health despite the cigarettes and champagne.

It doesn’t hurt that the university has the royal seal of approval, though that seems to matter more now than at the time. Undergraduate Wales and I overlapped for three years at St Andrews, and his presence was barely noticeable — someone you would pass in the street or mention if he had been present somewhere but otherwise his right to normality was jealously guarded by fellow St Andreans, and rightly so.

I’ve already written extensively about the place, so perhaps it would be best to summarise with the words of John Martin Robinson, the current Maltravers Herald of Arms Extraordinary, who described St Andrews as “similar to some people’s view of the afterlife: still like Earth but purified of the unpleasant elements”.

Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Edinburgh University is St Andrews’ younger cousin and the relationship between the two is a bit like that between town and country. St Andrews is in a country town made exceptional by its university, politico-ecclesial history, and that weird sport with sticks and balls, whereas Edinburgh is Scotland’s capital and perhaps the finest city in the English-speaking world.

Location alone makes the University a desirable place to begin with, but it’s a respectable institution in its own right, and has a fun and slightly jauntier mix of people than St Andrews. It’s not unheard of for some families in London and the south of England to send their eligible daughters to Edinburgh for a few years in the hopes of finding a suitable mate. Most often this is as students at Edinburgh University or the Edinburgh College of Art, but sometimes they just buy a flat on India Street and enjoy the social life. Edinburgh U. first-years have to live in the notorious Pollock Halls of Residence, however, which definitely counts against the institution.

Durham

The University of Durham, England

Properly speaking, the University of Durham is the third-oldest university in England, though there’s a pedantic argument on this point duly documented on Wikipedia. The town has the greatest cathedral in the kingdom, and if students join University College (one of sixteen Durham colleges) they have the opportunity of living in Durham Castle, the former bishop’s residence donated to the University shortly after its 1832 foundation.

The ancient capital of the County Palatine is far enough away from London to be outside the metropolitan orbit (as Oxford and Cambridge often aren’t) but having Newcastle and Middlesbrough as the two closest cities is not something in Durham’s favour. The dramatic riparian geography of this cathedral city, however, more than makes up for its less refined neighbours.

Sewanee

The University of the South, Tennessee

If the Ivy League universities are America’s Oxbridge, then Sewanee is the St Andrews of America. Student gowns are even worn, although their use is limited to members of the ‘Order of Gownsmen’, initiation into which is quite boringly based only on the very limited criterion of academic grade point average. Students are known for their attire — neckties predominate for gents attending tutorials for example — and a widespread if perhaps somewhat facile conservatism.

The university was founded by the Southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church and is the sole remaining university retaining its Episcopalian status, an affiliation it takes seriously despite being culturally out of step with the rest of the ever-liberalising, ever-shrinking denomination.

The South is the most interesting part of the United States, and, while a small and insular institution, the University of the South reflects much of the old Confederacy’s attractiveness. Sewanee’s gothic campus sits in the 13,000-acre “Domain” of the University (see above) atop the sylvan Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. It is a tiny university actually — just 1,400 undergraduates and 150-200 postgraduates — but despite this boasts twenty-five Rhodes scholars. Plus its founding bishop, Leonidas Polk, doubled as a Confederate general during the ‘Late Unpleasantness’. It all adds up towards the definition of a unique and fascinating institution.

Stellenbosch

The University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

It would be difficult to conceive of a more ideal location for a university. The centuries-old town of Stellenbosch dominates a small mountain valley in the verdant pulchritudinous winelands of one of the most beautiful lands in the world: the Western Cape province of South Africa. For the Afrikaners, whose language and higher culture developed under the shade of the giant oak trees planted by the old Dutch governor, Simon van der Stel, it is effectively ancient Sumer.

Yet Stellenbosch is not an old past-its-prime ruin but a thriving university town the Financial Times described as “full of well-groomed students with beach-ready figures”. In architectural terms its streets are lined with old Dutch houses alongside modern buildings ranging from the sensitive to the inoffensive.

The town does surprisingly lack a good bookstore, a statement that must be made with apologies to the very capable and friendly staff at the Stellenbosch branch of Exclusive Books on Andringastraat. The Van Schaik Boekhandel in the Neelsie concentrates more on books required by course reading lists, though the Protea Boekhuis further down Andringa at least has a decent second-hand selection.

The town so epitomises leafy comfort one almost forgets the university, its crowning glory. While it has an Afrikaans literary tradition second to none, Matieland isn’t shy of scientific glory: the ‘SUN’ in SUNSAT, arguably Africa’s first satellite, stands for Stellenbosch Universiteit.

As an academic institution of learning and research, its strong points are many: it features towards the top of every list of the best universities in the country and the continent for Law (its most prestigious school), Medicine, Business, Engineering, (Reformed) Theology, Agriculture & Forestry, and of course Afrikaans & Dutch. The History school boasts the unmatchable Hermann Giliomee, but I wonder if Stellenbosch has been losing out on this front to UCT (where Giliomee spent most of his career) and UWC (which boasts Antonia Malan). The closure of the unique Cultural History programme is certainly to be lamented.

More generally, the university’s leadership must be chided for their lamentable decision to turn Stellenbosch into a totally parallel-medium institution (that is, simultaneous course tracks in Afrikaans and English). It will be a sad and loathsome day when a Stellenbosch undergraduate can obtain a degree without taking a single course in Afrikaans.

Otago

The University of Otago, New Zealand

I confess knowing next to nothing about the University of Otago, the oldest in New Zealand, but this accounting makes no claims to be based on actual solid evidence. It might seem curious that Dunedin beat the now-larger cities of Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington in establishing New Zealand’s first university in 1869, when the town was capital of the Province of Otago. This is explained by Dunedin’s status at the time as the largest city in New Zealand thanks to the Otago gold rush of the 1860s.

When the university set about erecting its first buildings of its own in the 1870s, the administration set the tone for future generations with its choice of a domestic interpretation of the Collegiate Gothic, built in local bluestone faced with Oamaru stone. As Dr D.M. Stuart, the chancellor of the day, commented, “the Council had some old-world notions and liked to have a university with some architectural style”. That fine concept — old-world notions planted firm in fertile new-world soil — undergirds much of the spirit of Otago and indeed the best of New Zealand itself.

Otago is a collegiate university and the names of its colleges harken back to the region’s Scottish roots: Knox, Salmond, St Margaret’s, Cumberland. Aquinas College was founded by the Dominicans in 1954 and it counts among its former students the Right Honourable Sir Anand Satyanand GNZM QSO KStJ, 19th and current Governor-General of New Zealand, and the first Catholic to hold that office. Sadly, the Dominicans left and the college was secularised in the 1980s. The obviously Presbyterian Knox College enjoys a strong rivalry with the Anglican Selwyn College, which was visited by Michael Palin during his 1996 television programme “Full Circle”.

Caffe Reggio

In August, I enjoyed a lazy, espresso-fuelled afternoon in this place with Herr Doktor Zmirak and D. Riccardo.