How immortal is literary immortality? The members of the Académie Française, always 40 in number, are called les immortels, but it is clear that many of them are forgotten within a few years of their death, and some sooner than that.

In his preface to Three Plays by Brieux, Bernard Shaw calls Eugène Brieux (1858-1932) the greatest French playwright since Molière, the equal if not the superior to Sophocles; but, so far at least, history has not agreed with him. Though Brieux was elected to the ranks of les immortels, his plays are now never performed.

Throughout the play, the doctor sermonises at length with a moral certitude that irritates. For example, he advocates compulsory premarital testing for syphilis as if the audience were a legislature in the midst of debate:

It would soon become the custom for a man who proposed for a girl’s hand to add to the other things for which he is asked a medical statement of bodily fitness, which would make it certain that he did not bring this plague into the family with him.

Whether this be good sense or not (the state of Mississippi still requires a blood test before the granting of a marriage licence), it is not good drama. Policy proposals and plays do not consort well.

Sir Terry makes another important point, however: that when patients with Alzheimer’s disease, through no fault of their own, need to be cared for in a home they are made to pay for it by the liquidation of their savings or the sale of their house. And since they have contributed taxes throughout their working lives this is unfair and discriminatory.

The promise of the welfare state was that in return for high taxation everyone would be looked after from cradle to grave but this has turned out to be like a worthless insurance policy that covers you for every- thing except that which actually does happen to you.

Strictly speaking people with Alzheimer’s disease are not discriminated against: the same financial conditions apply to every old person who is admitted to a home for what- ever reason. But there is no doubt that a promise that turned out to be false was issued by successive governments. People were given the distinct impression that they need not make provision for a personal catastrophe such as Alzheimer’s because everything would be taken care of by the state.

Indeed the high taxation throughout their lives prevented them from being able to make provision for such a catastrophe even if they had wanted to. They were left with the worst of both worlds, neither insurance nor the means to pay for their own care except with the one asset that it took them their whole lives to accumulate, namely their house. No wonder there is a sense of injustice.

This is the statement of a typical intellectual whose indifference to the actual lives of the urban poor masquerades as compassion for them…

…[T]he class of victim is much larger than the class of perpetrator. Leniency toward criminals is not therefore a form of sympathy for the poor, but a failure to take either their lives or their property seriously. For Miéville to talk of “panicked reaction” in these circumstances is a form of moral exhibitionism. He is showing off in front of his peers.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine for February 23 reviews the current state of knowledge of the genetics of mental handicap and autism, with brief mention of schizophrenia and epilepsy in the bargain. Considering the history of this subject, ethical considerations are conspicuous by their absence from this article. After all, the premature assumption of knowledge of the genetics of mental handicap, mental illness, and epilepsy was one of the major ingredients of the Nazi program to kill 100,000 patients (as being “unworthy of life”) in German mental hospitals: a program that, as we now know, was a rehearsal for the Holocaust.

But one cannot prohibit the attempt to obtain new knowledge because the false assumption of knowledge about it in the past was used unethically. Even if he who does not remember the past is not absolutely condemned to repeat it, he is probably more likely to do so.

Nevertheless, an astonishing amount has been learned in recent years, and the pace is accelerating. This is a field in which the Promethean bargain is coming to fruition. But it is still necessary to remain cautious.

The wrongness of the film lies elsewhere: in its depiction of Margaret Thatcher’s dementia, for which there is neither artistic nor historical justification. It is intrusive and prurient and nothing else.

It is not pretended that she was suffering from dementia at the time she stood down from office; and, of course, she is still alive. Had she died, however, there is no reason why a film about her career would have been told through the hallucinatory memories during her state of decline. It is the fact that she is still alive that gives the artistic device its spice, if I may so put it; it is of interest only because she is still alive.

If her condition is as depicted in this film, she could not have given her consent to it (advance consent is no consent, in my opinion). If, on the other hand, she is not as depicted in it, it is a gratuitous piece of fiction.

It is cruel, degrading and unseemly to exhibit to the idle gaze of millions of strangers (as the makers of the film must hope) a famously self-controlled woman, who took particular and almost fierce care of her appearance in public, grovelling on the floor in a blue flannel dressing-gown, in the grip of a degenerative disease. This is not Richard II[I]: it is Hello! Magazine with the tact removed.

He who would see England’s future should be separated for a while from the better parts of London and sent (literally, not metaphorically) to Coventry. There, amid the hideous and dilapidating buildings of a failed modernism, he will see precincts with half the shops boarded up, where youths in hoodies skateboard all day along the walkways, the prematurely aged, fat and crippled unemployed occupy themselves in the search for cheap imported junk in such shops as remain open, and the lurkers, muggers and dealers wait for nightfall.

In New English Review Dalrymple examines one of the most outward signs of propriety, attire:

The impression that the bohemianisation of dress is intended to make is that the wearer is such an individual, whose real inner me is so unique and valuable, that it is quite unnecessary for him to make any effort to cover it in the rages of mere outer smartness. Do not judge a book by its cover, this form of dress proclaims, or almost shouts; inside me there is the Summa theologica.

….

Our current way of dressing is a sign of our egotism, of our habit of living in a kind of portable solipsistic bubble that goes everywhere with us, like a shadow. ‘I am not going to make an effort just for you,’ proclaim our clothes. On the contrary, my life is so full of importance, so beyond the right of anyone else to have a say in it, that I shall just put on the first crumpled apparel that comes to hand as a matter of principle.

The exhibition was among the most powerful by any living artist that I have ever seen…

…the light and the composition more than compensate for the inspissated hideousness of what is shown, and beauty emerges. Metal panels or blanked-out windows, disfigured (if you can disfigure what is already hellish) by graffiti or daubs of paint that look like dripping blood, become objects of contemplation and—yes—pleasure. He paints leafless trees in the midst of suburban lifelessness against skies that make you think of Atkinson Grimshaw. The poignancy is not unbearable, exactly, but it stops the heart.