Senate House rules
Sir, – It would be hard to quarrel with John North’s view (“Senate House Rules”, Commentary, June 8) that the University of London has at its centre a group of outstanding libraries and research institutes that are highly valued by the Colleges of the federal University and by the wider national and international constituencies that they serve.
But libraries and small institutes are expensive, and they rely heavily on public funding. The University’s responsibility is to ensure that resources, including space, are used as effectively as possible to ensure the survival and continued vitality of both collections and institutions. Current arrangements are simply not sustainable in today’s financial climate. If we are to safeguard the unique qualities of these research environments that are so valued by those who frequent them, we must be prepared to sacrifice certain by-products of the autonomous growth of the past, such as multiple copies of research material held in close proximity, in favour of the essential values of expert staff and research activity closely juxtaposed with research collections. The library convergence policy is a necessary mechanism to achieve economies of scale and to share professional expertise; to make more books accessible to more readers and, thereby, to enhance the academic mission of the Institutes.
Professor North’s perception is based on the past. He does not recognize the research strengths of the Senate House Library, or know that it is more used by postgraduates and academic staff than by undergraduates. He is not aware that the University of London Research Library Services deliver key academic benefits that the British Library cannot, including miles of open-access classified book-stock and remotely accessible e-resources. He appears not to know that the School of Advanced Study has recently created two new research institutes.
It is precisely because of the qualities of the Senate House and Institute libraries that the University, far from seeking a new role, is continuing to play its established one of fostering resources to nurture academic excellence in London and beyond. It is funded to support teaching and research, not to preserve traditional boundaries. Adapting to new circumstances does present problems; the solution lies not in looking backwards but in positive change for the future.
GRAEME DAVIES
NICHOLAS MANN
University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1.
Sir, – John North may not appreciate how important change is for the actual survival of the central University of London libraries. The current process is designed to save them. There is no plan B. These magnificent libraries could go the way of Westfield and Bedford Colleges, whose disappearance also once seemed inconceivable. Senate House Library would have gone under in the 1990s had UCL not come to the rescue. With its unmatched special collections and its role as a common resource for Humanities Students all over London – both postgraduate and undergraduate – its future should not be in doubt, yet it really has been questioned. The Senate Institutes are also vulnerable, even if their current travails do not seem to threaten their survival provided they do not self-destruct.
DAVID D’AVRAY
Department of History, University College, Gower Street, London WC1.
Summer book fairs
Sir, – Perhaps H. R. Woudhuysen was thinking of literary conceits like Jane Eyre, An Autobiography, or History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in writing that Robert Payne’s The Wanton Nymph: A study of pride was a novel (June 1)? Perhaps even the rather nondescript pink dustwrapper (as is the case with my edition) could only ever convey the impression of a novel? I can assure him that The Wanton Nymph is every bit an academic study – and a very good one too – of pride, and not a work of fiction. The revised edition was published more prosaically in America as Hubris: The study of pride.
Similarly, I don’t know if Professor Woudhuysen does much buying on the internet, but my experience is that far from driving prices down the internet has driven them upwards. Last week, I bought a fine edition of The Poetical Works of William Basse, a Jacobean poet, edited by Warwick Bond (1893) from a bookshop in Sydney for Aus$75. A similar ex-library edition is fetching over US$500 on Abebooks. But spare a thought for the Penguin paperback title Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women Writers, which was published as recently as 1998 in the Renaissance Dramatists series. I bought a copy when it first came out for the peppercorn sum of a few pounds in London and, again, a pristine copy from the same Sydney bookshop for Aus$5. Well, the same title is now offered – and has been since last year – on the internet by Amazon UK for the princely sum of £1,911.67.
However, Woudhuysen is right to point out the decline in the PBFA fairs brought on by the internet. I used to remember the hubbub that would accompany the major June or July fairs for both the PBFA at the Hotel Russell and its poorer cousin down the road at the Royal National as recently as the late 1990s. Booksellers in Charing Cross Road, Cecil Court and Bloomsbury would also get in on the act by coinciding their printed catalogues (Any Amount of Books, Ulysses) or restocking their shelves (Quinto) or sprucing up their shop windows (just about everyone else) just in time for the major book jamboree. The excitement among collectors was palpable.
AZEEM SAHU KHAN
PO Box 3561, Nadi, Fiji Islands.
Climate science
Sir, – As a non-scientist I cannot have read one-hundredth of the number of scientific articles read by Robert May, yet I am familiar with at least a score (each citing a score more) questioning key parts of the theory that there is a threat of catastrophic man-made global warming. So when Lord May claims (April 6) that “not one” respected scientist is unconvinced, far from persuading me he only makes me doubtful of his other claims.
Moreover, by applying the term “denial” (with all its loaded undertones) to sceptical scientists; by referring to them inaccurately as “well funded” by the oil industry; and by likening those who stress the uncertainties of climate science to unprincipled lobbyists for tobacco companies, Lord May enters on the field of personal vilification – not a suitable place for a distinguished former President of the Royal Society.
There is a great deal more money and acceptability available to consensus scientists than to dissenters. This suggests that the work of the doubters should be taken very seriously, since it brings with it problems both of funding and of exclusion from the friendly embrace of the Establishment. I admire such people, much as I have admired other dissidents like Solzhenitsyn, Pastor Bonhoeffer – oh, and Galileo and Darwin.
LEACH OF FAIRFORD
Matheson & Co, 3 Lombard Street, London EC3.
The English
Sir, – George Garnett quite rightly deplores Peter Mandler’s inattention to the Middle Ages (June 8) when the concepts of “English” and “Englishness” first surfaced, especially in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest when the tension between Anglo-Saxons and “Normans” (add, sotto voce, Bretons, Flemings Manceaux, assorted French) was first accentuated and then moderated by continuing conflict between the inhabitants of “England” and the Celts to the west and north. As John Gillingham and other scholars have shown, by Henry I’s reign second-generation Normans were referring to themselves as “English” in distinction to both the Welsh/Scots and “Normans” (from Normandy). A final point: surely Garnett meant Tweed, not Tees, in the geography of fog: I know, as he does, that medieval Scottish kings coveted Durham and Northumberland, but they failed to make good their claim.
JOHN S. MOORE
Department of Historical Studies, School of Humanities, University of Bristol, Bristol.
Modern Handel
Sir, – I am puzzled by some aspects of Ian Bostridge’s generally favourable review of my book Handel’s Operas 1726–1741 (May 4). He seems to imply that the creation of psychologically convincing operatic characters was unknown before Mozart. This is to take a very narrow view. Ignoring a possible case to be made for Monteverdi, Purcell and perhaps others, he dismisses the characters of Handel’s age as “types rather than unique individuals”. It is true that Handel’s method differed from those of later periods and that he operated within a severely res-tricted convention, but he surely transcended it, building up his characters by degrees over the course of the opera. Nor are they static or one-dimensional. Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare and Alcina (to name only two) rank high among the great operatic characters. I cannot see any link between eighteenth-century aesthetics and the “postmodern” directors whom Bostridge considers particularly successful in Handel, and who generally play havoc with plot and characters to serve some contemporary or personal whim.
Bostridge blurs a number of distinctions, for example the extent to which Handel’s musical material was transferable between different characters or scenarios. Except in revivals, when he had to accommodate new singers, often at short notice, and admittedly took little trouble, this seldom involved the music of major characters. There is a big difference between the comparatively rare occasions on which Handel passed off others’ compositions as his own and the far more numerous instances of his using the ideas of others as a jumping off point for fresh composition. It may seem strange that he needed to do this, but it involves a creative process, not simple larceny.
WINTON DEAN
Hambledon Hurst, Godalming.
Ruritania
Sir, – When Chris Patten lists authors who invoke Montenegro in the second paragraph of his review of Elizabeth Roberts’s Realm of the Black Mountain (June 1), he misses out one important one. “Ruritania” in Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda is modelled on Montenegro; and the plan of late nineteenth-century Cetinje can be superimposed almost exactly on that of Strelsau.
MARTIN COHEN
10 Beechwood Place, Apt 610,
London, Ontario.
Looiss
Sir, – J. C. relates of T. S. Eliot and Clive Bell: “Lewes, where Bell lived (pronounced ‘Loo-iss’, overseas readers please note), is a tricky word to rhyme but Eliot succeeded” (NB, June 8).
Eliot had enough time to think about it. He sprang from St Louis, Missouri. This is pronounced “Loo-iss”, overseas readers please note, not “Saint Louie” (as in “Meet Me in Saint Louie, Louie”). After all, Missouri has not been French since December 1803.
GEORGE STEVEN SWAN
NC A&T State University,
Greensboro, North Carolina 27420.
