The Times Literary Supplement - 01 July 2022

28 Pages·2022·35 MB·English

No. 6222 the-tls.co.uk
July 12022 | | UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Alberto Manguel Tales of the Jewish cowboys | Pablo Scheffer Medieval Britain under water

Lucasta Miller, Michael Kerrigan, Alison Kelly The best of summer fiction

perma.
ta2uu4ugooll
82 im

— Inflation is back

Kenneth Rogoff on how we got here
THIS WEEK

Newly printed $100
notes at the Bureau
of Engraving and
Printing, Washington,
2013 © Mark Wilson/
Getty Images

Inflation is back

In this issue

or those of a certain age it feels as if the bad old

days of the 1970s are back. In that dismal decade
two huge oil price hikes brought an abrupt end to
thirty years of unparalleled growth in the West.
Today the war in Ukraine and the after-effects of the
pandemic are delivering massive supply shocks.
Inflation has reached 9.1 per cent in the UK and is
set to soar to double digits. The unions threaten a
wave of strikes. The voters blame their political
leaders, but populists of the left and right have the
central banks in their sights too.

The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and
their ilk are natural targets for populist ire. They are
the most elite of elite institutions, staffed by pointy
heads who speak a strange language few outside the
inner circle understand. Kenneth Rogoff, an elite
Harvard economist, marks the bankers’ homework
in his review of The Lords of Easy Money by Christo-
pher Leonard and Scott Sumner’s The Money Illu-
sion, and hands out good grades. Rogoff has little
time for populists who would like to purge rather
than challenge their personnel - “it is precisely
because of its technocratic excellence that the Fed
managed the (banking) crisis so effectively”.

Nat Segnit’s review of Serious Money by Caroline
Knowles and Matt Knott’s A Class of Their Own looks
at the weird lives of the super-rich, whose assets
multiplied in value during the recent era of quanti-
tative easing and low interest rates. One plutocrat
tried to get her hotel suite covered in turf because
her dog would only use real grass for a toilet.
Others hire former SAS soldiers to escort them to
restaurants when they finally emerge from their
gated fortresses. The spouses and children of the
super-rich are apparently “paranoid, bored and
prima-donnish to the point of mental breakdown”.
Perhaps the rich really do cry all the way to the
bank - while guarded by an enormous private army.

Shmilkel the Gaucho might have helped ease
these poor little rich people’s pain. His colourful
story is contained in The Murders of Moisés Ville,
Javier Sinay’s history of Argentina’s Jewish commu-
nity, reviewed by Alberto Manguel. Shmilkel, an
anarchist philosopher and thief, would lecture his
victims on the evils of private property during
hold-ups. However, his seminars on political eco-
nomy came to an end when he was shot down
by an outraged chicken farmer to whom he had
sold a machine that was supposed to collect and box
eggs. It wasn’t kosher. Today, Shmilkel would be
marketing cryptocurrency or a quack cure like
Theranos instead.

MARTIN IVENS
Editor

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3 HISTORY ALBERTO MANGUEL The Murders of Moisés Ville - The rise and fall of the Jerusalem
of South America Javier Sinay; Translated by Robert Croll
5 BIOGRAPHY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD The Escape Artist - The man who broke out of Auschwitz
to warn the world Jonathan Freedland
6 LETTERS TO THE Reading Ulysses, Harold Gillies and plastic surgery, Cato Street,
EDITOR etc
7 SPORT SIMON KUPER Le Fric - Family, power and money: the business of the Tour

de France Alex Duff

8 ECONOMICS KENNETH ROGOFF The Lords of Easy Money - How the Federal Reserve broke the
economy Christopher Leonard. The Money Illusion - Market
monetarism, the Great Recession, and the future of monetary
policy Scott Sumner

10 POLITICS LAWRENCE DOUGLAS The Great Experiment - Why diverse democracies fall apart
and how they can endure Yascha Mounk
AMY HAWKINS Indelible City - Dispossession and defiance in Hong Kong

Louisa Lim

11 SOCIAL STUDIES NAT SEGNIT Serious Money - Walking plutocratic London Caroline
Knowles. A Class of Their Own - Adventures in tutoring the
super-rich Matt Knott

12. MEMOIRS LYNNE MURPHY Happy-Go-Lucky David Sedaris
WENDY MOORE The Reluctant Carer - Dispatches from the edge of life
Anonymous
13. ESSAYS TERRY EAGLETON The Last Days of Roger Federer - And other endings Geoff
Dyer
14 ARTS MICHAEL CAINES King Lear Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Globe)
GUY STEVENSON Jitney August Wilson (Old Vic)
16 FICTION LUCASTA MILLER Tiepolo Blue James Cahill. Blue Woman Jonathan Page
CLAIRE KOHDA Wet Paint Chloé Ashby
MICHAEL KERRIGAN Children of Paradise Camilla Grudova
ALISON KELLY You Have a Friend in 10A Maggie Shipstead
18 MEDIEVAL STUDIES PABLO SCHEFFER Landscape in Middle English Romance - The medieval

imagination and the natural world Andrew M. Richmond.
Transformative Waters in Late-Medieval Literature - From
Aelred of Rievaulx to The Book of Margery Kempe Hetta
Elizabeth Howes

ROWAN WILSON The Middle Ages and the Movies Robert Bartlett
PATRICK SIMS-WILLIAMS The Celts - A sceptical history Simon Jenkins
LEONIE V. HICKS The Normans - Power, conquest and culture in 1th-century
Europe Judith A. Green
22 SOCIAL STUDIES CHARLES FOSTER The Wilderness Cure - Ancient wisdom in a modern world
Mo Wilde
23 COMMENTARY MARK DAVIES Four limericks and a carving - Unpublished verses and

misattributed panels in Alice Liddell’s Oxford

24 IN BRIEF Last Poems - Centenary edition A. E. Housman. Shakespeare,
Violence and Early Modern Europe Andrew Hiscock. The
Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism Jakob
Norberg. Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking Marianne
Eloise. Windswept Annabel Abbs. Imperial Incarceration
Michael Lobban. The Earthspinner Anuradha Roy

26 AFTERTHOUGHTS IRINA DUMITRESCU A tale of two Alfreds - The Middle Ages today

27 NB M. C. Churchill caricatured, Catching up with Liberties, From Hebden
Bridge to Christie’s

Editor MARTIN IVENS ([email protected])

Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS ([email protected])

Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS ([email protected])

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TLS JULY 1, 2022
© ALICIA SEGAL/COLECCION ARCHIVO FOTOGRAFICO DEL CENTRO MARC TURKOW/AMIA

Next year in the Pampas

Tales of the Jewish community in Argentina

ALBERTO MANGUEL

THE MURDERS OF MOISES VILLE
The rise and fall of the Jerusalem
of South America
JAVIER SINAY
Translated by Robert Croll
288pp. Restless. £19.99 (US $28).

and journalist Javier Sinay received an

intriguing email from his father. It suggested
that Sinay go to a certain website and look up an
article by his great-grandfather with “a touch of a
crime report about it”. Sinay has a taste for crime:
in 2010 he was awarded the Rodolfo Walsh prize at
the crime-writing festival in Gijon, Spain, for his
stories about criminal adolescents, Sangre joven, and
as a journalist he has covered tales of blood and gore
for papers in Mexico, Peru, Switzerland and his own
country. He looked up the article.

Under the title “The First Fatal Victims in Moisés
Ville”, Sinay’s great-grandfather described a series
of twenty-two murders committed over a span of
seventeen years, from 1889 to 1906, in a remote
Jewish settlement in the Argentine province of
Santa Fe. After emigrating to Argentina, Sinay’s
great-grandfather had established himself as a jour-
nalist and, at the age of twenty-one, founded
the first Yiddish-language newspaper in his new
country, Der Viderkol. But information about his
enterprising ancestor and further details about the
murders seemed almost impossible to find. The
Murders of Moisés Ville (originally published in
Spanish in 2013 and now vividly translated by
Robert Croll) is the fascinating chronicle of Sinay’s
search for the truth.

The first inhabitants of Moisés Ville (wishfully
known as “the Jerusalem of South America”) were
Jewish immigrants from tsarist Russia. Until the end
of the nineteenth century, the Jewish population in
Russia was the largest in the world, with a history
going back to the fifteenth century: the first mention

O N JUNE 9, 2009, the young Argentine novelist

JULY 1, 2022

of Jewish settlements on Russian territory appears
in a chronicle of 1471. Over the next few centuries
the number of Jews in Russia rapidly increased, to
the point that in 1791, Catherine the Great, fearful
of a Jewish conspiracy, restricted her Jewish sub-
jects to the so-called Pale of Settlement, a region of
varying borders in western Russia that remained
in place until the October Revolution. Alexander I
allowed Jews to live in small colonies in Siberia, with
the explicit purpose being “to hold in check the
selfish interests of the Jews”. Except for a brief
respite in the mid-nineteenth century, during the
early years of the reign of Alexander II, Jewish
society was bound by strict cultural, social and
commercial laws. The conditions of the Jews wor-
sened after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881,
when the Jews became the scapegoat and pogroms
of savage violence became increasingly frequent,
Their settlements were looted and the inhabitants
beaten or killed. The atrocities were so extreme that
the American and British governments were moved
to complain, forcing the tsar to issue a restraining
edict. After the Revolution, between 1918 and 1922,
more than 150,000 Jews were killed in pogroms,
many led by members of the White Army, some by
members of the Red Army.

Throughout their long history of persecution the
Jews maintained their belief in a proper homeland,
the biblical Zion. Though for many Jewish thinkers
the Promised Land was a glorious metaphor, the
everlasting and constantly postponed assurance of
a divine gift to His Chosen People, for others,
especially members of the German Romantic move-
ment, Zion was conceived as a material possibility.
The political and intellectual forger of this idea was
the Hungarian Jewish thinker Theodor Herzl, who in
1897 founded the World Zionist Movement, causing
him to be mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of
Independence of 1948 as “the spiritual father of
the Jewish State”.

Though the idea of a Jewish state had its pre-
cursors, it was Herzl who most strongly rejected
the idea of assimilation, arguing instead for an
independent nation where Jews could feel safe and
at ease. During the surge of antisemitism sparked
by the Dreyfus affair, Herzl came to the conclusion

TLS

Moisés Ville at the
seventy-fifth
anniversary of its
founding, 1964

Alberto Manguel was
the Director of the
National Library of
Argentina from 2016 to
2018. His most recent
book is Packing My
Library: An elegy and
ten digressions, 2018

HISTORY

that any effort to fight anti-Jewish prejudice in a
gentile society was futile, and that the only strategy
for survival was the exodus of the Jews from Europe.
In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat (“The State of
the Jews”), in which he argued that all Jews should
set up Zion in their ancestral homeland, Palestine.
The itinerant Russian Jewish poet Naphtali Herz
Imber spoke of the age-old longing of the Jews to
be a free people “in the Land of Zion and Jeru-
salem”. These words were later incorporated into
the Israeli national anthem.

Yet many Jews, while acknowledging the imposs-
ible conditions under which they had to live in
Russia, did not believe in, or did not care for, a
home in Palestine. Palestine, Sinay writes, was felt
to be suited only to the elderly, “to die there in
holiness. Africa had the draw of the mines, which
seduced the more adventurous spirits. And the
United States seemed to be the simplest option: in
the first few years of the 1880s, more than two
hundred thousand people had set out toward that
destination”. Mordecai Richler, in his novel Barney’s
Version (1997), tells of his antihero’s grandparents
travelling from the shtetl to Budapest to be inter-
viewed at the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society.

“We want the papers for New York,” says the
grandfather to the jaded official.

“Siam isn’t good enough for you?” the official asks.
“India you don’t need? Sure, I understand. So here’s
the phone and now I'll ring Washington to tell the
president, ‘You short of greenhorns there on Canal
Street, Teddy? You need more who can’t speak a
word of English? Well, good news. I’ve got a couple
of shleppers here who are willing to settle in New
York. If it’s the goldene medina you want, Panofsky,
it costs fifty dollars American cash on the table.”

“Fifty dollars we haven’t got,” the grandfather
answers.

“No kidding? Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m running
a special here today. For twenty-five dollars I can
get you both into Canada.”

To settle abroad, wherever the destination,
whether the goldene medina, Canada or Argentina,
was a costly endeavour for the vast majority of Jews.
It was then that a Maecenas appeared in the person
of Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Baron Hirsch was born
into a wealthy Bavarian family, whose fortunes he
increased by investing wisely in Turkish, Russian
and Austrian railroads. Arguing that immigration
seemed a possible solution for the pitiful condition
not only of the Russian but of all European Jews,
in 1891 Baron Hirsch created a charity known as the
Jewish Colonization Association, with initial capital
of £2 million, which he later increased to £8 million.
“Even so,” writes Sinay, “Maurice von Hirsch, in the
happiest days of the bourgeoisie, never ceased to
be a capitalist who conceived his philanthropy as
a business.”

“What I desire to accomplish”, Hirsch wrote in
the North American Review of July 1891, “what after
many failures has come to be the object of my life,
and that for which I am ready to stake my wealth
and my intellectual powers, is to give a portion of
my companions in faith the possibility of finding a
new existence, primarily as farmers and also as
handicraftsmen, in those lands where the laws
and religious tolerance permit them to carry on
the struggle for existence as noble and responsible
subjects of a humane government.”

Baron Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association
acquired land in Canada, the US, Brazil and Argen-
tina. Of these, Hirsch considered Argentina the
choice destination: in the last decades of the nine-
teenth century the country had a comparatively
small population, proclaimed a policy of religious
freedom and (officially at least) was thought to be
free of racial prejudice. And land, due to an eco-
nomic crisis, was fairly cheap.

At the time of the creation of the association, and
in order to help Jews in Russia, Baron Hirsch had
offered the tsarist government a donation of 50
million French francs. The offer was turned down
because he had specified how it should be used:
to fund Jewish schools of trade and agriculture,

3
HISTORY

which the tsar’s advisers thought would give the
Jews political power. However, the government was
very much interested in a plan to remove the Jews
from Russian territory. An agreement was therefore
reached by which Baron Hirsch would transport the
Jews from Russia, while the Russian government
would provide them with travel documents that
until then been denied to them. Baron Hirsch had
wanted to resettle 25,000 Jews annually, but
because of red tape and realms of misinformation,
only 2,500 Jews settled in Argentina in the first year.

of Santa Fe in 1891, where Moisés Ville, the

colony that piqued Sinay’s curiosity, had been
founded. Baron Hirsch had turned down an offer
from the Argentine government to purchase land in
EI Chaco, an unhealthy jungle area in the northeast.
Instead he invested in Santa Fe and further acres
in Entre Rios, the so-called Argentine Mesopotamia.
This is where my own grandparents settled. One of
my grandfathers was a mattress-maker from the
outskirts of Moscow; another worked as a sort of
gardener or keeper on the estate of a Russian
princess somewhere near St Petersburg. I never
knew the princess’s name because my grandmother
merely referred to her, with nostalgic reverence,
as “die Prinze”.

The colonies functioned very much like a small
independent Jewish state. There were schuls built
in the local criollo style, orange groves and a fair
number of the cattle for which Argentina was
famous, and which these new settlers rounded up
with cries in their native Yiddish. In the beginning
the settlers encountered misfortune after misfortune.
On arrival in Buenos Aires after a long, unhealthy

T he first settlements took place in the province

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crossing, the first disappointment of the Moisés
Ville settlers, according to Sinay, was the discovery
that the land they had been promised was already
occupied by other colonists. In Santa Fe they were
forced to sleep in the ramshackle sheds of the rail-
way station: there were no houses or tents. “Beyond
extended a terrain strewn with cordgrass, tacurt
ants, iguanas, armadillos, chafiar trees, and white
carob; nothing like the cleared plains they had
imagined.” A typhus epidemic followed.

But eventually the settlers managed to create a
living environment. Decades later, between 1920
and 1950, the town of Moisés Ville became an
important livestock market and the settlers began
“building windmills; planting alfalfa, wheat, corn
and flax; opening dairy farms and creameries; and
working in agricultural cooperatives. They struggled
through droughts and floods, locusts, weeds, and
pests, while manufacturing toys, soap, soda,
bonbons, and candy”. Soon they began to dress as
the gauchos did, with baggy black trousers, a wide
belt that on festive occasions was decorated with
coins, white shirt and sleeveless black jacket, ker-
chief and brimmed hat. Their diet also changed:
tzimmes became puchero, latkes turned to crusty
bread and meat entered their regular diet in spite
of kosher restrictions, either as barbecues of the
whole animal (asado) or steaks (churrasco). Mate
replaced Russian tea. No matter where they had
come from, all immigrant Jews became known as
Russians, the rusos. Among them there was a host
of dubious heroes. According to my grandmother,
one of the better-known characters among the
Jewish gauchos was a cattle rustler and conman,
famous for having stolen cattle from the local
judge, which he then sold back to the judge’s

TLS

66

One of the
Jewish gauchos
was a cattle
rustler and
conman,
famous

for having
literally won
at poker the
shirt off the
rabbi’s back

brother-in-law, and for having literally won at poker
the shirt off the rabbi’s back. He was known to the
community as Shmilkel the Gaucho. Imbued with
nineteenth-century revolutionary Russian politics,
Shmilkel was also an anarchist philosopher and
sometimes, during a hold-up, would lecture his
victims on the evils of private property. He came to
a sorry end: he was shot down on the streets of
another colony by an outraged chicken farmer to
whom Shmilkel had sold a machine that could
reportedly collect and box eggs, but instead turned
the farmer’s profits into a vast un-kosher omelette.

Sinay’s investigation into the murders themselves
repeatedly comes up against a dead end, either
because the witnesses could not be traced or
because the records have disappeared. A few
gruesome accounts emerge, including that of the
Waisman family, a Jewish couple and their children,
killed on July 28, 1897 by a band of robber gauchos.
Only one son escaped, hiding in the tall grass. Other
victims left slimmer memories. “Bureaucracy”,
Sinay concludes, “is implacable. The penal juris-
diction [in Argentina] destroys files on infractions
every three years; on violations, every five; on
investigations, every fifteen; and ones with sen-
tences, every twenty.” As W. H. Auden wrote, “His-
tory to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help
nor pardon”. He might have added: “Nor can it
properly document their plight”.

Sinay adroitly intersperses the chronicle of his
investigation (less a police procedural than a series
of reports from second- and third-hand witnesses)
with flashbacks to the bloody events and gruesome
reminders of antisemitism in Argentina from the
nineteenth century to today. This became even
more evident in the aftermath of the Second World
War. Uki Gomi, an Argentine-American historian
who spoke to Sinay and who investigated General
Juan Per6n’s involvement with Nazis seeking a safe
haven in his book The Real Odessa (2002), found
a trove of documents that showed that Per6n was
personally responsible for selling Argentine pass-
ports to Nazi escapees. Gofi’s book was derided in
Argentina, and he finally donated his immense
archive to the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington DC on condition that the
institution scan all the documents for him. Even
before the publication of Gofi’s book, Per6én’s
involvement in the Nazi escape plan was no secret.
When my father, in 1947, accompanied a represent-
ative of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires to
ask for explanations, Per6n’s response was to name
my father the first ambassador to the about-to-be
created state of Israel, in order to stifle the com-
plaints. Perén’s strategy worked.

But antisemitic reactions in Argentina never dis-
appeared. Perhaps the most extreme manifestation
was the Argentine government’s alleged involve-
ment in the suicide attack on the Argentine Israel-
ite Mutual Association (AMIA) on July 18, 1994, in
which eighty-five people were killed. The govern-
ment of Iran and the Hezbollah militia were
accused of being responsible for the attack by the
two leading Argentine prosecutors, one of whom,
Alberto Nisman, later (in January 2015) filed a 300-
page document accusing the then president Cris-
tina Kirchner (now vice-president of Argentina) of
covering up Iran’s role. Hours before Nisman was
due to testify, he was found dead in his apartment:
Kirchner’s government spoke of suicide, her oppo-
nents of assassination. She has always denied any
wrongdoing in the handling of the case.

Sinay concludes: “It’s no simple task to approach
a series of murders of which all that remains”, “are
the oral accounts of the victims’ descendants; my
great-grandfather’s text, dramatically cut through
by its time; and scattered, infrequent articles in a
few periodicals. There are different paths to
reconstructing the past: that of memories is one,
and that of documents, another”. Perhaps a third
path is the one taken by Javier Sinay in his book:
a soul-searching, honest account of one man’s
stubborn exploration of a murky chapter in his
country’s troubled history. =

JULY 1, 2022
© KEYSTONE PRESS/ALAMY

Never quite
believed

One man’s Auschwitz testimony

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

THE ESCAPE ARTIST
The man who broke out of Auschwitz
to warn the world
JONATHAN FREEDLAND
AOOpp. John Murray. £20.

N OCTOBER 14, 1942, the International
O Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva met to

decide whether to go public with the evidence
they had received - along with the Vatican and the
Allied governments - about the Nazi extermination
camps. They voted to do nothing. The information,
they decided, was too uncertain and improbable,
the outcome of a public protest too unpredictable,
the threat to their work with prisoners of war too
great. The Vatican and the Allies followed suit.

Who knew what when about what was happening
to the Jews in eastern Europe from early in 1942 is
a subject that has long fascinated historians. The
account that had reached the West had come in part
from Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who had
got himself into one of the extermination camps,
then carried out reports on the Final Solution as it
was unfolding, only to have them politely set aside.
Other sporadic witness accounts emerged, but actual
escape was virtually impossible. Rumours abounded,
but were never quite believed. Indeed, no one
wanted to believe them.

Then, on April 7, 1944, a young Slovak called
Walter Rosenberg, better known by his adopted
name of Rudolf Vrba, escaped from Auschwitz, with
a companion, Fred Wetzler. It had taken many
months, and the help of selfless assistants, to arrange
it. Using tobacco soaked in petrol to confuse the
sniffer dogs, and lying in a coffin-like pit for three
days while the SS conducted a manhunt, the two
young men wriggled past the sentry posts and, after
several days of wandering precariously through the
countryside, made it across the border to freedom.

Drawing on Vrba’s memoirs, and on conversations
with his first wife and his widow, Jonathan Freedland
has put together both the story of Vrba’s two years
in Auschwitz and - perhaps most interestingly - the
long saga of the aftermath of his escape. It is written
almost as fiction and moves at a great pace. The
teenage Vrba, strong, fit, clever, resourceful and at
various moments extremely lucky, endured every
bleak aspect of the camp, from the selection ramps
to the mortuary, the construction sites to the
storehouse for the possessions taken from the Jews
as they arrived. Following his trajectory through
camp life enabled Freedland to write a full account
of the workings of the highly efficient Nazi killing
machine and economic hub, kept smoothly running
through a conspiracy of silence and denial.

What kept Vrba alive was his growing obsession
with getting the facts out to the world. As he was
moved from job to job within the camp, so he
observed, noted and remembered: the numbers
of arrivals, where they came from, their chances of
survival, the fate of small children and the elderly,
the deaths from starvation and brutality, all the “data
of industrialised murder”. The need to escape with
these facts became more urgent as the spring of
1944 brought the first convoys of Hungarian Jews.
He knew there would be more. If he could warn
the world in time, Vrba thought, then they at least
would be spared.

The last third of Freedland’s book concerns the

JULY 1, 2022

sorry tale of Vrba’s desperate, and ultimately ill-fated,
attempts to make the world listen. Lethargy, inaction
and disbelief met him at every turn. Having been
helped to put down his story, on thirty-two single-
spaced typed pages, along with ground plans of
Auschwitz and Birkenau, he met journalists, senior
prelates, Allied representatives. Allen Dulles, the US

Rudolf Vrba (left)
at the Frankfurt
Auschwitz trials, 1964

‘It was a puzzle with no solution’

PENGUIN

cLASSICS

TLS

BIOGRAPHY

spymaster based in Berne, passed it on, but it would
be seven months before the full version saw the
light in Washington. Calls for the bombing of the
railway tracks leading to Auschwitz were dismissed
as “impractical”, though nearby areas were success-
fully bombed.

The report reached London in July 1944, where it
was read by Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden,
who might have acted had the RAF not declared that
“it was out of their power”. Freedland quotes a chill-
ing remark made by a man in the Foreign Office who
observed that too much time was being wasted “on
dealing with these wailing Jews”. About 200,000
Hungarian Jews were later said to have been saved
after pressure was brought on the regent, Admiral
Horthy, to halt the deportations, but that came too
late for most of them. The thought that some at least
had been spared brought Vrba some comfort.

Vrba had risked everything - slow strangulation
was the fate of attempted escapees - in the belief
that the information he carried would change
the course of the war. Embittered by his failure, he
nonetheless made a life as a chemical engineer, first
in Prague, later in Israel, the UK and Canada. He
married twice, had two daughters and worked
on his own or with the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesen-
thal to track down war criminals. He became a key
witness at trials and an excellent source for histori-
ans. But he was not an easy man, short-tempered,
querulous and sardonic.

When Martin Gilbert published his authoritative
Auschwitz and the Allies in 1981, he concluded that
while much had indeed been known about the Final
Solution, Auschwitz had remained a largely
“unknown destination ... somewhere in the east”.
However, new research, published some twenty
years later, suggested otherwise. A steady, if small,
stream of credible information about the exter-
mination camps and the mass killings in the east had
in fact been reaching the Allies from soon after the
Final Solution was agreed in January 1942. Karski and
Vrba were not the only messengers. Others had had
their reports pushed to one side as policy-makers
chose to focus on other war goals. After reading
Vrba’s account, Churchill’s often quoted words
“What can we do? What can we say?” can be under-
stood both as a genuine expression of dismay and as
uncertainty about the wisdom of making the facts
known. The French Jewish philosopher Raymond
Aron perhaps best summed up much of the world’s
scepticism and inaction when, asked about what
he had known about the Holocaust, replied: “I knew
but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe
it, I didn’t know”.

Jonathan Freedland has produced a painstaking
and very readable reconstruction of Vrba’s increas-
ingly frantic attempts to convince a world of facts
it did not want to hear. It is a valuable, if depressing,
reminder, at a time when veracity is everywhere
under threat, of the fragility of the truth. =

Caroline Moorehead is the author of a quartet of books
on resistance in the Second World War
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Harold Gillies and plastic
surgery

I disagree with Christine Slobogin’s
assertion, in her review of The Face-
maker by Lindsey Fitzharris (June
10), that modern plastic surgery
was not a “creation on English soil”.
Harold Gillies and his colleagues
in the First World War tried the
techniques previously described
by others and found that they
did not work, so had to adapt or
reinvent almost all the procedures.
Furthermore, the concentration of
resources at the Queen’s Hospital,
Sidcup enabled a leap forward in
collaborative working. In France
and Germany, those who attempted
facial remodelling worked in isola-
tion and could not learn from the
successes and mistakes of their
peers. Gillies commented that some
of the patients treated in France or
Germany looked hideous at the
outset and ridiculous at the end,
and the photographs of those men
he received who had been treated
on the Continent bear this out. He
also, rightly, described how his
multidisciplinary approach laid the
foundations of plastic surgery as a
separate speciality.

All of this is outlined in my book
Faces from the Front: Harold Gillies,
the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the
origins of modern plastic surgery
(Helion Press, 2017). I have
researched the work of Sir Harold
Gillies for more than thirty years,
having discovered the extant case
files from the British Section of the
Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup in 1990,
and recovered these with the
surviving files of the New Zealand
Section. As a result of my research
I have been privileged to corre-
spond with many relatives of facial
injury patients, and have received
over 100 accounts of what hap-
pened to men after the war.

It is a myth, perpetuated for far
too long on the basis of two much-
quoted individual accounts (neither
from Sidcup) that men who under-
went facial surgery remained

to philosophers and poets to cult

Reading Ulysses

s Paul Muldoon’s prismatic essay “Spinoza’s shille-
lagh” (June 17) illuminates, James Joyce’s Ulysses
represents a world of endless colour, complexity and
thematic inter-relatedness (eg seeing “Homer” in Irish
Home Rule, the myriad interwoven threads of Catholic,
Jew, Greek, Irish, etc). As a footnote to Muldoon’s
broad-ranging scholarship, touching on Frank
Budgen’s comment about Joyce’s “method” of narra-
tive “through suggestion rather than direct statement”,
I would like to propose that Joyce’s approach to his
creative process is a revelation occurring to, and
described in the novel by, Stephen Dedalus himself.
The novel opens with a famous thematic scene in
Dublin’s Martello tower, with a dour Stephen (whose
mother has just died) and Buck (Baruch) Mulligan,
the latter performing a blasphemous “shaving” mass,
during which Stephen defines Irish art as “the cracked
lookingglass of a servant”. Later that morning, walking
on the strand alone, Stephen thinks quietly to himself
as he observes the shapes and colours of things served
up in the marine detritus. He taps these with his
ashplant (the shillelagh!) and, in the course of this
wandering, he systematizes his own way of observing
the world around him: “he was aware of them bodies
[things] before of them [being] coloured”. In the pro-
cess of cataloguing - “the nearing tide, that rusty boot.
Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs” - he
defines, in his typically paradoxical way, how he will
create the work: “Shut your eyes and see”.

From Mulligan’s mock-Catholic mass to Molly’s
exchange of seedcake mouth to mouth with Leopold,
everything is observed, reflected upon eyes closed,
inter-related and created anew in this immense portrait
about his life becoming a novel. Though it recounts only
“one little day” in the life of Dublin, Ulysses is, as Mul-
doon unfolds it, a microcosmic web of humanity itself.
® James Lichtenberg
Durham NC

It occurs to me after reading Paul Muldoon’s brilliant
and suitably botanical take on Joyce’s Ulysses that
George Steiner more than deserves a mention.
Muldoon’s suggestion that Joyce deliberately chose not
to allow us (as with Moses) to fully experience the
Promised Land does not seem quite right to me. For
me, Joyce was demanding a return to the ancient craft
of reading deeply, and he is resurrecting what Steiner
called, in his essay “On Difficulty” (The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol 36, no 3, 1978), the
“grid of classical and Biblical reference” that was being
buried under philistine positivism and mercantile
structure in the new industrial age.

Though mainly focused on poetry in the essay,
Steiner identifies two trends in modernism - one in
which the author increasingly seeks an element of
semantic privacy (as with Paul Celan, understandably)
and another in which authors wish to “re-animate
lexical and grammatical resources that have fallen out
of use ... and will labour to undermine, through distor-
tion, through hyperbolic augment, through elision and
displacement, the banal and constricting determi-
nations of ordinary, public syntax”. Steiner does not
mention Joyce specifically in this essay (though he
does in the book of the same name), but he could be
describing our artful Dublin exile with “aplum”.

@ Paul Larkin
Na Doiri Beaga, Co Dun na nGall

It is difficult to take Paul Muldoon’s far-fetched
analyses of Joyce’s Ulysses seriously when he makes
such an egregious error in the simple matter of the
Blooms’ breakfast. Leopold cooks the kidney for him-
self, not for Molly, to whom he takes bread and butter
and tea with cream. The kidney he has himself, apart
from the burned bit, which he gives the cat.

™ Stephen Barber and Mary Hoffman

Witney, Oxfordshire

depressed and were shunned by the
world. This is in the main untrue.
My collected accounts are testi-
mony not only to the success of
surgery and the resilience of the
men, but also to the significant
rehabilitative support given both to
the patients and by the patients
themselves to each other. This
made it unnecessary to develop
any self-help organization in Britain

lth

ests, from novelists

“ommentators.

Subscribe to the podcast today at the-tls.co.uk/podcast

after the war along the lines of the
French “Gueules Cassées” or the
Second World War Guinea Pig Club.
As for the suggestion that Fitz-
harris should consider focusing on
the patients’ stories instead of an
“acclaimed white male surgeon”, of
course, almost every surgeon in the
early twentieth century was a white
male. If we were to ignore them
there would be no medical history.
Almost all the patients were also
white males. Of the 2,344 patients
of the British Section at the Queen’s
Hospital for whom any records
exist, there is one Nigerian, one
Indian and one Chinese, of whose
postwar progress we know nothing.
® Andrew Banji
Rye, East Sussex

Cato Street

My warm thanks to Robert Poole
for finding my Conspiracy on Cato
Street “an enthralling classic of
London history” (June 17). I won-
der, however, at some of his mis-
representations of my book. He is
annoyed that I don’t look at north-
ern radicalism more closely, which
may be because he’s the author of
the undoubted classic in that area,
Peterloo: The English uprising (2019).
Yet his book dismisses the Cato
Street conspiracy in London
in a casual half-page and deems it
unimportant. As he covers the
north in 1819, may I not be allowed
to cover London in 1815-20? His

TLS

peevishness at my expense seems
to rest on the sense that I’ve
betrayed what he assumes are my
origins. He tells us that the histo-
rical empathy of “a Mancunian born
and bred”, who served his historical
apprenticeship “counting cotton
mills”, “seems to give out north of
Watford”. Apparently my northern
integrity has been corrupted by the
contemptuous view of low life that
prevails at Cambridge high tables.
Actually I am no northerner born
and bred. I lived my first twenty
years in South Africa. And few high
tables would endorse my view of
the Cato Street conspirators: I am
rather on their side. It’s likewise
untrue that I “take a swipe” at
“miserabilist histories” of the Indus-
trial Revolution; I have spent most
of my teaching career endorsing
them wholeheartedly. Nor does the
book focus only “on the few weeks
before the conspiracy”: a good half
of it, which he omits to mention,
ranges over the preceding half-
century of London radicalism, and
includes a chapter on Peterloo.

I did, as he notices, fail to
examine the “Private and Secret”
Home Office correspondence in HO
79; but the National Archives were
closed for two years as I wrote the
book, and the vast number of spy
and trial reports I have examined
serve my purpose adequately. As
for the two books in the field to
which I omit to refer: one mentions
Cato Street in passing in a two-line

footnote; the other, a novel, invents
a good part of its story. Loosen up,
Professor Poole. We’re on the same
side, really, and there’s room for
all of us.

@Vic Gatrell

Cambridge

Suze

In her review of Abel Quentin’s Le
Voyant d@’Etampes (June 24), Lisa
Hilton points to the opening scene
in which the sexagenarian narrator
asks for a particular drink. No one
knows what it is. We are in Paris.
Hilton explains that the drink is
called Suze, “a traditional drink
made from gentian root”. She con-
tinues: “Roots - what they consist
of, who has the right to claim them
and the concomitant claim on not
only ideas, but facts - are at the
heart of this book”.

That mention of Suze, especially
given Lisa Hilton’s explanation,
made me think of a particular
photograph in W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz (2001). Jacques Austerlitz
is in Paris, searching for his roots.
He had been brought to England
on the Kindertransport, and never
saw his mother or his father again.
Before disappearing to almost cer-
tain extermination, his father had
lived on the rue Barrault. Although
no house number is given, we are
told that Austerlitz visited the actual
house. And here Sebald presents us
with a photograph of a narrow,
high building that was indeed a
house situated on the rue Barrault.
Given what we know about Sebald’s
method, can it be pure coincidence
that on the side of the building is a
huge advertisement spelling out the
word SUZE?

@ Neil Cooper
Ruskington, Lincolnshire

Hoddin grey

What a wonderful discovery is
“The Prince Obsessed” by George
Egerton (June 24)! Just one small
point: I think “the hidden gray of
the middle-class” may contain a
misreading of “hodden, hoddin”,
defined in the Scottish National
Dictionary as “coarse homespun,
undyed woollen cloth, of a greyish
colour, due to a mixture of white
and black wool”. At any rate it is
surely a (mischievously ironic?)
allusion to Robert Burns: “What
though on hamely fare we dine, /
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a’ that? / Gie
fools their silks, and knaves their
wine - / A man’s a man for a’ that”.
@ Alan James

Gatehouse of Fleet, Galloway

Correction

We omitted to mention that the
translator of The Familia Grande by
Camille Kouchner, reviewed on
June 3, is Adriana Hunter.

CONTACT

1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
[email protected]

JULY 1, 2022
© AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The hardest slog in sport

The chequered history of the Tour de France, from collaboration onwards

SIMON KUPER

LE FRIC
Family, power and money: the business
of the Tour de France
ALEX DUFF
336pp. Constable. £22.

liberation of Paris, two media magnates met in

an office on the Champs-Elysées. During the
occupation, Emilien Amaury’s advertising agency
had printed clandestine Resistance newspapers.
Now, with the war ending, his fortunes were hitting
new heights. A Resistance member had recently
cycled to his office and delivered 27 million francs
in French banknotes, printed largely in Boston:
Amaury, the son of a provincial roadmender, had
been assigned the mission of financing the new
postwar French media.

By contrast, the high-born magnate visiting
Amaury’s office, Jacques Goddet, was in trouble.
Goddet’s family newspaper, L’Auto, renamed LAuto-
Soldat, had spent the occupation publishing a mix
of Nazi propaganda and sport. The incoming French
government had vowed to bury collaborating editors
“in a common grave of national dishonour”. If
Goddet was to stay in the newspaper business, he
would need Amaury’s help.

Amaury immediately established the power
relationship by borrowing Goddet’s bicycle. He then
agreed to lobby the new government on Goddet’s
behalf. “In return”, writes Alex Duff in this rollicking
but unsatisfying history, Amaury “would get a 50 per
cent stake in LAuto’s treasured asset - the Tour de
France”. In a quintessentially French outcome, the
Amaurys own the race to this day, defying every
“anglo-saxon” attempt to buy them out.

The Tour, first raced in 1903, rapidly became a
beloved mix of village féte, celebration of la France
profonde and what Duff calls “probably the hardest
slog in sport ... perhaps the equivalent of running
a dozen marathons in a month”. Doping was an
accepted, even storied part of it from the start.
Riders - who also drank a quart of wine for breakfast
- ate amphetamines like candy. How else were
you going to get up the mountain? The central role
occupied in other sports by coaches was played in
cycling by soigneurs, or doctors (sometimes horse
doctors). It is no coincidence that the famous riders
Fausto Coppi and Jacques Anquetil ran off with
doctors’ wives. But throughout the twentieth

I THE LATE SUMMER OF 1944, soon after the

JULY 1, 2022

century the doping remained relatively amateurish,
brewed according to traditional recipes. Cycling
drugs were “magic potion” as much as medicine.

The postwar French Communist Party was the
first of many actors to try to grab a piece of the
beloved Tour, but Amaury, though never much of
a cycling fan, understood he was on to a good thing.
His race lost money - the crowds by the roadside
didn’t need tickets, and television hadn’t yet got
going - but it boosted newspaper sales. During the
“trente glorieuses” years of postwar boom, French
media thrived, Goddet was rehabilitated and LAuto
was reborn as the popular sports newspaper
L’Equipe, which Amaury would eventually take over.

Meanwhile, Amaury’s dubious wartime dealings
were forgotten. His ad agency had played both
sides during the occupation. He had clandestinely
published Charles de Gaulle’s wartime speeches
from abroad - cannily, after the war he handed the
general a scrapbook of the cuttings - but he had also
made money putting out posters and propaganda
booklets for Vichy.

In 1956 Amaury and Goddet bought outright con-
trol of the Tour from the French state for 20 million
francs (then about £20,000). To this day the state
continues to oversee this piece of French patri-
mony: public roads are closed for the race and the
president traditionally gives the winner a handmade
porcelain bowl on the Champs-Elysées.

When Amaury died in a riding accident in 1977,
he left behind only an unsigned, contested will
written in green ink. The legal battle between his
son and daughter was eventually won by the reclu-
sive son, Philippe, who ran the empire quietly
until his death in 2006, after which his widow and
children took charge.

Along the way, like most good French things, the
Tour had been discovered by the anglo-saxons. The
Texan rider Lance Armstrong emerged like an
American machine bulldozing French traditions,
winning the race seven straight times from 1999
through 2005. Armstrong was a far more discreet
and professional doper than his predecessors, but
many always suspected that he was cheating. The
Tour’s new, more global following was less tolerant
of doping, and cheats were constantly being
exposed, often by L’Equipe. The family’s newspaper
was damaging the family’s race, and the conflict of
interest was unsustainable. Duff reports Philippe’s
widow, Marie-Odile, telling her journalists in 2008:
“J am fed up of doping stories in the paper”. After
that the stories tended to be relegated to the back
pages. Still, L’Equipe’s long pursuit of Armstrong
eventually helped to bring him down in 2012.

TLS

Jacques Chirac,
Jacques Goddet,
cyclist Louison Bobet
and Bernadette Chirac
at the arrival of the
Tour de France on the
Champs-Elysées, 1977

66

Doping was an
accepted part
of it from the
start. Riders -
who also
drank a quart
of wine for
breakfast - ate
amphetamines
like candy

Simon Kuper is a
Financial Times
columnist and author
of The Happy Traitor,
2021, Barca: The rise
and fall of the club
that invented modern
football, 2021, and
Chums: How a tiny
caste of Oxford
Tories took over

the UK, 2022

SPORT

That summer Bradley Wiggins became the first
British winner in the Tour’s 109-year history, after
which his compatriot and teammate Chris Froome
won the race four times. A century late to the
starting line, British fans finally bought Lycra and
switched on to the race in numbers. There has long
been an underlying tension to the Tour - does it
belong to France or the world? - and many in
French cycling were snooty about the incursion.

Once the anglo-saxons discover something, they
tend to try to monetize it. Almost everyone had a
go at gaining control of a piece of the Tour: Roth-
schild of London, BSkyB, a gaggle of Armstrong-
venerating venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and
still more exotically, the Chinese billionaire Wang
Jianlin. Duff, who covered sports business for years
for Bloomberg News, plainly reported on the
various bids in real time, and he raids his old note-
books in detail here.

The problem - for both the bidders and for this
book - is that the Amaurys wouldn’t even listen to
offers. They had no interest in selling. The family
appears to share the broader French sense of a
national patrimony forever besieged by barbarians.
Emilien’s self-effacing grandson Jean-Etienne, who
now oversees the race with his sister, tells Duff in
a rare interview that the Amaurys consider them-
selves guardians of the Tour. “The Americans,” he
says dismissively, “think everything is for sale”.

There’s that, then there’s also the fact that the
family has done very nicely out of the race since
1944. The model of Emilien Amaury’s business has
been reversed: now it’s the media properties that
lose money, while the Tour has become the family
cash cow. The Amaurys have historically paid the
riders only the crumbs from their table, often justi-
fying this with grumbles about doping. Even after
TV channels worldwide began buying rights to the
race, from 1990 to 2010 the winner’s purse rose
by less than the French average salary. Today a
journeyman rider on the Tour might earn €60,000
a year. The teams rely on small-time sponsors and
frequently go bust. They complain about being shut
out of the Tour’s riches, but there isn’t much they
can do about it: they can hardly boycott or abandon
a race that represents as much as 80 per cent of the
professional cycling economy.

And so the Tour remains the possession of a
typically secretive French family company. The
Amaurys pay themselves millions a year in divi-
dends and have increased the company’s financial
reserves to €142 million. Neither flamboyant nor
innovative, they are simply always there. Cycling, in
short, has avoided the path of sports such as foot-
ball, tennis and Formula 1, in which teams and
players now practically monopolize TV money.

This makes Le Fric a book of two halves. The first
half, featuring the rise and rule of the Amaurys, is
full of picturesque details plucked from French
books and archives, or from Duff’s interviews. But
the second half, in which each new bid is built up
and then fails, fizzles. Duff spends too many pages
pursuing the efforts of moneymen that ultimately
came to nothing. The book always remains read-
able, but goes nowhere because the Tour’s owner-
ship doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Duff underplays cycling’s economic
shift from the obsession of a few bits of western
Europe (above all, Flanders) to a modest niche sport
in countries all over the world. Despite the demise
of generations of Frenchmen who watched the
race with Michelin guides to France on their laps,
the Tour is ticking over nicely. Doping seems to
have receded, or at least morphed from the life-
threatening and eventually detectable ephedrine
(EPO) of the turn of the millennium into safer micro-
dosing and blood-doping. The race has recently
even reversed its decades-long decline in France,
benefiting from its retro appeal (and from the
empty days of lockdown). Last summer a record
42 million French people watched at least a minute
of their national odyssey. In the endless battle
between modernity and French patrimony, the
French surprisingly often win. =
The great
inflation
of 2022

As prices soar, have the central
banks been caught napping?

KENNETH ROGOFF

THE LORDS OF EASY MONEY
How the Federal Reserve broke the economy
CHRISTOPHER LEONARD
384pp. Simon and Schuster. £20 (US $30).

THE MONEY ILLUSION
Market monetarism, the Great Recession,
and the future of monetary policy
SCOTT SUMNER
392pp. University of Chicago Press. £28
(US $35).

financial wealth and the large footprint of the

financial news media, central banking has
penetrated mainstream consciousness to a degree
that was once unimaginable. There is now a healthy
public appetite for business books that attempt to
demystify central banking, critique central bankers
and still entertain.

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve
broke the economy by Christopher Leonard is one
of the more intriguing recent contributions, offering
a lively, populist perspective on institutional culture
at the world’s most powerful financial institution,
the United States Federal Reserve (the Fed). The
author’s organizing device is to pit the views of a
neglected dissenting policymaker, Thomas Hoenig
(the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas
City during the financial crisis), against the Fed
leadership, particularly Ben Bernanke (2006-14)
and Jay Powell (2018-). The subtext is that these
men’s differing outlooks can be seen as part of a
class struggle between the insulated elite and the
common person. Prior to taking the reins at the Fed,
Bernanke was an influential academic and Powell
a successful financier. Both had studied at elite
universities and enjoyed stellar early careers before
being helicoptered into the top position. Hoenig, by
contrast, worked his way up the ranks.

There is little debate that the Fed and other cen-
tral banks largely did the right thing during the
2008 financial crisis, then twelve years later during
the pandemic, at least in the acute early phases. By
broadly backstopping the system to prevent asset
fire sales and a general meltdown, they shielded
the real economy and reduced long-term “scarring”.
That said, I did not, in the earlier crisis - and still
do not - think it made sense to save every major
bank, no matter how irresponsible their policies. It
would have been better to have put at least one into
receivership, which would not only have reduced
moral hazard, but given the public a sense that
there had been a modicum of social justice for the
problems the banks had created. (The case of
Lehman Brothers was different: the company did
not own a commercial bank and, as Bernanke
explained in his testimony to the House Committee
on Financial Services, “at that time, neither the
Federal Reserve nor any other agency had the
authority to provide capital or an unsecured guar-
antee”.) There is a standard procedure for putting

8

[inane TO THE MASSIVE expansion of

a bank into default that essentially siphons the worst
loans into a “bad bank” and reconstitutes the rest

into a “good bank”, protecting depositors but
wiping out the bank’s equity. Sweden and China did
this in the 1990s, quite successfully.

This, in any case, was not Hoenig’s beef with his
Fed colleagues in the wake of the financial crisis.
The much bigger debate concerned what the Fed
(and the Bank of England, the European Central
Bank and others) did after propping up the banks.
First, they pushed very short-term interest rates to
zero by offering unlimited cash to banks at this rate.
When that proved insufficient to restore growth and
tame disinflationary pressures, the Fed engaged in
“quantitative easing”. This involves offering banks
reserves at the central bank - in effect, electronic
cash - in exchange for either central government
debt (“pure” quantitative easing) or private sector
assets (“fiscal” quantitative easing).

Hoenig, along with a significant minority of
economists, believed that undertaking quantitative
easing on a mass scale would flood the economy
with money and lead to inflation and recession. The
late Alan Meltzer (1944-2011), a leading monetarist
who wrote an influential history of the Fed, was
another key proponent of this view. Their reasoning
was seductive and its flaw was to be found in
something subtle: the fact that, once all short-term
interest rates (including very short-term treasury
bills) have converged to zero, there isn’t a significant
difference between electronic cash and short-term
government debt. Both are obligations of the central
government, since the government owns the central
bank. When the Fed issues bank reserves to soak
up, say, thirty-year government debt, all that really
happens is a shortening of the maturity structure of
government debt held by the public. When interest
rates are zero (or if bank reserves pay interest),
there is virtually no difference between the central
government issuing short-term debt or issuing long-
term debt and having the central bank immediately
issue short-term debt (central bank reserves) to the
public to buy it up. One might reasonably think this
cannot hold true, because central bank reserves
can only be traded in the banking system, while
government debt can be held by anyone. But,
because many banks are also very active in treasury
bill markets, that distinction does not really matter
in practice (except for second-order effects due to
financial frictions).

TLS

A Poor People’s
Campaign rally

on Pennsylvania
Avenue, Washington,
June 18, 2022

Kenneth Rogoff is a
Professor of Economics
at Harvard University
and the co-author of
This Time Is Different:
Eight centuries of
financial folly, 2009

This seemingly obscure nuance is important
because, once interest rates are zero, further
attempts to buy up government debt by issuing
short-term bonds are not terribly inflationary. When
interest rates on treasuries are zero, “money” and
government “debt” start to seem a lot alike. It was
this key insight that led John Maynard Keynes, in
his General Theory (1936), to conclude that govern-
ment spending is vastly more effective than mone-
tary policy when interest rates collapse to zero, as
they did in the US in the Great Depression of the
1930s. Although in recent years central banks have
insisted that “money” and government debt are not
quite perfect substitutes for one another at the zero
interest-rate bound, and that pure quantitative
easing policy can still have some effect, the bulk of
the academic literature finds the effects to be quite
small. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding: cen-
tral banks have often failed to bring inflation up to
their targets despite gargantuan efforts, as in Japan,
which has tried the hardest for the longest.

The real problem with Fed policy in the years
after the financial crisis was that it was not inflation-
ary enough, with most central banks struggling to
lift inflation to their target (generally 2 per cent).
Contrary to Hoenig’s view that policy was too loose,
it was arguably too tight, and the Fed should have
been open to ideas such as raising its inflation target
(Paul Krugman’s preferred solution) or open-ended
negative interest policy (which prevents wholesale
cash hoarding, as I explained in The Curse of Cash,
2016, but which so far no central bank has tried).
My own position during the financial crisis was
that moderate inflation (of 4-6 per cent for a few
years) would have been a good thing. It would
have helped to relieve stress on subprime mortgage
holders in the US and on periphery economies in
Europe. The Fed’s mistake was a failure to create
inflation when it was most needed, and an obsession
with controlling it when there were bigger problems
on the horizon, such as slow growth and rising
unemployment. Either way, the notion that the
“lords of easy money broke the economy”, as per
the title of Leonard’s book, seems nonsense.

Leonard is aware, of course, that inflation never
blew up in real time, as Hoenig had feared, and he
can point with much more justification to what is
happening today, more than a decade later. Thanks
to a mixture of factors, ranging from post-pandemic
global supply chain woes to Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and, above all, to well-intentioned but
catastrophically misguided Biden administration
stimulus policies, inflation today in the US exceeds
8 per cent, and it is not going away any time soon.
The $1.9 trillion March 2021 package was a particular
culprit in this regard, arriving when the economy
was already sharply recovering, and it proved too
much too late. Unfortunately, the progressives who
dominate policy in the Biden administration
thought there would be little risk to having the
government issue enormous quantities of debt,
then letting the central bank soak it up. Their
anthem, which goes under the rubric of “modern
monetary theory” (MMT), is really just a distilled
version of a line many left-leaning academics have
long been pushing: that government can vastly
expand its debt issuance to pay for social spending
without ever having to cut spending or raise taxes,
including through inflation.

Leonard’s argument is that it was the Fed that
was supposed to shut the door on inflation by rais-
ing interest rates, and that, had these raises been
implemented earlier in 2021, demand would have
been tempered by making borrowing more expen-
sive, bringing down asset prices of all types, from
equities to housing. Now the Fed is having to play
catch-up, most recently with last month’s unusually
aggressive 0.75 per cent rate hike; and other central
banks are following suit. But, while it is true that
the Fed held on to zero interest for too long, and
particularly from early 2021, the author’s contention
that Hoenig and his allies were ultimately right
is undone by the important detail that the world
we are looking at now is more than a decade on

JULY 1, 2022

© JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AP PHOTO.
from the financial crisis, and circumstances have
changed radically thanks to matters such as the
pandemic and Ukraine. Very easy monetary policy
certainly can lead to high inflation - just look at
Argentina or Venezuela - but that does not mean
it is wrong in every circumstance. And in the case
of our current predicament, a good part of the
blame must be laid not at the door of the Fed, but
at that of progressives who preferred to engage in
epic fiscal spending via the expansion of debt,
rather than through raising taxes, and to the sub-
stantial number of academics and MMT proponents
who supported this view, perhaps lulled to sleep by
decades of low inflation.

Despite being wrong in its central economic
thesis, The Lords of Easy Money is still fascinating and
engaging. Where it really shines is in its exploration
of how Fed culture attempted to deal with dissent
and outside views. Hoenig’s willingness to challenge
the economic assumptions of the Fed chair and
senior staff led to a debate that is, in Leonard’s
hands, enlightening and entertaining. Unfortunately,
the next crisis could be different. Leonard raises
important questions about whether groupthink and
excessive deference to the chair (Bernanke and
later Powell, with Janet Yellen in between) poses
bigger risks than politicians and the markets cur-
rently appreciate.

In a sense, Leonard’s perspective is part of a
wider populist push after the financial crisis to
argue that the technocratic elites had it all wrong
and should be purged. This view is dangerous: it is
precisely because of its technocratic excellence that
the Fed managed the crisis so effectively, if imper-
fectly. And it is precisely the power of technocracy
that we see on display in Scott Sumner’s excellent
new book, The Money Illusion.

This thoughtful and broad-ranging critique of the
post-financial crisis consensus on macroeconomic
policy is worth reading for anyone interested in
monetary policy, even if you don’t buy into the
“market monetarism” (of which more later) champ-
ioned by the author. Sumner is unafraid to challenge
the academic consensus: in his earlier book on the
Great Depression (The Midas Paradox, 2015), he
argued that bad policy-making at every turn made
things far worse in the late 1920s and early 1930s
than they had to be. In The Money Illusion, much
like Leonard in The Lords of Easy Money, he explores
monetary policy decision-making during the
2008-09 financial crisis and its aftermath - but
with more focus on the economics and less on the
personalities. Some may wonder why anyone today
would write (or read) a book raking over the
financial crisis, when the world has moved on to
dealing with the pandemic, war in Europe and how
to manage economic policy in an era of wild
political see-saws. In fact, Sumner’s book is of great
significance to our current crises, and his challenge
to conventional wisdom is bracing.

As I have previously argued, central-bank policy
rules that focus excessively on inflation targets can
be wildly off in a deep crisis, causing central banks
to react too slowly and cautiously to prevent the eco-
nomy from sinking into low demand and deflation.
Of course, in a really deep crisis, a huge fiscal policy
response is essential, but the contemporary view that
monetary policy should play a secondary support-
ing role reflects a profound lack of imagination. And
Sumner fully appreciates this. A key element of his
preferred framework is market monetarism, which
advocates for central banks to target “nominal
GDP”, which is basically national income without
adjustment for inflation. Compared to targeting,
say, 2 per cent inflation, nominal GDP targeting
would let inflation go up when output seems to be
collapsing. If - and this is a critical point - the public
has high confidence in the central bank’s ability to
let prices rise when output softens, this measure
provides an automatic incentive to shift consumption
and investment into the present and away from the
future. This behaviour will have the effect of push-
ing up demand, which will result in some inflation
but soften the blow to employment and output. The

JULY 1, 2022

potential efficacy of nominal GDP targeting can be
illustrated in a wide class of Keynesian models, first
laid out by James Meade in 1977 and a few years
later by James Tobin, both Nobel laureates.

The alert reader will notice that Sumner’s recipe
is 180 degrees opposite to that of Hoenig. In
Sumner’s view (and mine), the inflation that results
from very easy monetary policy in a financial crisis
is not a flaw of nominal GDP targeting, but a
desirable feature. It’s not that a fiscal response is
unimportant: it’s that monetary policy can have a
big impact in relieving the burden on fiscal policy,
as well as on both public and private debtors,
particularly during a slow post-financial crisis
recovery. This would certainly have been desirable
back in 2008-09. Importantly, in normal recessions,
even deep ones, the advantage of monetary policy
as a first line of defence is that it can be reasonably
technocratic. By contrast, politics are baked into
fiscal policy, making it hard to get the timing, and
balance, right; fiscal policy is reliant on horse-
trading and other external factors.

One might argue that the massive response to the
pandemic proves that political obstacles can be
conquered. And this seems fair - until we realize
that a pandemic recession is hardly a typical one.
A pandemic is akin to a natural disaster, making
political consensus far easier to reach. At the same
time it hits the economy very unevenly, making
targeted fiscal policy far more effective than scatter-
shot monetary policy. Pandemics are different from
ordinary recessions in other ways, too. As the eco-
nomy recovers, the initially dominant demand
shock fades and the economy is left facing a huge
supply shock. For example, if China continues to
follow its radical zero-Covid policy into sustained
recession, global supply chains will seize up even
more than they have already. If the global economy
is supply-constrained, pumping in too much more
demand is only going to create inflation. It is clear
that policy-makers spent too long fighting the last
war, during which, it is now commonly agreed, the
fiscal stimulus was withdrawn too quickly.

Sumner’s argument that the Fed should have
targeted nominal GDP going into the financial crisis
misses one critical element. If output is falling, the
Fed needs to create more inflation, but how can it
achieve this once it has taken short-term policy
rates to zero and “money printing” becomes, as I
have shown, akin to shortening the maturity
structure of government debt? During the Great
Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt man-
aged to create inflation by reducing gold backing
for the dollar, which effectively depreciated the
currency. The UK did the same in 1931. But in the
modern system there is no gold anchor to jettison.
Instead, Sumner floats ideas such as higher inflation
targets and negative interest rates, but he does not
view them as necessary, and, in any event, the
version of negative rates that he considers is a
limited one that fails to prevent wholesale paper
currency hoarding by pension funds, insurance
companies and financial firms, which no central
bank has tried and which would be necessary to
truly make negative policy effective. (As I explained
in The Curse of Cash, it is extremely straightforward
to shield 99 per cent of people from negative rates,
and the idea that bank profitability has to suffer is
a red herring.)

For all its searing critiques of mainstream think-
ing, The Money Illusion is by no means a diatribe.
Sumner offers numerous examples of occasions
when he believes mainstream thinkers got it right,
while at the same time calling out various over-
blown claims. For example, during the years after
2008-09, the UK never did have the disastrous
“double dip” recession widely vaunted by many
liberal economists (including the chief economist of
the International Monetary Fund). Nor did the US
ever tip into a true depression, even if leading left-
leaning economists such as Krugman continued to
insist otherwise.

In addition to the policies Sumner critiques, there
are other ways in which the financial crisis response

TLS

66

The biggest
bubble of the
past forty
years is the
collapse of
interest rates

fell short. In particular, US policy-makers were too
hesitant to find creative ways to write down sub-
prime loans, and those in Europe were far too
reluctant to write down unsustainable debts in the
European periphery. In some ways the pandemic
response corrected these mistakes through debt
moratoria or, in Europe, the next generation EU
programmes, which were akin to a massive debt
write-down, even if not labelled as such for political
reasons. And, of course, with sweeping inter-
ventions into financial markets, most of the main
advanced-economy central banks effectively sub-
sidized high-risk borrowers. It is curious that the
current academic literature continues to focus so
heavily on fiscal policy in the pandemic and not the
myriad other policies that supported the economy.

So, as inflation continues to skyrocket in the main
advanced economies, should they take nominal
GDP targeting more seriously? Although I believe
there are better ideas - especially rethinking how
to better implement negative interest rates - nomi-
nal GDP targeting merits serious discussion. But it
might be wise to make an effort to raise economic
literacy first. While the public loosely understands
what inflation is - even if most people quite reason-
ably attach more importance to food and gas prices
than the CPI index does - almost nobody under-
stands what nominal GDP is and why it matters. On
top of that, GDP is poorly measured. Revisions of
1 per cent or more are reasonably common. Another
problem is that, under a regime of nominal GDP
targeting, there would be enormous pressure on the
Fed to make optimistic growth predictions, which
would end up adding to inflation if unrealized.
(I first made this point in a paper of 1985, “The
Optimal Degree of Commitment to an Intermediate
Monetary Target”, which introduced the idea of
central bank independence as a way to stabilize
long-term inflationary expectations.)

Sumner’s book has all sorts of philosophical
insights that will be interesting to anyone trying
to understand markets and macroeconomics. One
bogeyman he confronts is bubbles. Many market
observers see speculative bubbles everywhere.
Sumner, by contrast, argues that there is typically
some rational factor behind the “bubble”, and the
fact that the casual (or academic) observer isn’t
easily detecting it is not a reason to dismiss signals
from market prices. After all, the biggest bubble of
the past forty years, if you want to call it that, is
the collapse of interest rates, particularly “real”
interest rates (the interest rate adjusted to remove
the effects of inflation). Low real interest rates make
virtually any kind of long-lived real asset seem more
valuable, from housing to art to stocks to crypto-
currency. Now that interest rates are on the rise,
asset prices are tanking across the board. Does this
confirm that everything was a bubble that is now
popping? Well, only if you are sure that interest
rates before were too low and that they are now
becoming more “normal”, a topic about which there
is great debate. Indeed, the decline in inflation-
adjusted interest rates over the past few decades,
and especially since the financial crisis, has been
the single most important phenomenon in macro-
economics. Right now markets seem to believe that
after a few years things will go back to something
like the new post-crisis normal of very low real
interest rates. But if interest rates were to revert to
the longer-term trend, then there would need to be
many adjustments to come, especially for govern-
ments that have been borrowing with abandon in
the belief - often egged on by liberal academics -
that rates will never rise significantly.

It is to the credit of both Christopher Leonard and
Scott Sumner that they are prepared to challenge the
smug consensus. And in their own ways, both of
their new publications are valuable contributions.
Arcane books about central banking may not seem
important in quiet times when inflation is tame and
markets are soaring. But with the UK and US now
both at high risk of entering a period of “stagflation”
(high inflation plus low growth), these debates
suddenly start to become highly relevant. =
POLITICS

Divided
we fall?

Diversity and democracy

LAWRENCE DOUGLAS

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
Why diverse democracies fall apart
and how they can endure
YASCHA MOUNK
368pp. Bloomsbury. £20.

The Great Experiment: Why diverse democracies
fall apart and how they can endure, is mis-
leading. This is because the problem with diverse
democracies is not that they are prone to collapse:
it’s that they’ve never been created in the first place.
History tells us that democracies have tended to
be either ethnically homogenous or structured in
such a way as to exclude racial, ethnic or religious
minorities from participation in the governing
process. Many European nations, for example, long
preserved their political homogeneity by defining
citizenship in ethnic terms. The United States was
one of the few early democracies to preside over a
diverse population, but even after the formal aboli-
tion of chattel slavery, Black Americans remained
politically disenfranchised and legally suppressed.
What the world hasn’t seen, then, is democracies
that are genuinely diverse- that is, in which all
groups enjoy full equality and find fair access to
participation in the democratic process. That, insists
Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins Univers-
ity, is the unprecedented “Great Experiment” that
democratic polities are now engaged in.
In many respects the experiment is not going well.
On the right, populist demagogues demonize immi-
grants and warn of the “Great Replacement” - the

lf | \HE SUBTITLE of Yascha Mounk’s new book,

idea that white “nativists” are being eclipsed by
minority groups, lacking the education, industry
and values to sustain national “greatness”. On the
left, scholars and activists insist that structures of
racism represent less the betrayal of liberal demo-
cratic principles than their most unadulterated
expression. Mounk insists that both positions over-
look the fact that the world’s democracies are vastly
more inclusive than they were fifty or a hundred
years ago. Many ethnic minorities now enjoy greater
prosperity than white majority populations. Immi-
grants tend to be more law-abiding than their
“native” counterparts, no less patriotic, and demon-
strate higher rates of upward mobility.

All the same, Mounk recognizes that diverse
democracies suffer from a want of political solidarity
and a positive common project. The traditional
sources of solidarity - shared history and ancestry,
myths and stories - have been revealed to trade in
precisely the exclusions and suppressions that
diverse democracies must now overcome. So where
are we to find the political solidarity that can sustain
the Great Experiment? Mounk finds one source in
philosophical liberalism, the idea that it is the
responsibility of the state to protect the moral,
spiritual and social autonomy of its subjects. Taking
the view that individuals and not groups represent

On borrowed time

Gathering the voices of Hongkongers

AMY HAWKINS

INDELIBLE CITY
Dispossession and defiance in Hong Kong
LOUISA LIM
320pp. Bantam USA. Paperback, £12.99.

According to Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign

secretary when Hong Kong became a colony
in 1841, it was a “barren island with nary a house on
it”. The British then transformed this pile of rocks
into a glittering Asian metropolis that enjoyed all the
trappings of the decadent West, if not the western
ideal of democracy. By 1997, when Britain handed
Hong Kong back to China (today marks the twenty-
fifth anniversary), the “barren island” had become a
golden goose. China, which had only just started to
open up, would hardly want the goose to stop laying
eggs, so it promised to preserve Hong Kong’s way of
life under a “one country, two systems” framework
for fifty years. Then, in 2020, after a year of protests
against an extradition bill many believed would
increase China’s coercive powers, the Hong Kong
government, backed by Beijing, imposed a draconian

10

| 4 | \HE sToRY OF HonG Kong used to be simple.

national security law which effectively criminalized
any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The freewheeling days were over.

Of course, missing from this precis is any mention
of Hongkongers themselves. Louisa Lim, in her
tender new book, Indelible City: Dispossession and
defiance in Hong Kong, aims to put Hongkongers
back into the story of their city. Lim’s first book, The
People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen revisited
(2014), showed how the CCP erased the 1989 Tian-
anmen Square massacre in Beijing from the Chinese
collective consciousness. Here the author tells
another story of forgetting.

Her chief interlocutor is the King of Kowloon, a
“toothless, often shirtless, disabled trash collector”
who, from the 1950s until his death in 2007, scrawled
“misshapen, childlike” graffiti across the city. His
message was always the same. Great swathes of land
had been stolen from his ancestors by the British in
the nineteenth century, and he wanted everyone to
know about it. He waged his graffiti war against who-
ever claimed to rule Hong Kong, undeterred by the
authorities’ attempts to paint over his proclamations.
His actions have a clear legacy in the (unsuccessful)
protests staged during the Umbrella Movement in
2014 against the screening by the Chinese govern-
ment of candidates for the 2017 election of Hong

TLS

Shoreditch, east
London, 2018

Lawrence Douglas is
the author of Will
He Go?: Trump and
the looming election
meltdown in 2020,
2020. He is a
contributing opinion
writer for the
Guardian and teaches
at Amherst College

Amy Hawkins writes
about foreign affairs
for the Economist

the fundamental building blocks of society, philo-
sophical liberalism seeks to protect persons from
both the arbitrary power of the state and the coercive
conformism of in-groups.

Mounk locates a second source of solidarity in civic
patriotism - that is, patriotism built not on nativist
triumphalism, but on shared pride in a country’s
most basic political values and everyday culture.
Such “inclusive patriotism”, Mounk insists, can
create “a real feel for cohesion” among citizens of
a diverse democracy while encouraging them to
accept and embrace a “huge variety of subcultures”.
Such “a shared commitment to a country’s most
basic political values really can help sustain diverse
democracies”.

But here, of course, we must ask: what are these
basic values? For his argument to work, Mounk
needs to appeal to this assumed shared commitment,
yet much of his book shows that no such consensus
exists. Indeed, if there were anything like a con-
sensus about, for example, the importance of treat-
ing persons as individuals, Mounk would not need
to spend so much time defending philosophical
liberalism. And he would not need to argue against
programmes that confer entitlements on specific
ethnic groups, which, he insists, are “inimical to
the kind of universal solidarity diverse democracies
need to sustain the welfare state”. Here Mounk’s
argument flirts with circularity as he suggests that
targeted entitlement programmes are problematic
not because they are morally wrong, but because
they contradict the very universal solidarity that he
presupposes holds us together. Can the author, then,
point to other basic values that hold “us” together?
He gestures to the robust protection of free speech,
but that itself, as we have so often seen, is open to
contestation when free speech is seen to protect
racist or otherwise inciteful expression.

Yascha Mounk concludes by insisting that we must
choose to emphasize “what we have in common
rather than what divides us”. Alas, he has failed
convincingly to tell us what those things in common
are. If anything, The Great Experiment reminds us
that, if we do have something in common, it is the
freedom to disagree about the content of that
common ground. Whether the freedom to disagree
can provide the kind of glue to hold a diverse
democracy together remains, however, unclear. =

Kong’s chief executive; and in the pro-democracy
demonstrations of 2019. Take the Lennon Walls
(named after a similar focal point for protest in
Prague in the 1980s, after the death of John Lennon),
which featured in both waves of the protests. Hong-
kongers covered stretches of the city’s concrete with
colourful Post-it notes bearing messages of support
for freedom and democracy. Like the King’s works,
the Lennon Walls soon disappeared: “disappearance
is the ultimate fear of Hong Kongers”, Lim writes.
“The island, only seven miles from end to end, is
destined to be subsumed into Greater China ... A
borrowed place on borrowed time.”

Melancholia haunts the book. Lim quotes an
anonymous young protester, interviewed at the
start of the 2019 protests, who is asked if he thinks
the demonstration in which he’s participating
will bring about change. “No, absolutely not”, he
answers. But by taking part, “At least you tried”.
Lim, who grew up in Hong Kong, makes no secret
of her feelings about the city, try as she might to
approach the story as a neutral observer. The book
opens with her helping to paint Chinese characters
onto a protest banner and wondering “if I had just
killed my career in journalism”. Yet she also writes
beautifully about the complexities she feels regard-
ing her own identity as someone who is ethnically
half Chinese, but was raised in the English-speaking
world of expats. “The truth was that I was a post-
colonial relic writing about an imaginary place”,
she comments. If the protests, and the force with
which they were crushed, had any positive effect,
it was to crystallize for millions of people what it
means to be a Hongkonger. =

JULY 1, 2022

© GUY CORBISHLEY/ALAMY LIVE NEWS