A shimmeringly good start to the Debussy centenary

A Christmas present to make you feel grown up

In this centenary of the death of the great French composer Debussy, one thing is assured: there will be no shortage of recordings of his works.

If Debussy has never quite been my favourite composer, he’s been hovering not far away from the top of my personal pantheon since around 1980. I had embarked on A’ level music studies at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School and one of the first works that we were introduced to was Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

It was a Deutsche Grammophon recording, with Herbert von Karajan wielding the baton and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra providing the gorgeously lush sound that stunned this then teenage listener.

It was the start of love affairs with all four component parts of that musical equation.

My mother, whose own classical music appreciation largely went little further than Handel’s Messiah (played every year as we put the Christmas decorations up) and Gilbert and Sullivan, was delighted in my interest and happy to buy me albums at Christmas and birthday.

The mantra was established instantly: DG, Von K, the Berlin. Most arrived on cassette, since I had one of those handheld ones that I later took to college. Such tech has gone the way of all flesh, but my vinyl recordings still survive – including one of those joint Debussy-Ravel programmes that seem to have been the light-classical norm for years.

In a general sense, I always loved DG covers – and still do: so much cleaner and brighter and more modern than those that, for instance, had a reproduction of a painting of an eighteenth-century street because it was a recording of something or other by Mozart. And while of course I would not wish to suggest that I am swayed by covers alone, I do still think that DG produces the classiest covers around, even when they’re predominantly artist portraits. 

Before the centenary got underway, DG had released Seong-Jin Cho’s new collection of piano works, Debussy, comprising Images I and II, Children’s Corner and Suite bergamesque.

In January, this was followed by Daniel Barenboim’s heavily-touted Claude Debussy, with a programme of Estampes, Clair de lune (from Suite bergamesque), Le plus que lente, Elégie and Préludes, Book 1.

Since the composer is standardly described as an Impressionist, it’s easy to think of his work in terms of paintings rather than the literature that was his inspiration. It was a poem by Mallarmé that gave birth to Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, for instance.

But it can be difficult not to see pictures in the mind’s eye when listening to his work. To be honest, I don’t think that counts very high on a list of problems.

On a different note, I have made the mistake, for some time, of treating music as background – something to play on headphones when working so as to aid concentration – and forgotten the value of setting aside time to really listen.

This weekend, I decided to actually sit down and pay attention to these two new discs.

Now Cho is new to me, whereas Barenboim is an established household god who I have had the very great joy and privilege of seeing play live.

The programmes are different – except for Clair de lune. Both are wonderfully meditative: a proper listen is seriously de-stressing stuff.

I have no preference over that one shared piece. But there is something in Cho’s playing that is so subtle, yet utterly devastating.

The thing I kept thinking of when listening was, ironically, not in his programme – Le Cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral), which is is the tenth piece in Préludes, Book 1. Yet it is what I thought of, time and again, while listening to Cho.

Barenboim is wonderful, with the contrasts that you would expect, but there is an ethereal, shimmering quality to Cho’s interpretation that takes the breath away – that’s if you’ve not already found tears streaming down your cheeks.

I was constantly half-thinking of light on rippling water – and yes, of submerged buildings.

In this year of Debussy, these two have already set the bar very high. Get/stream both, if you can. But if you have to choose, go for Cho and then invest the time away from anything else, simply letting yourself be drawn in to the utterly beautiful music and this quite extraordinary performance.

And one can only hope that this is indicative of the quality that we’ll be treated to over the coming months.

The apotheosis of the idiocracy?

Is it just possible that we live in an age that is seeing the apotheosis of the idiocracy?

The last few weeks seem to have provided ample evidence of such a state of being.

First (for the sake of this post) there was the sheer obscenity of ‘Black Friday’.

People falling over themselves, fighting, screaming and altogether behaving like total cretins in order to get goods that they probably have no need for, which in many cases were being marketed as ‘cheap’ when the price before this sale madness had been hiked to enable that.

And don’t pretend that it was just the lumpen poor either, simply because TV cameras went to the shops where some of them would be congregated. The likes of John Lewis was advertising ‘Black Friday’ nonsense too.

But setting even that aside, let’s remember that this is not (yet) the US and we do not (yet) celebrate Thanksgiving.

So why the hell have this obscene nonsense?

Not that that is likely to stop anyone, as we increasingly see an Americanised Halloween merchandised and sold to the credulous as a major event, while an increasing number of schools have ‘proms’.

What was wrong with signing each other’s school blouses/shirts and, if you were so inclined, chucking some flour and a few eggs around?

Now, we have a situation where stupid parents are encouraged to behave ever more stupidly; encouraged to try to ensure that their brat has the most expensive outfit and arrives in the most stretched limo of any of their peers.

I absolutely shudder at the thought of being forced to go through all that. Thank god I grew up in saner times. Now, there’s even a rise in proms for ‘graduation’ from nursery school, as well as from primary school.

Only a generation and a half ago, most people would have seen through the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses cult for precisely that – and laughed at those who played that game.

Now, we’ve turned it something that’s so important that it’s central to the economic calculations (I use the word loosely) of the Chancellor, who is basing his predictions on households going ever deeper into debt.

Moving on, this Christmas – even before we had reached Advent – decorations were going up (and not just in the big stores), while stalls had set up selling Christmas trees. Who is stupid enough to buy one so early? It’ll be dried up before Christmas itself!

Indeed, why the creep of the start of Christmas ever earlier and earlier?

I know that, historically speaking, the long Christmas shopping season started in WWI when families in the US were sending presents and cards to their loved ones in the trenches.

But it has lengthened further for entirely commercial reasons in more recent years, and now Christmas seems to start as soon as the Halloween sales opportunity is done for another year.

Of course, it’ll only be a week or so before we see the first adverts for Easter eggs.

Like Christmas tree sales, decorations were going up at hotels and businesses, as well as in homes, before the start of December this time around.

Generally speaking, most people only decorated their homes a fortnight before Christmas Day itself, and the time to take them down is 5 January, the 12th Day of Christmas.

And what’s with the ‘buy a sweater for one day a year’ thing – never mind that being followed by: ‘pay £2 to wear it to work and that will go to charity’?

Instead of spending £15 on a sweater (probably made of crap acrylic, in a sweatshop somewhere), and then £2 on your charity giving, put a tenner in the collection box.

Still, if you live to shop, then it just gives you another excuse to … well, shop.

Not that this is just about Christmas and commercialism in general.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against having fun, but when I see adults scooting past me on over-sized scooters of the sort that were designed with small children in mind, wearing wooly hats with animal ears on them, I wonder if we are also in an age of increasing infantilisation.

And then there’s the total logic deficit that we are increasingly witnessing in other walks of life.

Take the case of Russell Brand. Now I’m far from being a fan (and I think his opinions on voting are misguided at best and downright dangerous at worst), but in the present instance, with his involvement in the campaign to try to stop the tenants of the New Era estate in Hackney being evicted by a US business that will then hike the rents through the roof, he is most definitely on the side of the angels.

But what does he get accused of? Hypocrisy.

Now admittedly, this was from the Sun, with the Mail in hot pursuit, but the story seems to be that he rents – and not cheaply – and that his ultimate landlord is not the most ethical.

Now if Brand was calling on everyone to check the ethics of every individual or company that they do business with, while not doing the same himself, that would be hypocrisy.

But this really seems to come down to a view I’ve heard espoused from right-wing cretins more than once: that, if you are doing okay yourself, it is hypocritical to care about anyone who is not doing as well as you are.

Further, I’ve seen it suggested that, if you are in the above situation and you dare to think that people should be paid a living wage, for instance, then you should somehow use your wage to achieve that.

And then there’s the guff about how ‘socialists’ should not earn £X, because they should only ever be on low incomes.

‘Socialists’ has become a word used by the terminally (if only) imbecilic to damn anything they simply don’t like. Few have any concept of the actual economic philosophy behind it.

It’s reminiscent of the woman filmed calling Obama a ‘communist’ during the last US presidential election. When asked what she thought a communist was, she had to admit that she hadn’t a clue.

Of course it also means that we’ve moved so far to the right in UK politics that when someone says that people should be paid a living wage, it’s considered not as ‘fairness’, but as something to be slagged off, either bizarrely as ‘envy’ or as ‘socialism’!

To the dolts out there: if people cannot afford to live, how do you think that will impact on recruitment, retention, sickness rates and productivity?

And why do you think that the tax take has gone down even as the number of people in work has risen? That’s right: because we’re in the middle of a drive by business to a low-wage economy, with hundreds of thousands (about 1.4 million, to be accurate) on zero-hours contracts, many more in insecure jobs and yet more forced into ‘self-employment’ that gets them off the books, but can see them earning well below what is needed to live.

Mind, all this sees us looking at a media that is increasingly dumbed down, even in the supposed quality press, with increasing amounts of bias too and far less good-quality reportage.

What’s so depressing is the sheer number of people who appear to believe at face value anything they read in print.

You can bet that the same papers that are railing against Brand are not railing against the new owners of the New Era estate wanting to throw the residents onto the street.

And if this all sounds like a rant, that’s because it is. But honestly, look around you and at the things I’ve mentioned above and tell me that it doesn’t make you want to do a combination of ~head > desk~ and ~face palm~.

The year of Matisse

Matisse – and friend

It was in early September last year, as a chill returned to the air and the shadow of longer nights crept across the light. Just a short while after our return from the Roussillon, I found a book that promised to include a reference to Collioure.

In which case, Hilary Spurling’s Matisse the Life seemed to offer a welcome way of holding on to the light and the warmth and the colour a little longer.

Collioure merited quite a lot of mentions – enough that I learned new things – but beyond that, the book succeeded in drawing me into the work of an artist whose creative explosion in the village in 1905 had proved a seminal moment in modern art.

And from there it was but a short step to wondering where I might be able to find some of his work in London.

At which point, it’s apt to explain that Matisse and I actually go back a long way.

As a teenager studying art for A’ level, part of the course covered the history of art.

Unfortunately, in those days, I could never ‘get’ modern art – and that included Fauvism, the name given sarcastically to Matisse and his fellow artists after critics viewed the artistic result of their stay in Collioure that year.

Red Beach (1905)

Indeed, it was only within the last couple of years that I even remembered that we’d been taught about Fauvism – although beyond remembering the name of both the school and Matisse himself, I recall no other detail, which rather illustrates my point.

Picasso I ‘got’ – at least in terms of comprehending that, when you can do what he could do at 16, you’re going to have to move somewhere very different or stand still and stagnate.

At around about the same time, a school-organised visit to the National Gallery produced my first experience of some van Gogh in the ‘flesh’, blowing me away with the colour and his use of impasto to such an extent that he became an instant favourite – in spite of not being even remotely photographic.

Philosophically, my tastes were all over the place: I loved the likes of van Eyck and, in terms of more recent art, the Impressionists – but Renoir far more than Monet, the latter being too ‘modern’ in his abstraction – and that was as far as I was prepared to entertain the ‘modern’, apart from Picasso, Lowry and photo- and hyper-realism.

Portrait of Greta Moll (1908)

Indeed, it’s possible that that liking for van Eyck – specifically, a love of the Arnolfini Wedding – was essentially because I could view it as a form of early photo-realism.

There were, I suspect, many reasons for all this, but suffice it to say that, in ways I had no comprehension of at the time, it seems likely that a very traditional unbringing contributed to a mental blockage when it came to anything ‘modern’ – particularly when it was ‘experimental’ and abstract (I had the same sweeping attitude toward modern serious music too).

Anyway, fast forward again to last autumn and the search for works by Matisse in London.

Initially, that took me to the National Gallery, which claimed online to possess Portrait of Greta Moll from 1908.

But on visiting, it was nowhere to be found and nobody knew anything about it.

A week or so later, with time to spend in the Aldwych area of London late one afternoon, I decided to make a first visit to the Courtauld Gallery.

The Viaduct at Arcueil (1898-1900)

I was fully prepared to see that institution’s Impressionist works, its Cézannes, its van Goghs and its Gauguins: I was not prepared to walk into a room and suddenly see, when turning around, Matisse’s Red Beach, from 1905 – and to see it just a few short weeks after sitting on precisely that spot at Port d’Avall.

In an instant, the colours made sense – perhaps mostly because my unprepared response was an emotional one, and an emotional response to a subject was precisely what Matisse and his fellow Fauves were attempting to convey on their canvases.

After all, with cameras able to make a photographic record, why try to do the same thing in paint?

There were a couple of other Matisse works in the same room, but that first sighting was, I think, the moment at which I fell in love with his work.

In late November, visiting the Walker Gallery while in Liverpool for work, produced another unexpected spot – this time, a very early Matisse, The Viaduct at Arcueil (1898-1900), which is an excellent illustration of the subsequent impact of the light and colour of the south on this northern artist.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté, (1904)

And right at the end of the year, the mystery of the missing Portrait of Greta Moll was finally solved when we walked into a room at the Tate Modern to see it hanging there, on loan from the National, presumably.

As for 2014, it brought with it the news that the spring and summer Tate Modern blockbuster was due to be Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, covering the late works.

It  seemed to be an astonishing piece of good fortune to have such a major exhibition close at hand so very soon after starting to really appreciate the artist, and it proved to be close to a spiritual experience and one that had its own arty ramification, of which more later.

In the meantime, July’s trip to Paris afforded further Matisse moments.

Port d'Avall (1905)

First, the long-awaited visit to the Orsay saw another of those occasions of walking into a room to find an unexpected pleasure – this time, Luxe, Calme et Volupté from the year before Collioure.

Matisse, having moved from Fauvism to what was known as Divisionism, was already moving on again. But in a small side gallery, with few people around, the opportunity existed to really take in this beautiful canvas, both from distance and then up close to examine the brush work.

Like so much art, reproductions – no matter how good – don’t do justice to the actual work.

The Snail (1953)

The week also produced a number of gems in the Pompidou, and then further works – albeit it from the ‘difficult’ Nice period – at the Orangerie.

But when you’re really getting to grips with the lifelong work of a particular artist, it’s as valuable to see some of the less-successful works as it is to see the iconic pieces.

It was after Paris, though, that I decided to take out a Tate membership – with the initial intention simply being to revisit the cut-outs. Indeed, I returned for a third visit in late August.

And for all that each visit gave me something new – and I felt something like pain knowing that it would not be in London for much longer – it is with forehead-slapping irritation that I only now realise that, in standing so far back from this vast piece, I’d failed to spot the detail, in the top left corner, of the tiny snail cut into the paper.

Then September arrived and it was back once more to Collioure, where the reproductions hung around the village made more sense than before.

Taking a look around the new headquarters of the Fauvism Trail, with its welter of prints of the relevant works by Derain, I suddenly spotted something on the wall behind the desk and, completely ignoring the issue of whether that was out of bounds or not, dashed to see.

It was a print of a long, narrow painting from 1905: Le Port d’Avall, and for some reason, it’s not well known.

Matisse, photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson

It’s important – and this is what saw me hasten past the woman at the desk – because it’s as much a getting-past-Divisionism piece as Luxe, Calme et Volupté.

The Collioure paintings of Matisse that are regularly see are, like Red Beach and View of Collioure, along with the famous views through open windows.

But this was different: this was a link to the previous stage in the artist’s development: the great leap forward was just around the corner.

It was the perfect way to mark the end of a year when I finally got to know Matisse and really appreciate his work.

In her book, Spurling writes: “Discussing luminosity long afterwards with his son-in-law, he [Matisse] said that a picture should have the power to generate light.”

There’s more than one work I’ve seen this past 12 months of which that is most obviously true.

And when you finally ‘get’ that, you understand just why Matisse was so good – and so important in terms of the history of art.

It has been a remarkable year of learning and understanding – and sheer joy.

Literature and an outburst of modern hysteria

I'm faint with the shock of it all

In the middle of all the news, analysis and hand-wringing surrounding the European and local elections emerged a little story that came almost as light relief.

Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird are to be barred from school reading lists by secretary of state for education Michael Gove, it was reported late last week.

I don’t know about the reaction of any mockingbirds, but Twitter was alive with the sound of indignant tweeting.

One could quite easily have reached the conclusion that, deprived of the opportunity to read these works by John Steinbeck and Harper Lee, The Young People will fail in their studies, be put off reading for life and probably start injecting H.

Okay: I invented the last one.

The BBC reported “a Labour spokesperson” as howling that Gove’s “vision is backward-looking and preventing the rich, broad and balanced curriculum we need in our schools if our children are to succeed in the future economy.

Now it’s a lovely idea that what every child studies for a GCSE in English literature will have a direct impact on the national economy, but I’m going to call that one out as bollocks.

Actually, the reports were illustrative of the parlous state of substantial chunks of the UK media, as various organs picked up the story and ran with it uncritically.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, irrespective of Gove’s involvement in anything, some of the attitudes that have been revealed are hysterical – in more ways than one.

There is not a shred of evidence that any book has been banned.

One exam board has chosen to drop the novels from its preliminary syllabus (plus Arthur Miller’s The Crucible), with one anonymous individual from that board reportedly claiming that Gove’s personal dislike of Lee’s book is behind it – a claim that seems, at best, to be of dubious merit, although Gove has form on complaining that he thought ‘too many’ pupils were studying it. But that is not a synonym for hating the book himself.

The new English literature GCSE subject content was published last December and includes at least one play by Bill the Bard, something by the Romantic poets, a 19th Century novel, poetry since 1850 and a 20th Century novel or drama.

So pupils will still be able to study modern British works – the BBC reported that Meera Syal’s 1996 story of a British Punjabi girl in the Midlands, Anita and Me, and Dennis Kelly’s 2007 play about bullying, DNA, are among recent works that have been included in the same exam board’s draft syllabus.

Yet the Sunday Times reported Bethan Marshall, “a senior lecturer in English at King’s College, London”, as saying that it was a syllabus “straight out of the 1940s”, which would make schools “incredibly depressed” when they see it.

This is hyperbolic rubbish.

Frankenstein's monster. 19th Century. Still iconic

My secondary education came more than a generation later than the end of the 1940s and that’s pretty much what we studied for English literature – for our exam at 16.

Indeed, this is another point that seems to have passed over the heads of some.

This is about what pupils study for a particular GSCE – not for every English literature class for the duration of their secondary education up to and including taking that exam.

If Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird are so influential and important to the development of young people, then perhaps they should be taught in the first three years, as preparation for the eventual list of texts that are available to be studied for examination?

To go back to my own experience, in the five years up to O’ level, we studied a huge number of books – and at least two plays a year by Shakespeare (plus the odd one by Sheridan and Shaw).

Now, much as I like to highlight my own uniqueness, I rather doubt that I’m alone in observing, some decades later, that none of that old stuff wrecked my exam chances or put me off reading.

In some cases, I fell in love instantly with the works – in particular, all but one of the Shakespeare that we studied (I only disliked Romeo and Juliet) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

At the time, I disliked Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Brönte and most certainly bloody, sodding Keats.

But then I also disliked William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – every bit a 20th Century novel – while I enjoyed Orwell’s Animal Farm.

As it happens, I have returned to most of these in the years since walking out of school for the last time. In most cases, I have enjoyed what I didn’t at the time and have explored further.

And my more recent literary peregrinations did not begin in isolation, but started as a result of my return to the literature I first encountered in class.

Ode to Autumn aside, however, Keats remains “bloody, sodding Keats”. Thankfully, our teacher also introduced us to a spot of Ted Hughes. And yes, I still read poetry too.

For clarity, I came from a home that was filled with books (mostly theology, non-fiction and light fiction), but have no memories of ever being read to or, once I’d passed beyond reading obviously children’s stories, being encouraged to read anything more demanding than Mary Stewart or Agatha Christie.

Vampires are still popular

So it was a case of mixed messages on the home front, leaving my introduction to literature entirely down to school (as was my introduction to art and music).

My first secondary school, which I attended until after taking my O’ levels, had a very mixed intake in terms of social background. It was a girls’ grammar school (we still had the 11 plus), but it was most certainly not ‘posh’.

My sister, who went to a local secondary school, was introduced to those dreadful ‘old’ books too – and has never ceased to be a reader or to love many older classics.

One of the problems with this sort of debate is that it is inherently patronising to children and young people.

It assumes that they need ‘easy’ texts and that ‘difficult’ – for which, often read ‘old’ – ones will be too hard and will turn them off their studies and even off reading in general.

Such things as computers, television and gaming are cited as being among the reasons that pupils will struggle to concentrate on anything that isn’t obviously ‘accessible’.

As I said: patronising.

Some complaints seem to think that not studying two particular classic 20th Century US texts for an exam will mean that pupils will be deprived – in other words, that they will never read them.

That is an assumption. There is nothing to stop anyone reading those – and other – books, either in their childhood or later. As I suggested earlier, there is nothing to stop a school using those books in earlier literature classes, before GCSE course work begins.

It also falls into the trap of assuming that the prime role of teaching literature to children is to create a life-long love of reading.

Now while hardly unpleasant, that’s far too simplistic an idea.

Few would apply the same idea to, say, the teaching of maths or of geography, so why treat reading differently?

Mind, much of this comes from the same camps that denounce ‘grammar nazis’ and proclaim that children should not be expected to learn to write correctly.

What they do in this – quite apart from revealing an utter lack of understanding of what a ‘nazi’ really was/is – is to reveal, among other things, that they do not comprehend the connection between a solid grammatical grounding in one’s own language properly and the ability to learn another language.

Let’s make it harder for children, shall we?

Every child – not just the ones whose parents can afford to send them to private schools – every child should have the right to the very best possible language education, in order that they have the very best chance to learn to make the most of the English language.

The clash between science and nature is no longer topical

That will not just help them in their future lives, but can be claimed to make a difference to the economic life of the nation as a whole.

And every child – not just the ones whose parents can afford to send them to private schools – every child should have the right to be introduced to the literary heritage of this country (and even Classical culture) and not just the ‘easy’ bits.

It’s the same, incidentally, with music and art – every child should have the right to be introduced to the very best that has been reached in those realms and not just what might be considered ‘easy’.

It’s not the role of education to make things comfortably easy, but to challenge the mind in order for that to develop.  Literature isn’t just about sitting down for a nice bit of a read, but about helping to develop critical skills.

To go down the route of education being ‘easy’ in such a way is not far from seeing education as essentially utilitarian – as merely a preparation for the workplace, which is what you get when the likes of the CBI bleats that school leavers lack “business and customer awareness” skills.

The idea has also been doing the rounds that pre-20th Century literature is also inherently reactionary – ‘misogynist’, was how one Twitter user characterised most of it.

First, as with reading history, it’s a cardinal error to attempt to impose modern mores on the past. You should not, as the Open University beautifully explains it, try to understand the Roman Colosseum through the prism of 21st Century Western attitudes to crime and punishment, religion or even animal rights (as though there’s only one Western attitude to any of those subjects anyway).

Similarly, you don’t try to understand any cultural ‘artifact’ by doing the same thing.

But none of this means that you have to introduce children to classic literature in a way that’s turgid.

Stop being terrified of the bawdiness of Chaucer.

And Shakespeare is full of power and politics, sex and violence.

Examine The Merchant of Venice in terms of anti-semitism and racism – and a proper examination, including the context in which it was written, does not produce the tired argument that is an inherently bigoted play, but rather, subtly the opposite.

Modern enough?

Look at Dickens for insights into 19th Century social issues. Austen was, first and foremost, a satirist – not a writer of rom-coms.

Read Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton if you want to see a representation of women and of class in the 19th Century industrial north.

Just want a damned good yarn? Try Conan Doyle or HG Wells – and with the latter, consider his ideas in terms of 21st Century scientific developments such as GM or cloning.

Now there’s a thought: man tampering with nature. What about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The fear of female sexuality and modernity? Try Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Indeed, many of the above remain iconic figures on both the printed page and in film. With the latter, there comes the suggested opportunity to discuss changing attitudes toward women – and if you wanted, you could explore that by comparing Stoker’s tale with modern incarnations of vampires, including Selene in the Underworld film series.

19th Century English literature should not be seen as some sort of holy canon, but neither should it be damned and ignored, any more than anything from later – or earlier – or treated as though it were somehow so utterly out of date that is has no connection to human lives and experience in the 21st century.

Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with children reading To Kill a Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men, (I loved being introduced to Arthur Miller at A’ level), but I have no problem with them being introduced to older texts either.

The idea that seems to be floating around that somehow they’ll be damaged if they cannot study for examination the former novels, and damaged if they have to study for examination anything from before 1900, is patronising nonsense that does absolutely nothing to promote the best possible educational opportunities for every child.

And in protestations about ‘old’ literature and ‘accessibility’, the argument perversely turns out to be similar to Rupert Murdoch’s avowed anti-elitism. Do we need to detail how that has been used as an excuse to dumb down media – including but not limited to news media – and its impact on the UK’s public discourse?

If you need a reminder, then consider current attempts by the Times – once the paper of record – to smear Labour leader Ed Miliband because he looks a bit “weird”.

Another point: the clue is in the title – English literature. If you want to create a different course that covers global literature, then do so.

Literature in translation doesn’t count – although students of foreign languages will likely read relevant literature during their courses – so why should literature from the US?

After all, does anyone whine about a perceived lack of opportunity for pupils studying English literature to read, say, works by the rather excellent Australian author, Peter Carey?

And for brooding romance, Jane Eyre

Setting all that aside, is social mobility helped or increased by making education ‘easy’.

Ask yourself where the political leaders from the traditional working class are these days.

Is their absence down, in part, to the demise of the grammar schools that provided opportunities to gain the tools that enabled social mobility – including those that would and will always be available to those who have the fortune to be born to wealthy families.

Now this is not an argument that grammar schools are, per se, the ‘answer’. But the current situation is quite clearly not working – see that question about our politicians, and plenty of research that reveals social mobility to be reducing.

There are myriad reasons to criticise and damn Gove – his obsessive love of free schools and his actual record of trying to micromanage the curriculum (including some of his pronouncements on the teaching of history) are just two – but this non-issue really has the hallmarks of a dose of 19th century hysteria.

And caught in the middle, as always, are young people, being used – yet again – as a convenient political and ideological football.

So go on – won’t somebody actually think of the children for a change?