Economics and the rise of extremism

The Greeks take on neo-liberalism

The day after a political earthquake in Greece might not seem the most obvious day to discuss the rise of Islamic extremism, but the two are far more closely linked than might appear obvious at first.

Let’s start, though, with the latter.

It’s a popular (and left-of-centre populist) analysis to suggest that Western foreign policy – in particular, the imperialist adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing refusal of many Western nations to even politely criticise the behaviour of the state of Israel toward the Palestinian people – are the reasons for the rise of Islamic extremism.

But while they can be seen as contributory factors – they’ve certainly fanned the flames of the problem – it’s simplistic to suggest that they are the sole or even main causes.

To start with, it’s worth noting that Al-Qaeda was formed sometime between 1988-89 and had been active well before the 9/11 attacks on the US.

And it’s a generally-accepted fact that the Taliban grew out of the proxy Cold War struggle in Afghanistan between the Soviet Union and the West.

The Palestinian situation was well established by 9/11, but whether of not one believes that the invasion of Iraq in particular was an own goal in terms of handing Osama bin Laden a massive recruitment boost, it’s clear that the invasion did not begin the process.

There are a number of analyses that place the beginning of the rise of what we call Islamic fundamentalism at the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Film footage from Nasser’s funeral in Cairo shows no mass of niqabs or even hajibs, so it’s fair to say that the use of these have grown in the years since – one visible sign of the growth of increased religious observance and of increased religious conservatism.

Fast forward to Iran in 1979, and we see religious bods taking power and benefiting from the help they received from the secular opposition – which they subsequently crushed.

Now take things forward considerably. The ‘Arab Spring’ was not triggered by issues of religion.

It began in issues of economics: ‘I don’t have a job’, ‘I have sod all pay’.

The Egyptian government reacted by raising the minimum wage.

Victory!

Or perhaps not. Because Egypt had signed up to trade treaties that allowed corporates to sue the country if it did something that the said corporates didn’t like.

In this case, it was Veolia doing the legal stuff.

Now this is important: the clause in a trade treaty that Egypt had signed is incredibly similar to that being currently negotiated by the EU and the US. To be accurate, because of campaigning, that clause Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) has been ‘suspended’ in the treaty negotiation.

Do not even begin to pretend that it is ‘over’.

This is an illustration of how national governments are giving in and handing power to corporates.

How would anyone who believes in democracy want to support such things?

But let’s go back.

There is an increasing prevalence of people joining jihad from non-Muslim backgrounds and not just from Europe, but from the EU too – and from the likes of the US.

I am going to suggest that the core, key, underlying issue is not Islam ... but that the real issue is the economic philosophy that being foisted upon the majority by the minority.

‘Trickle down’ doesn’t work – it never has.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Paris or Cairo, London or Athens: the big – the really big question – is about how all of us create a world that is fairer for all of us.

Disillusion presents a wonderful opportunity for theocrats and would-be theocrats to offer something different – not least when the mainstream political discourse has apparently let them down. And the same is true of the far right.

But this is not simply a West v East situation, as Greece shows us.

Although there are other factors, the most important is an economic one.

The Greeks have chosen to use the ballot box to challenge why they should pay the price of neo-liberalism. At least some of the actions of Islamic extremists are almost certainly triggered by the same polices.

While there are particular issues historically with Greece (the scale of tax avoidance for one), the country also suffered at the hands of the politicians who were so desperate to join the euro, and the bankers – Goldman Sachs – who diddled the country's books to enable it to be able to meet the criteria for entry.

Isn't it a wonder that nobody has done or is doing jail time for this?

But then again, austerity is being foisted on countless countries, with millions suffering, while the bankers who caused the global financial crisis of 2008 remain at liberty, well off and without having to have made any form of restitution.

As big bonuses and continuing fines for wrongdoing show, banks continue to go about their business the way they did beforehand.

We understand the roots of fascism and how and what fascists take advantage of. The theocrats and the Islamic extremists are little different.

And while trying to avoid this economic context to discussing the rise of Islamic extremism is simply crass, it's easy enough to see why many in the political establishment would be reluctant to do so.

Why the French are more mature than we are

Probably not the man himself.

OMG! There’s a bloke – in another country – and he’s had an affair! Hold the front page!

I always wanted to be able to yell that. Well, the ‘front page’ bit, at any rate. And 20 years ago next month, I had the chance.

I was a duty chief sub for a national daily newspaper and shortly before we went to bed that night, the news chugged through that Stephen Milligan, the Conservative MP for Eastleigh had been found dead in somewhat compromising circumstances.

It seemed that he had accidentally killed himself during a spot of autoerotic asphyxiation, wearing only stockings and suspenders, with a bin bag over his head, an orange segment in his mouth and an electrical cord around his neck.

“Hold the front page!” I yelled to our small but perfectly formed team – not that we knew all these details at the time.

Now usually, I’d be the first in line to say that, beyond the man’s death, there was no public interest aspect in the details of that death being so widely revealed and discussed.

However, what changed this was that the story came at a time when John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign was in full swing, and rather seemed to conflict with such a stated governmental aim.

If only we’d known then what we know now about Major and Edwina. Who’d a thunk that, eh?

Anyway, that was the context. In other words, there was a public interest angle.

Tim Yeo, who was a junior minister in Major’s government at around the same time, stood up at one autumn Conservative Party conference and denounced single mothers as the cause of every problem in the country.

A couple of months later, he was revealed to be having an affair with a single woman who was pregnant by him.

In other words, it was an approach of: ‘Do as I say, not as I do’.

As such, there was a legitimate public interest angle to publishing the story.

Of course, there are plenty of circumstances in the UK where there is absolutely no public interest for publication of a salacious story. Some of the public being interested doesn’t count.

The News of the World had to try to fabricate a public interest angle in order to justify the stories about Max Mosely, for instance. It didn’t work, but the damage had already been done – and papers sold.

We seem to have a peculiar attitude in the UK – and not only the unholy combination of prurience and prudery that sees people lap up salacious stories and then justify it to themselves by being judgmental about the very thing that they’ve just been entertained by reading.

There’s also a widespread series of weird attitudes toward privacy, ranging from the spectacularly crass ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide’ to ones whereby anyone in public life has no right to a private life, to a position whereby you lose privacy incrementally dependent on how much you earn.

Then there are spurious arguments such as those about Ryan Giggs: ‘Well, he’s a role model’.

Who said so – did he describe himself as a role model; or others? Should he be penalised for what others say about him?

If he declared himself a role model, then perhaps you do have a public interest justification for publishing details of how he shagged a few women – although it also remains to be seen why we, as a whole, remain so utterly obsessed with monogamy and seem to experience a collective fit if anyone else’s life experience doesn’t actually fit this subjective – and some would say unrealistic – ethical stance.

The French are different.

Buy a newspaper on the other side of the Channel and it will not be full of stories about who shagged who, who fell out of a nightclub at 4am and so forth.

So it was something of a surprise to see that a gossip magazine had decided to publish the ‘news’ that President François Hollande had been having an affair.

Outside of the ‘yuck: who’d do it with him?’ questions – do some people really not get the sexual allure of power? – it seems that what has subsequently upset parts of the British press is that the French have not made more of it.

After all, how dare they not be as infantile about sexual relationships involving consenting adults as we appear to be, in general.

The biggest concern in much of France seems to be that the president was riding pillion on a scooter.

The allegations about the affair are not new, but publishing photographs of – allegedly – the couple is and certainly breaks the country’s culture of the private lives of politicians remaining, err, private.

The ‘other woman’, Julie Gayet, is set to sue Closer for invasion of privacy.

Good luck to her.

What happens between consenting adults is nobody else’s business – unless there is a genuine public interest angle, as illustrated above.

In the case of a former French president, François Mitterrand, the public were not worried about him having an affair – only whether or not he used public money for private business.

The same matters are the only relevant ones in the case of Hollande.

So, dear France – please do not go down the route of commoditising people’s private lives for the financial benefit of a few.

And for anyone who really thinks that they have a right to know who is shagging who, just because it's sex or because of their own set of values – grow up.

Ich bin eine Europäerin

With one of those European devils.

It could hardly have seemed like more apt timing: back from a trip to the Continent and straight into the joys of local elections and their campaigns.

This year, much is being made of the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the threat that it poses, in particular, to Conservative seats.

UKIP, which doesn’t have a single MP, is getting rather more than its fair share of media coverage: one senses certain agendas among newspaper proprietors.

Much has been made, in recent months, of the nuttier elements within its ranks, including among candidates.

But setting that aside, what is factual is that the party is deeply Europhobic and that this plays to a percentage of the population – not least from the Conservative right, which has been anti-Europe for years (conveniently forgetting that it was St Margaret of Grantham herself who signed the Maastricht Treaty and the Single European Act).

Europe has become such a divisive issue for the Tory Party that it’s practically reached the status of a tradition, but this could be one of those occasions where a revolt by grassroots activists and supporters actually makes itself felt. Whether they’d do the same at a general election is entirely a different matter.

Like so much of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of Europe, the arguments can hardly be dignified with that term.

Take this little anecdote by way of an example.

I was on the phone with my parents the other day and my father – not for the first time – announced that he was voting UKIP out of disgust at the Eton boys currently running the country.

I pointed out that UKIP leader Nigel Farage is another former public schoolboy, but that didn’t seem to carry quite the same weight.

“At least he’d get us out of Europe,” huffed my father.

I pointed out that many people who are opposed to the EU are so because they want to reduce the rights of workers to below those of EU levels. My father – from very humble working-class stock himself – purports to have sympathy on such matters, so it seemed a coherent point to make, and I thought that it would, at the very least, make him pause.

He did pause.

And then: “We didn’t win the war to be ruled over by the Germans!” he exploded.

Facepalm moment.

Europe has become the big bugbear; the scapegoat for everything that certain people see as wrong with this country.

But the problem is not so much the political disaffection, as something far wider - the conflation of 'Europe' and the political institution(s) of the EU.

Let's be clear: there are many faults with the EU, and I am not some uncritical supporter: quite the contrary. Although it also needs to be stated clearly that the EU is NOT the reason that we, as a country, are still not showing economic growth.

You can, entirely rationally, be a Europhile and an opponent of political union. But there exists this extraordinary way in which Europhobes are not EUphobes, but have turned the political questions and issues into a phobia about the continent as a whole, starting from the brazen untruth that 'we are not Europeans'.

A little personal background here may be helpful for the sake of context.

I grew up in a home where patriotism was paraded as a virtue, albeit no actual thought or reason behind it, and all other nations (or at least the 'important' ones) had derogatory nicknames.

My father was hardly best impressed when I started grammar school and was expected to learn French – Latin was okay, though. We suffered a dinner table rant the following year when I had to start German.

For many years, while I didn't feel the same belligerent intolerance, I had no desire to visit 'Europe': the list of places that I wanted to travel to was pretty much limited to the US and one or two other countries that spoke English.

So against that home background, it can hardly be surprising that I struggled with languages at school: I felt no reason for them.

It was only in 1998, on a first long weekend trip to northern Europe (Amsterdam) that this changed. Suddenly, I could see both difference and similarity. And the over-arching sensation of feeling at home.

Whenever I go back, that feeling is the same. France too. Germany rather obviously so, being more obviously northern European – although my 'discovery' of Germany and German culture, and my realisation that I love it, that I am a Germanophile, still came as something of a shock.

It shouldn't have, though. Since 'discovering' classical music in the third year at school, I had been worshiping at the altar of Beethoven (preferably played by the Berlin Phil, conduced by Herbert von Karajan), even while pretty much everyone else (or so it seemed) was putting safety pins through their noses.

My father's screaming, ranting rages at the television whenever England were playing West Germany (as it was then) left me not simply teary with the tension of it all, but secretly nursing a hope that the dreaded Krauts would win.

In the meantime, my mother, being in charge of Christmas presents, was delighted to buy me classical albums, even though she herself has rather more limited tastes.

Indeed, the household record collection, partly stored in a massive radiogram, was less culture-vulture and more aspirational, pretentious middle class, comprising vast amounts of Readers' Digest boxed sets of 'best of' classical tunes that were then barely (if ever) actually listened to.

But this is the background against which 'Europe' was such a shock.

The thing is, it seems, that with the UK, we try so desperately to pretend that we are not a part of Europe; that this sceptered isle somehow sits in splendid isolation from that continent that has, so often, erupted in trouble.

And yet once you begin to read the history, we have always been there – including in the trouble.

The Thirty Years War, for instance – which was not a 'German war', but a European one – saw men from these islands learn their soldiering and then bring it home to participate in the English civil wars and in Ireland.

We traded with the rest of the continent for centuries: as I've mentioned before, there were Hanseatic outposts here, but we have all but forgotten them and, with them, the League itself.

We 'forget' the European nature of the Armada, as though it arose in isolation. We forget, even, the foreign influx of royals – even when we gather around our own tannenbaums.

We forget that, after Waterloo, Wellington's dispatches homes made a point of stressing the vital role in victory that had been played by the Prussians under Blücher (and we imagine that all Wellington’s troops were English/British).

We forget the cultural links. We forget the linguistic links – English is, after all, a Germanic language. We forget the centuries of migratory movement between this island nation of ours and the rest of Europe.

You could be forgiven, indeed, for imagining that we are not part of the continent of Europe at all. Somehow, we manage to sit apart from any continent – we’re clearly not African or Antarctican, after all.

And that is a grave misrepresentation of fact; a massive delusion.

We are a European family. Like any other family, there are differences. There are bad days and good ones.

But frankly, there is no contradiction in saying, as I do, that I am both English – and a European.

And there is point where, if you look at yourself only in the mirror, and not within the wider context of society, you only see a part of yourself and not the whole.

The same is true of any nation. No country on this earth sits alone, in splendid isolation. Not even the global powerhouses of the US or China.

You don’t have to like any form of the idea of Europe – let alone the political one. You don’t have to feel European. But that does not change the facts.

And the sooner that we learn and understand that, the better. And if you still want to vote for UKIP – well fine. But stop pretending what it is that you're voting for – or, more to the point, against.

A British food renaissance? Think again

Bad Food Britain by Joanna Blythman

It’s not often that a book leaves me confused as to whether to bang my head against a brick wall or pull my hair out. Or both. At the same time.

But Bad Food Britain is exactly that sort of a book.

Joanna Blythman’s 2006 polemic against the state of the nation’s food is precisely that: a polemic.

But there's a place for polemic and, even when you half know what to expect, she has the power to shock.

Just take a couple of stats.

By the time of working on this book, Britons were eating 51% of all the crisps and snacks consumed on the entire continent of Europe.

That’s around 6,000 million packets of crisps a year – and 4,400 million packets of other snacks.

By 2005, we were eating more ready meals than the rest of the continent of Europe put together.

Sales of dining tables are down – because a declining number of people think it’s worth having somewhere to sit down properly and eat.

There are plenty of stories that will leave the reader rolling their eyes, from the environmental health officers who prefer (and sometimes insist) on plastic chopping boards even when wooden ones have been shown scientifically to have a natural ‘anti-bacterial’ quality that stops bacteria multiplying where the plastic one don't – and have quite the opposite effect.

There is the developer who built houses for holidaymakers from abroad who wanted to self cater – and found themselves in trouble because they’d only put a microwave in the kitchens, and visitors from abroad expected proper cooking equipment.

There are stories about the state of British hospital food and of malnourished patients admitted to a health system that, perversely, does not see food as a valuable part of health care.

And, of course, there is the tortured question of school meals.

Blythman makes a superb observation on the latter, where the system is obsessed with choice. Would primary school children be expected to choose which lessons they were going to do or not?

Of course not. In which case, why the obsessive belief that they should be able to choose what they have for their school lunch?

Even if you’re not particularly worried about what other adults fuel themselves with, then what is being fed to children, particularly in schools, where the idea should be that their welfare is at the top of the agenda, must be ethically criminal at the very least.

And it is in total contradiction to pretty much any country other than our own and the US.

Yes, there clearly needs to be more parental responsibility shown too, but assuming you cannot find a quick-fix way to make or 'nudge' (a current favourite government idea) parents into feeding children better – and that's also assuming they actually have the skills to do so – then schools are an environment where you could at least hope to make a positive impact.

And that's not just in terms of what the children are given to eat at lunchtime – but also in terms of what they're taught. The emergence of 'food technology' as the replacement for the old 'domestic science' is one that apparently seeks to educate children about industrial processes.

'How does a factory make a muffin?' is one sort of question that's mentioned. As a teacher put it: 'why not just teach them to cook one?'

As with the equally excellent Shopped: The shocking power of Britain's supermarkets, Blythman provides an absolute mass of evidence to show that, far from being some sort of new foodie paradise – as per the media's defensive pretense – Britain’s food culture is a mess. And a deeply unhealthy one.

She also pokes a stick into the nest of radical feminism, from within which some have claimed that real cooking is part of the tyranny against women and convenience food is liberation.

And she doesn't forget the rent-a-quote populists like Julie Birchill, who rail against any negative comment on fast/junk food as class-based snobbery.

At the heart of all this is what can only be described, at best, as an ambivalent national attitude toward food.

In the UK, food is not something to be really enjoyed and cherished, with time spent on it considered one of life’s great investments, but as fuel and an inconvenience that can best be ‘solved’ by an increasing reliance on so-called convenience foods, snacking and fast food.

It is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon puritanism that still, somehow, holds sway. It's no coincidence, for instance, that in popular terms, we use the love of food as something to hold up about all that is wrong with our age-old enemy, the French.

Blythman can only find one other country where the same attitude – and the same health problems – are so dominant: the US. Which should tell us something.

And behind all this is a food industry that is perfectly happy for this situation to continue; an industry that behaves disingenuously and with no concern or sense of responsibility for anything beyond profits.

If there is a problem with this book, it’s that it doesn’t really suggest how to combat this.

But if Blythman makes a few people look at and change their own habits, then perhaps that is entirely enough of a positive development.

Do read and do inwardly digest – and the latter will be easier than with much of what is passed off as food in this country these days.

A cross to bear

The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín, brought up a Catholic in Ireland, set out in this 1994 book to understand something of his own background. Having grown up in a family where relatives went on pilgrimages – including his terminally ill father to Lourdes when he was in his early teens – he has long ceased believing in the central tenets of Catholicism, but remains fascinated by the history of the church that he was baptised into and by people's links with it.

But as Tóibín discovers on his travels around Europe, Catholicism means different things to different people in different places.

In Seville, for instance, where Holy Week sees dozens of marches around the city with statues of the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary, he discovers that many of the men who volunteer to carry the statues have no personal religion and do not even attend Mass during the rest of the year. For them, the marches are to do with local tradition and their cultural heritage.

But not all that Tóibín observes is like this. Medjugorje – a rocky, barren outcrop of Croatia – is the home to a shrine where six teenagers claim to have seen apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1981. They say that the Virgin has blue eyes and speaks Croation. And they continued to have apparitions and receive messages from her.

Tóibín, who visited during the Balkans conflict, never doubts the sincerity of the six – or of the pilgrims who have radically changed Medjugorie – but what he clearly finds discomforting is the link between Croation Catholicism and a nationalism that remains unapologetic for being a Nazi client state, for persecuting and exterminating Serbs (Orthodox Christians) and even retaining much of the symbolism etc of that era (the national football team's badge and shirts are based on the badge that was worn by Croation Nazis).

In Poland, Tóibín is uncomfortable at the presence, so near to the Auschwitz concentration camp, of a Catholic convent, given that country's long history of anti-Semitism and since the majority of those who were killed there were Jewish. Is it an appropriate place? It's an interesting question at a time when the issue of whether a mosque should be built a couple of blocks from the site in New York of the World Trade Towers that were attacked on 9/11 is causing such discussion.

In Slovenia, it is suggested that perhaps the reason that Croat and Polish Catholicism have become so intertwined with extreme nationalism, while Slovenian Catholicism has not, is that the latter country experienced the Reformation and rationalism.

Elsewhere on his travels, Tóibín is astonished to discover that there are no Scottish Catholic writers of note in that country – while his visit to Glasgow also reveals both sides of the sectarian divide spouting lies/myths about their neighbours or their own perceived victimhood.

In London, he finds then MP and Catholic convert Anne Widdicombe to be particularly English in her attitude and faith (she hadn't converted for "the smells or the bells or the saints", for instance), while he sees, in the 5 November celebrations in Lewes – known for their continuing anti-popery (but now apparently down to one, unnoticed banner) – nothing other than displays for the heritage industry, in a country that has lost any interest in such parts of its history.

In one chapter, which initially seems at odds with the rest, Tóibín describes his experiences as an adult at a retreat where people had gone to work through difficult issues with a psychiatrist who had developed new techniques for bringing out repressed memories. In the author's case, these were to do with the death of his father when he was 14. The retreat was not religious, but at the end of his own experiences, finally letting out the grief that had been bottled up for decades, Tóibín found himself wanting – needing – to make the sign of the cross in the air as a way of dealing with, of expressing that grief, and of bidding farewell to his father.

The non-believer needed the rituals of his childhood; the rituals that bored him as a child (and leave him feeling similarly blank when he experiences masses across Europe, including in St Peter's in Rome) as a way of dealing with his own life. The book itself, then, is partly an extension of that: an excavation of memory. And he went on to further explore his father's death in the 1999 novel, The Blackwater Lightship.

It is a fascinating book, one that in places is very funny and also one that, in places, is deeply disquieting.

Tóibín is an excellent writer of both fiction and non-fiction. That was partly why I read it. But also too, I have been intrigued by European Catholicism since an Easter visit to Perpignan some four years ago when we witnessed the sanche on Good Friday: the 'march of the penitents', the like of which is described in this book.

But I also read it because it seemed a natural step after Wolf Hall, with that book's fictionalised examination of the English Reformation.

Catholicism, I think, has understood human nature far more than Protestantism: it has catered for a need for drama and emotion more; the ritual of confession seems to comprehend more and provide for human 'failings' in a way that a personal relationship with God, with no intercessors, cannot. Catholicism can be seen as a polytheistic religion rather and a monotheistic one – with its pantheon of saints and a goddess in Mary.

Protestantism is less poetic, more serious. 'The Protestant Work Ethic', for goodness sake. As someone tells the author in Glasgow, you want the Calvinist as your accountant, while the Catholic will be the romantic, the dreamer. Could a Protestant really have created the word – and the concept – of Utopia, even if Thomas More's book was light years removed from his own attitudes and behaviour?

Yet as Tóibín puts it: "Protestants one Catholics nil" on the music front, after hearing a Bach's St John's Passion in a Protestant church in Regensburg one Good Friday. Later, he feels disappointment that none of the great classical settings are used for the service at St Peter's: it's the same rather drab and uninspiring music as at home in the Enniscorthy cathedral of his childhood. Yay! We can create great art too.

What is extraordinary is how much one's own religious heritage clings, as Tóibín found as he dealt with the loss of his father. Wolf Hall makes quite clear the issues of the democratisation of religion – of thought – that were part of the Reformation across Europe, and a direct result of the invention of the printing press. But I cannot help wondering why – apart from it being interesting in an anthropological and historical sense – religion still seems so important to me, even though, like Tóibín, I no longer have the actual beliefs. Those simply drifted away from my shoulders a decade ago, without a shred of pain or any sense of loss.

Has anything else from my childhood left such an imprint, to the effect that even now, I seem to feel a need to point out the theological fallacies of Catholicism? That has no relevance to the other, current issue, of religion in general and the public sphere.

Perhaps it's simply inherited hatreds? But then why do I not have the same attitudes as my parents – and my father in particular – other, related things, such as Ireland and Celtic FC?

My sympathies, since 'O' Level history taught me the phrase, "too little, too late", have always been with the Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland.

In that peculiar way that so many English football fans also have a Scottish team that they sympathise with (it doesn't work the other way around!), my father has always considered Rangers – one half of the passionate football rivalry in Glasgow – to be infinitely superior, as they are Protestant. I've long sympathised with Celtic: the club might be Catholic, but it dumped sectarianism (if indeed it ever had it) decades ago.

Why is it that religion exerts such a pull on us; leaves such marks on us, even when we think that we have "put away childish things"? It's not difficult to understand why Richard Dawkins rails against such a mark being put on a child: no child is described as 'a socialist child' or 'a Conservative child'. Whatever one's parents' political beliefs, everyone accepts that you'll choose your own later. But religion is different: religion can be used to label an infant from birth.

Yet my father, oddly, always got on better with the local parish priest than he ever did with assorted Anglican clerics. Partly, I imagine, because they shared a love of whisky. Perhaps he felt an empathy on screwed-up ideas of sex. Sometimes, it was if his bigotry was merely for show.

The memories don't fit together into a coherent picture. And there's no box to see what it should look like.

But perhaps that's it. Religion as part of a rootedness – part of a picture of home and family and community. Not a singular thing, but merely one aspect, reflecting and part of a range of others, that present a whole, as the men in Seville appear to feel.

There are no roots or much of a family in my background. Perhaps that is why religion has loomed so large and still puzzles.

But Tóibín's book has perhaps offered some understanding of what the picture on the box might look like.