Robert Sharp

Barrister

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Sam Leith's 'Fail' Win

2 April 2010 / / 0 Comments

I do like Sam Leith’s Standard column on a Monday evening. If a columnist manages to write something that chimes with your own views often enough, then when he challenges you he is more likely to persuade.
His column on ‘Broken Britain’ is one such example. He outlines why he thinks the phrase is more than a cliche. The final line has a twenty-first century feel:

Now a 15-year-old boy lies dead. Child fail, parent fail, police fail, passer-by fail. “Broken” does just about cover it.

Note the use of the word ‘fail’ as a sort of all encompassing noun. Rather than say “failed” (which begs the question, in which precise activity did they not succeed?) a ‘fail’ implies something more fundamental, a negation of one’s telos. it isn’t just setting ourselves a task and then not succeeding. Its a 180 degree reversal of the goal.
This concept is well understood by anyone who spends time on the Internet: there is a Fail Blog dedicated to funny examples, and it’s a staple of hashtagging (#O2fail, or #BCAfail, say). Nevertheless, it is interesting to see it in a newspaper, used ‘properly’ by the writer to conveys both an astonishment and the events described, but also the scale of the tragedy and it’s wider implications.

Simon Singh's Fair Comment

2 April 2010 / / 1 Comment

Yesterday, Simon Singh won an important appeal in the libel action he is defending against the British Chiropractic Association. Singh is being sued after writing that the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments” for which there is “not a jot of evidence” that they are effective. In yesterday’s ruling, a distinguished panel of judges declared that Singh’s article should be taken as a “statement of opinion, and one backed by reasons”. This opens the door for Singh to mount a “fair comment” defence (which they prefer to call “honest opinion” although that isn’t the official legal terminology). If the BCA pursue the case further it is highly likely they will lose.
The judgement is available as a PDF and was hailed by commentators as not only an intelligent judgement, but a somewhat literary one too. It quotes Milton, Orwell and Galileo along the way.
Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship was the quickest of the journalists covering this issue to file a report on the outcome, and he has a bit more detail. I contented myself with taking some photos of the press conference, at which Singh and others gave their reactions.

[My photos on the PEN Flickr stream really are becoming a one-stop-shop for all your ‘close-ups of people talking at a public event’ needs.]
Also present at the press conference was the blogger Jack of Kent, who is the one-stop-shop for commentary on the BCA vs Singh issue (Simon says that its the site even he visits, when he wants to know what’s going on with his own case…). ‘Jack’ pointed out that the BCA had chosen to sue in order to protect and enhance its reputation, and discredit Simon Singh along the way. In fact, the reverse has happened. The case has caused much more damage, and much more negative publicity, than the original offending article. A Streisand Effect writ large.

Judging a Book by its Cover

1 April 2010 / / 0 Comments

An event report I wrote for the English PEN website.

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.


I’ll admit, I judged this event by its cover.
I assumed that an discussion titled ‘Judging a book by its cover’ would be about book jacket design, rich and fertile ground for ideas on culture and mass marketing.  I expected to hear bookseller Rick Gekoski wax about the beauty of a hardback first edition, and hear Joanna Prior explain how Penguin’s mass market paperbacks have become an iconic design in themselves.  I expected to hear how the large publishers are stifling creativity by homogenising the book design process.
And in fact, I did hear about all those things. However, I expected them to be within a discussion that was essentially about aesthetics. I did not expect to be faced, instead, with a more philosophical question: what is a book? Is it the paper, the cover and the binding? Or is it the words on the page? Continue reading

Speech to the Society of Young Publishers

29 March 2010 / / 3 Comments

A friend and collaborator just e-mailed to say he enjoyed my use of Hanif Kureishi’s formulation on multiculturalism, in my remarks at Goldsmiths College:

‘Multiculturalism’, he says, ‘is the idea that one might be changed by other ideas’. It is a movement based on the dialogic exchange of ideas, even traditions, based on ‘the idea that purity is incestuous’.

I have used it in another speech recently, to the Society of Young Publishers annual conference, in Oxford last December.  In the interests of posting something new to the blog on a Monday morning, here is the speech I wrote.  It is not necessarily the one that I actually gave, but until Jon S uploads a video of the proceedings, I’m safe. The discussion was on ‘The Responsibility to Publish’, and I shared the panel with Chris Brazier, Co-Editor at the New Internationalist, Sarah Totterdell, Head of Oxfam’s publications department, and Alan Samson from Orion Books.

The View from the Panel

The View from the Panel. Photo by yrstrly.


On being asked to speak at this event, I was terrified that I was going to end up speaking in tautologies. If you’re at the Society of Young Publishers, then you’re already speaking to a group of people who are, by definition, of the belief that publishing is a civic good, that they are part of civil society.
So, I want to say more. Let’s go the whole hog.  My first thought is this: That of The Arts, it is literature and publishing, that has by far the greatest impact on politics. Continue reading

Elsewhere, on Offence

27 March 2010 / / 0 Comments

In The Independent, Michael Coveney discusses theatre that offends, and what to do about it. There is a quote from yrstrly too:

Freedom of speech carries with it a freedom to insult; otherwise, as Tom Stoppard says, it’s not a freedom worth having. Bhatti’s first play was not based on any real-life case history, but offered as an extreme allegory of hypocrisy. And as a Sikh herself, who is she to be denied that privilege?
It says much about the state we’re in that her new play comes with explicit support from campaign groups Index on Censorship, English PEN and Free World. Robert Sharp of PEN says that the Sikhs who took exception to Behzti (and many prominent Sikhs didn’t) should remember that when you are satirised or criticised, then you’re relevant, you’ve arrived. But is there any limit to the offence a theatrical play can cause, or should there be?
“None at all,” says Sharp, “except perhaps from a clear incitement to violence. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are sister rights. There is neither in China or Iran. People here should respond to things they don’t like by writing reviews, or writing their own plays.”

Both of the readers of this blog will note the provenance of the sound-bites offered. The bit about satire of minority faiths as a badge of relevance was first mooted in 2005; Putting limits on free speech in cases of incitement was noted last month; and my thoughts on counter-speech and responding through plays and reviews was the subject of a Comment is Free piece last year.  Its a long term project, but you can see how the blog-as-scrapbook model is beginning to pay off.

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