Stephen Fry's Blog

40 years on, when afar and asunder

Parted are those who are with us today

When you look back and forgetfully wonder

What you were like in your work and your play.

Here I am, shyly putting my toe into the waters of Substack. I thought I might as well begin my time here by acknowledging an anniversary and trying to recreate for those readers who are younger than me (statistically speaking, that will be the great majority of you) something of the atmosphere, manners, and modes of that time.

Read the rest on Substack

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Follow doomed Persephone into the dark and lonely realm of the Underworld.

We shiver in fear when Pandora opens her jar of evil torments and watch with joy as the legendary love affair between Eros and Psyche unfolds.

Mythos Illustrated captures these extraordinary myths for our modern age in stunning colour – in all their dazzling and deeply human relevance.

UK Release 19th October 2023

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 2928377218898
Number of pages: 464
Weight: 1200 g
Dimensions: 252 x 192 x 30 mm

The post Mythos – The Illustrated Story appeared first on Official site of Stephen Fry.

The siege of Troy is perhaps the most well-known tale in Western literature. Retold by Stephen Fry this autumn in all its passion and tragedy, Troy will be the third volume of his unforgettable and definitive series, following on from the bestselling Mythos and Heroes.

In Troy, Stephen Fry takes the reader into the heart of a story both mythical and grounded in history. It is Zeus, king of the gods, who triggers war when he asks the Trojan prince Paris to judge the fairest goddess of them all. Aphrodite bribes Paris with the hand of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of the Greeks.

A terrible, brutal war ensues, and the stage is set for the oldest and greatest story ever told.

‘The tale of Troy is the Big Bang of story-telling. Every story that came afterwards contains fragments of its incredible mixture of drama, tension, romance, betrayal, cunning, magic, violence, comedy, revenge, wonder, beauty, sacrifice, sorrow and triumph. The original epic, and still the best. I’ve loved it since I first heard about the matchless Helen of Troy, the noble Hector, the glorious Achilles and the cunning Odysseus. Retelling the story, getting to know the personalities, twists and divine interventions and immersing myself in the wildly exciting blend of myth, legend and real history has been one of the most completely enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had. I hope you get as much pleasure from reading it.’

x Stephen Fry

This title will be released on the 29th October 2020 in hardback, audiobook and eBook

The post TROY – Best Seller appeared first on Official site of Stephen Fry.

The siege of Troy is perhaps the most well-known tale in Western literature. Retold by Stephen Fry this autumn in all its passion and tragedy, Troy will be the third volume of his unforgettable and definitive series, following on from the bestselling Mythos and Heroes.

In Troy, Stephen Fry takes the reader into the heart of a story both mythical and grounded in history. It is Zeus, king of the gods, who triggers war when he asks the Trojan prince Paris to judge the fairest goddess of them all. Aphrodite bribes Paris with the hand of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of the Greeks.

A terrible, brutal war ensues, and the stage is set for the oldest and greatest story ever told.

‘The tale of Troy is the Big Bang of story-telling. Every story that came afterwards contains fragments of its incredible mixture of drama, tension, romance, betrayal, cunning, magic, violence, comedy, revenge, wonder, beauty, sacrifice, sorrow and triumph. The original epic, and still the best. I’ve loved it since I first heard about the matchless Helen of Troy, the noble Hector, the glorious Achilles and the cunning Odysseus. Retelling the story, getting to know the personalities, twists and divine interventions and immersing myself in the wildly exciting blend of myth, legend and real history has been one of the most completely enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had. I hope you get as much pleasure from reading it.’

x Stephen Fry

This title will be released on the 29th October 2020 in hardback, audiobook and eBook

The post TROY – Available from the 29th October 2020 appeared first on Official site of Stephen Fry.

The siege of Troy is perhaps the most well-known tale in Western literature. Retold by Stephen Fry this autumn in all its passion and tragedy, Troy will be the third volume of his unforgettable and definitive series, following on from the bestselling Mythos and Heroes.

In Troy, Stephen Fry takes the reader into the heart of a story both mythical and grounded in history. It is Zeus, king of the gods, who triggers war when he asks the Trojan prince Paris to judge the fairest goddess of them all. Aphrodite bribes Paris with the hand of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of the Greeks.

A terrible, brutal war ensues, and the stage is set for the oldest and greatest story ever told.

‘The tale of Troy is the Big Bang of story-telling. Every story that came afterwards contains fragments of its incredible mixture of drama, tension, romance, betrayal, cunning, magic, violence, comedy, revenge, wonder, beauty, sacrifice, sorrow and triumph. The original epic, and still the best. I’ve loved it since I first heard about the matchless Helen of Troy, the noble Hector, the glorious Achilles and the cunning Odysseus. Retelling the story, getting to know the personalities, twists and divine interventions and immersing myself in the wildly exciting blend of myth, legend and real history has been one of the most completely enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had. I hope you get as much pleasure from reading it.’

x Stephen Fry

This title will be released on the 29th October 2020 in hardback and eBook £20

The post Troy – Coming Soon appeared first on Official site of Stephen Fry.

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Hello there.

After five months of life away from social media I have reactivated my Twitter account.

From time to time you will now be able to read news of what I am up to, along with occasional redirects to causes important to me.

I started work on a comedy series for CBS television in the US this week and I will certainly keep the @stephenfry feed up to date with information and pictures about this exciting new project as well as, perhaps, subjecting the world to a mini-blog or two on my website.

While I won’t be burdening you all with personal observations or visiting the Direct Messages page, Twitter can still reward with its marvellous uses as a bulletin board and information exchange.

Had anyone suggested that such a service might exist ten or fifteen years ago I would never have believed them.

So hurrah for upsides.

xS

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OFF THE GRID

This shouldn’t be a blog. It really shouldn’t be a blog. But it has to be a blog I think. So here is this blog.

JACKING OUT

What might be the proudest boast of any young person now, teenager, or twenty-something? They have been given, willy nilly, demographic tags like ‘millennial’, ‘post-millennial’, ‘Generation Z’, ‘i-Gen’ — not out of anybody’s acute cultural observation, sympathy or understanding but either to bulk up a HuffPo article or to delineate convenient advertising categories, within which many sub-categories can be established. You are not a person, you are an algorithmic assumption, a mould into which hot selling-jelly may be poured.

So. What might be the proudest boast of these young?

I’ve got this app.

I’ve written this app.

My YouTube Channel won an award.

I’ve got xy followers on thisdotcom?

Well maybe. But I’m going to suggest that if I was young now, my proudest boast would be: ‘My friends and I, we disappeared ourselves. No social media, no email, no chat, no wifi, no selfies, no SMS, no smartphones. We did it. We did this thing. We Got Off The Grid.’

Why should anyone want to dissociate themselves from all that connectedness, fun, convenience, reach and power? Well, because it would be – and I can’t be bothered to search for a better word and anyway perhaps there isn’t one – awesome.

 The great William Gibson (he coined the word ‘cyberspace’) wrote about ‘jacking into the matrix’ with an awareness, I think, that ‘jacking’ carries a druggie connotation. Jacking out of the matrix will entail plenty of cold turkey and I don’t propose it lightly or without a sense of how difficult and disruptive it would be. But then, when I was young, being difficult and disruptive was more or less what I lived for.

Jacking out of the matrix would cast one as a hero of the kind of dystopian film that proved popular in the 70s, Logan’s Run, Zardoz, Soylent Green, Fahrenheit 451 … on the run from The Corporation, with the foot soldiers of The System hard on your heels. We really are starting to live in that kind of movie, mutatis mutandis, so surely it’s time to join the Rebels, the Outliers, the Others who live beyond the Wall and read forbidden books, sing forbidden songs and think forbidden thoughts in defiance of The One.

Remembering what I was like at fifteen, I wriggle pleasurably at the thought of how it would feel in 2016 to tell a teacher that, no, I couldn’t possibly ‘e-mail’ my homework, because I don’t have e-mail:

‘I’m not on your email, miss/sir.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Stephen. Email me the essay as soon as possible.’

‘I will write it and bring it in to class tomorrow for you to mark. I’ll do that happily.’

Sudden sympathy. ‘Oh. If there’s an issue … if your parents can’t afford broadband or a computer, there are government schemes…’

‘My parents do have the band that is broad of which you speak, miss. They offered me one of the machines that understands the language of the “e-mailings” that so excites you. But I want no part of such elec-trickery.’

And so on. What larks. They couldn’t force me to have an online presence after all. These days, while there may be much talk of digital connection being a civil right, that doesn’t make it a civic duty, or a legal compulsion.

My friends and I, liberated from all digital shackles, would giggle at those sheep who flee to the playground to fire up their devices every time the break bell sounds, like addicted smokers lighting up in a theatre interval. We would watch them as they gaze, lips parted and eyes glazed over, at their Snapchats, WhatsApps, Tweets, Tumblrs, Boomerangs, Meerkats, Vines and Periscopes and how lucky we would feel to be above it all and out of it all. Out of the bullying and wheedling and neediness. Out of the invisible selling, the loveless flirting and cowardly mocking. Out of the unbearable long silences and the ceaseless screaming chatter. Out of the vengeful rivalries, the frenzied desperation and the wrenching loneliness.

We would turn on our heels and go to the park, the town library or a greasy-spoon café. One that doesn’t plead to be liked on Facebook. We would talk of God and guitar chords, poetry, fashion, sport and sex like any teenagers, but we’d do it lying on our backs looking at the sky, gigglingly whispering in reference libraries or coolly nudging the pinball machine into a replay.

I know, I know, I know. This is just maudlin, nostalgic mush. You can’t go back. But all my imagination can do when picturing a life off the grid is summon up the life I had before the grid existed, so I cannot help being retrospective. Signing off and logging out may seem to some like a move back, a fatuous attempt to disinvent the wheel, a modern equivalent of The Good Life, digging up Wikipedia and planting cabbages over it or steampunking the new to create a simulacrum of the old, but what I am talking about is a move forward for those who have never known anything but the digital world. Generation Z (it brings vomit to the gorge even to type that) must invent their own reality, not replay mine. No, this is not about the retro chic of analogue, it is about forging a new reality outside the – for want of a better word – matrix.

33 RPM

But first, what would motivate any young person today to pull the plug?

Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers.

Well, if you’re young and have an ounce of pride, doesn’t that list say it all? So fuck you, I’m Going Off The Grid.

 We all know vinyl has made a comeback. That has been deprecated as a feeble, self-conscious example of retro nostalgia, or applauded as a finger jabbed up to the contemptuously poor quality of MP3 and the so-called ‘lossless’ codecs in which music is almost universally served up these days.

Vinyl reminds us that, before the days of the internet, digitisation and streaming, musicians were perfectly able to create extraordinary new sounds and write immortal songs. It’s not helpful for me to suggest that the music that came from people meeting up in garages and sheds and bedrooms was better than the music being made now, because such a claim would rightly be put down to the obvious preference we all have for the music of our youth – but no one surely can deny that it was possible to create marvellous sounds and write marvellous songs without the help of MIDI synthesisers and Protools loops.

Magazines were put together by friends who had something to say, trivial or profound, it didn’t matter. They wrote out their articles and drew their illustrations and cartoons in exercise books and on notepads and then laboriously typed and pricked them out them onto stencils that were stretched on the drums of intricate duplicating machines. The run-off pages were manually stapled or bound together into something that could call itself a magazine. Maybe two hundred were produced in one run, which might be exhibited on the shelves of a kindly local newsagent who had been persuaded to carry them ‘sale or return’.

Things that were necessary in this world were paper, pencils, typewriters, diaries, cash, dictionaries and maps.

I don’t know what would be needed if you decided to go off the grid today. I imagine the same instruments – musical and graphical, from pianos to Rotring pens – would be helpful. A lot more walking: walking to leave notes at friends’ houses, walking to post-boxes, walking to the library, walking to shops that sold goods but did not deliver, walking to rendezvous points like pubs, cafés, parks and public spaces because the only way you could all assemble and talk would be to meet face to face.

All the junk that would get cleared away! Computers, drives, printers, USB hubs, webcams, ink-cartridges, keyboards, phone chargers and miles and miles of cable. Spray it with resin and create an art installation.

You’d learn the joy of writing again … “poets love their handwriting, it’s like smelling your own farts” W. H. Auden wrote. Everything would be physical. Everything would be tactile, real and atomic. Everything would have heft and feel and touch and brush and swish and mass and heart.

I am not cursing the internet, Savonarola-like, and calling for a bonfire of its vanities, nor am I decrying it for the usual reasons – concentration span, over-simplicity of access to knowledge, softening of the brain, blah-blah-blah. I don’t really subscribe to any of that.

Rota Fortunae

Swings and cycles. I sometimes subscribe to the Boethian idea (so beloved of the immortal Ignatius P. Reilly) of the Wheel of Fortune. The wheel (think London Eye) takes people round, they have their time at the top which they enjoy all the more because they have come from the bottom to get there. But they must always remember that they will soon be on their way down.

I hopped aboard the digital wheel in the late 80s as it was just rolling upwards. To change metaphorical horses midstream, we felt like frontiersmen heading west, west, west in search of gold and new land.

At first this was a text-driven, not a graphically driven world, but all that changed when in 1993 or thereabouts Mosaic arrived, the first program available for general use that could browse Tim Berners-Lee’s new invention, the worldwide web.

By the mid-nineties, and yes it really did take that long, the online services like CompuServe and America Online offered their subscribers an ‘internet ramp’ which meant you could dial into them and find a door out into the free world of the internet. This is important. The internet, as opposed to AOL and the others, was like a great city. It certainly had slums and red-light districts and places you wouldn’t want to visit after night, but the museums and art-galleries, theatres, cinemas, squares, parks, post-offices and streets were packed with excitement. AOL though, was a wipe-clean, family-friendly planned community, a digital Milton Keynes. Ample cycle-paths, parking and street-lighting – but fuck me how dreary, safe and bland. AOL hated having to provide the internet ramp out of its closed system, but it was inevitable. So they upped their game and started to sell themselves as a true internet provider. Higher they rose on the wheel.

Every movie poster or commercial for the next few years had an AOL #keyword printed on it, along with the now standard web URL. Every shop counter and every magazine was adorned with AOL membership CDs. I once gave a party in the 90s for 40 or so people and managed to ensure that I distributed about the surfaces at least 40 AOL CDs to use as wine coasters.

At the same time all the talk was of ‘portals’. Alta Vista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, they had their moments at the top of the wheel too. They provided your homepage, crammed with personalised tidbits and primitive widgets. Your commitment to them kept them big. They were sometimes service providers and search-engines too. The battle was on to keep you from being an individual roaming free in the big world and to keep you on the paved streets of their city.

THE WILD WEST

Two internets developed. The real internet, as I would call it, was that Wild West where anything went, shit in the streets and Bad Men abounding, no road-signs and no law, but ideas were freely exchanged, the view wasn’t ruined by advertising billboards and every moment was very very exciting.

The other internet was an environment packaged supposedly for your safe, simple navigation and convenient access. First AOL led the way here, next came the portals and after a few misfires (MySpace and Bebo) Google arrived and blew all the other portals and search-engines out of the water while Facebook established itself as the new AOL.

AOL was once so mighty that it was the senior partner in the merger with Time Warner, at the time the largest of its kind in history. Now it is so embarrassing an entity that it is no longer included in the name of the media giant that owns it. The wheel came round.

The wheel does not stop. Ever. Not for any one or any thing no matter how mighty. It didn’t stop for the real Wild West, which soon had its day, nor did it stop for its online successor. The digital Wild West may have been rough and lawless but folk were politer to strangers and knew their manners better than the ruthless, ambitious citizens who took over. The pioneer territory has now had its shitty streets and crooked boardwalks paved over. In place of saloons there are strip malls, fun fairs and multiplexes. The telegraph and train killed the stage coach and the pony express. The wheel turned.

And Facebook will be dust one day. Hard to imagine perhaps but obviously and happily true. ‘Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.’

For now, Facebook is of course all powerful and finds itself busy eating the internet (thereby preparing its own extinction) and of course parents are on it. That’s how crap it is.

I and millions of other early ‘netizens’ as we embarrassingly called ourselves, joined an online world that seemed to offer an alternative human space, to welcome in a friendly way (the word netiquette was used) all kinds of people with all kinds of views. We were outside the world of power and control. Politicians, advertisers, broadcasters, media moguls, corporates and journalists had absolutely zero understanding of the net and zero belief that it mattered. So we felt like an alternative culture; we were outsiders.

Those very politicians, advertisers, media moguls, corporates and journalists who thought the internet a passing fad have moved in and grabbed the land. They have all the reach, scope, power and ‘social bandwidth’ there is. Everyone else is squeezed out — given little hutches, plastic megaphones and a pretence of autonomy and connectivity. No wonder so many have become so rude, resentful, threatening and unkind.

LOG OFF, JACK OUT, POWER DOWN

The radical alternative now must be to jack out of the matrix, to go off the grid.

If this blog is read by 10,000 people (which will be a lot fewer, off course, than might have read it if I had stayed on Twitter) well, fine. Strangely, if I printed it samizdat style, by way of an old-fashioned Gestetner duplicator and it was read as a physical pamphlet by only 100 people, I would feel that it had connected far more and with far greater purpose and meaning. It is not about the numbers. It is never about the numbers. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

I live in a world without Facebook, and now without Twitter. I manage to survive too without Kiki, Snapchat, Viber, Telegram, Signal and the rest of them. I haven’t yet learned to cope without iMessage and SMS. I haven’t yet turned my back on email and the Cloud. I haven’t yet jacked out of the matrix and gone off the grid. Maybe I will pluck up the courage.

After you …

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‘for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions…’

trumpery  ˈtrʌmp(ə)ri

noun (pl. trumperies)

practices or beliefs that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth. he exposed their ideals as trumpery. theatrical trumpery. [ as modifier ] : that trumpery hope which lets us dupe ourselves.

adjective

showy but worthless: trumpery jewellery.

delusive or shallow: that trumpery hope which lets us dupe ourselves.

 On no! Another blog about that Trump man. Surely saturation point was reached long ago?

Bear with me, caller. I am reproducing here, shortened but otherwise unaltered, a diary entry that became a chapter in the book I wrote about my travels around the United States.

From the autumn of 2008 to the late spring of 2009, accompanied by a TV crew I made my way around America in a black London taxicab, visiting  every single one of the 50 states.

We started at the top right with Maine, and the eighth on our list, in December 2008, was New Jersey.

Now read on …

My taxi and I are on our way to a place that has hammered its own nails into the coffin of Jersey’s reputation for refinement. Atlantic City.

Best known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its boardwalk, all seven miles of it, Atlantic City on the south Jersey shore was one of the most prosperous and successful resort towns in America. After the Second World War it freefell into what seemed irreversible decline, until, as a last ditch effort in 1976, the citizens voted to allow gambling. Two years later the first casino in the eastern United States opened and ever since Atlantic City has been second only to Las Vegas as a plughole into which high and low rollers from all over the world are irresistibly drained.

And so I find myself driving into hell.

The weather does not help, heavy bruised skies brood over grey Atlantic rollers and on the beach the tide leaves a line of scummy frothing mousse and soggy litter. The signs advertising ‘Fun’ and ‘Family Rides’ on the vile seaside piers tinkle and clang in the sharp wind, a feeble ferris wheel squeaks and groans. Along the deserted boardwalk the wind tosses and rolls Styrofoam coffee cups and flappy burger containers – New Jersey’s urban, eastern reinterpretation of the mythic tumbleweed and sage brush of the West. Above tower the hotels, the ‘resort casinos’, blank facades in whose appearance and architectural qualities the developers have taken precisely double-zero interest.

Would it not have been better to let the home of Monopoly, this seedy resort town and remnant of another way of holidaying, simply fall into the sea? Instead we are given an obscene Gehenna, a place of such tawdry, tacky, tinselly, tasteless and trumpery tat that the desire to run away clutching my hand to my mouth is overwhelming.  But no, I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all … The Trump Taj Mahal.

For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions all along the boardwalk. It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. I am not an enemy of developers, per se; I know that people must make money from construction and development projects, I know that there is a demand and that casinos will be built. I can pardon Trump all his vanities and shady junk-bonded dealings and financial brinkmanship, I would even forgive him his hair, were it not that everything he does is done with such poisonously atrocious taste, such false glamour, such shallow grandeur, such cynical vulgarity. At least Las Vegas developments, preposterous as they are, have a kind of joy and wit to them … oh well, it is no good putting off the moment, Stephen. In you go.

The automatic doors of the black smoked glass entrance hiss open and I am inside. I see at once that the exterior, boardwalk side of Atlantic City is deliberately kept as unappealing as possible, just to make sure people stay inside. All you need is here: mini-streets complete with Starbucks for people who hate coffee and KFC for people who can’t abide food; there is even a shop devoted entirely to the personality of Donald Trump himself, with quotes from the great man all over the walls: ‘You’ve got to think anyway, so why not think big?’ and similar comforting and illuminating insights that enrich and nourish the hungry human soul.

Everything sold here is in the ‘executive’ style, like bad 80s Pierre Cardin: slimy thin belts of glossy leather, notepads, cufflinks, unspeakable objects made of brass and mahogany. There is nothing here that I would not be ashamed to be seen owning. Not a thing. Oh, must we stay here one minute longer?

Into the casino I go …

Above my head glitter the chandeliers that for some reason Trump is so proud of.

‘$14 million worth of German crystal chandeliers, including 245,000 piece chandeliers in the casino alone, each valued at a cost of $250,000, and taking over 20 hours to hang,’ trumpets the publicity.

‘An entire two-year output of Northern Italy’s Carrera marble quarries – the marble of choice for all of Michelangelo’s art – adorn the hotel’s lobby, guest rooms, casino, hallways and public areas.’

Yes, it may well have been the marble of choice for Michelangelo’s art. English was the language of choice for Shakespeare’s, but that doesn’t lift this sentence, for example, out of the ordinary. And believe me the only similarity between Michelangelo and the Trump Taj Mahal that I can spot is that they’ve both got an M in their names.

‘$4 million in uniforms and costumes outfit over 6,000 employees.’

‘4½  times more steel than the Eiffel Tower.’

‘If laid end to end, the building support pilings would stretch the 62 miles from Atlantic City to Philadelphia.’

‘The Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort can generate enough air conditioning to cool 4,000 homes.’

You see, all that this mad boasting says to me is ‘Our Casino Makes A Shed Load Of Money’. They can afford to lavish a quarter of a million bucks on each chandelier, can they? And where does this money come from, we wonder? Profits from their ‘city within a city’ Starbucks concession? Sales of patent leather belts and onyx desk sets? No, from the remorseless mathematical fact that gambling is profitable. The house wins. The punter loses. It is a certainty.

This abattoir may be made of marble, but it is still a place for stunning, plucking, skinning and gutting sad chickens.

It is with real pleasure that I leave Atlantic City behind me, certain that I shall never return. Donald Trump. I hope never to hear the name again.

Excerpt from Stephen Fry in America  © Stephen Fry 2009

Now, I am not claiming that there is any remarkable degree of prophecy or insight to be found in that furiously intemperate outpouring. Anyone could have seen eight years ago (ten years ago, twenty years ago) that Trump was poison. Not because of his disgusting Mexican walls, but because of his disgusting marbled walls. Not because of his unacceptably vulgar and contemptuous speeches, but because of his unacceptably vulgar and contemptuous buildings. In case you think that is glib and silly, let me expand a little.

Oscar Wilde visited America in 1882, giving talks on the renaissance goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and on what he called ‘The House Beautiful’ – so far as I can tell, the first ever lectures given anywhere  on the subject of interior decoration.

The story goes that he was asked in Chicago whether he had an opinion as to why America was such a violent country. It is worth recalling just how strange, puzzling and upsetting to Americans their homeland’s almost apocalyptic explosion into violence seemed. Here was a country founded little more than a hundred years earlier in the spirit of the most optimistic and harmonious enlightenment values of justice, equality and freedom. Yet now it was recovering from the psychic shock of having recently erupted in the most bloody civil war in human history. The West was opening up in a trail of blood too: the blood of pioneers and the blood of plains Indians. Even species were being slaughtered wholesale, the buffalo, the bear and the passenger pigeon. In Chicago and New York the first gangs were beginning to exert their deadly grip. Everything, in short, was going wrong with America, that great and noble experiment. So …

‘You’re an intellectual kind of a fellow, Mr Wilde, do you have an opinion?’

‘As to why you are so violent? Oh yes, that is readily susceptible of an explanation,’ said Wilde. ‘You are violent because your wallpaper is so ugly.’

The first reaction to such a remark might be to laugh. Or to roll the eyes. So facetious, so precious, so appallingly trivial in the face of such a question. So Oscar. That first reaction would be wholly wrong.

Wilde was brought up under the powerful influence of two great aestheticians (I say that rather than aesthetes, there is a difference) – Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Under them Wilde learned a very important truth. An aesthetic wrong is a moral wrong. Aesthetics and morals are inextricably interwoven. If a thing is ugly it is wicked. If it is beautiful it is good. The qualities flowed both ways of course. If a thing was good it was, or became, beautiful. If it was wicked, it was ugly. Have we not all found that a lovely, captivating face belonging to an unkind, proud or unpleasant person very soon becomes an ugly face? Next time, we will be on the alert when we see that kind of apparent loveliness again. In other words, our sense of beauty (like our sense of smell) has evolved to warn us. Evil smells are bad for us. Ugliness is bad for us. Or, if you prefer, what is bad for us we have learned to find ugly.

Consider this too. We look out at the natural, wherever we are in the world, and it is always beautiful. Whether it be the deserts or the arctic wastes, the fells, the plains, the tundra, the bush, the cataracts, the mountains, the veld, the savannah, the jungle or the coastlines … nature is unconditionally and extraordinarily beautiful.

But if we look out of a window in a city (especially one at the height of the  industrial nineteenth century) so much of what we see, made by humankind, is quite dreadfully and unremittingly ugly. Ugly to the point of contemptuous, terrible and wicked. Ornaments and utensils stamped out in cheap base metals, dangerous to the touch and horrid to the eye: crockery, cutlery, buildings, clothes and – yes, the wallpaper we wake up to and fall asleep dreaming to – all dreary, ill-considered and insulting to the spirit.

A child would soon see that they had been born into a species that can only uglify and despoil. What visible or viable perfection could there be to aim for? Can disconnection, contempt for life and ready violence really be such a surprising outcome?

You may think I am overstating the aims and claims of aestheticism. I am not. Ruskin lived all his life trying to prove the power of architecture, art and design to uplift spirits, heal broken societies and reconnect humankind to nature and our own selves; and conversely to warn how bad design and flawed, careless and callous architecture can corrode the soul of communities and peoples. I am old enough to remember how as a nation Britain underwent a rediscovery of these thoughts when we finally awoke and rubbed our eyes in disbelief at what had been done with the thoughtless development of ugly, ugly, socially sterile and contemptuous tower-block council flats and brutalist concrete city centres in the 1960s.

Pater’s, Ruskin’s and Wilde’s ideas are absolutely as alive as ever they were. It would be  a huge mistake to underestimate Wilde because he was funny. His being funny was an index of his high seriousness, especially in matters of design, beauty, happiness, moral tone and their eternal interconnectedness.

Which brings us back to Trump. It is not his policies that stand as the clearest guide to his wickedness, contempt, stupidity, meanness and lack of moral character, it is his atrocious and life-throttling taste. Surely this should have been seen this before he even began to think of running for president?

But in fact he has already won. Trump’s idea of what success is, what style is, what America means has largely been ‘voted for’ and has become an aspirational norm for hotels, malls, resorts and homes up and down the land, uglifying America with an especially repugnant kind of short-lasting gloss and shallow gleam.

Trump is the faux-mahogany and fake-brass lamp and ceiling fan available in Target and Walmart that swirls and beats the air above us all, not shining light, just stirring the air noisily and to no purpose, while claiming to be somehow an heirloom and a collectible.

Do please believe that to decry such offences against taste is emphatically not a kind of snobbery. Doubtless Trump and his supporters would see any attack on him on aesthetic grounds as sneering metropolitan elitism because they would choose not to understand the moral dimension at play here. It must be understood that bad taste on the monstrous scale that Trump disseminates and embodies is the most brutal crime against the human spirit – a snobbery that looks down with contempt.

If you don’t know Peter York’s book Dictators' Homes: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colourful Despots by Peter York (2005) Hardcover" target="_blank">Dictators’ Homes you really should try to get hold of it. It demonstrates quite wonderfully and hilariously how a gross, shatteringly greedy appetite for power and gross, shatteringly vulgar taste go hand in hand. The ‘ruthless, ill-educated, ignorant and trashily vainglorious’ who want to rule us at any price can be read through their bedrooms, dining-rooms and studies.

And, leafing through the book, whose execrable, vomitous taste do you think is shown most exactly to match that of Trump and his towers and foul resort hotels? Why Saddam Hussein’s of course. Indistinguishable.

x S

Cartoon by the brilliant Tony Husband 

The post Trumpery Towers Over All appeared first on Official site of Stephen Fry.

You learn the most astonishing things from your friends. Yesterday and today I have been bombarded by texts and emails asking me why I am leaving Britain to go and live in America. This caught me not a little by surprise, since I have no plans at all to swap the UK for the US.

Apparently the plan is for me to hide in Hollywood as a response to the ‘twitter storm’ in which I was recently caught. Which paints me as even stupider than I believed I could be. Do I really think that Twitter is British? That leaving the shores of the United Kingdom and hissy-fitting my way to America would make the slightest difference?

Where can such an idea have come from? In whose head was it conceived? Is it perhaps a hint? Stephen, we would like you to leave. You are no longer welcome in the country of your birth. Quit. Depart at once never to return.

It’s a bit hard. I love Great Britain. You know, cricket, Scott’s Porage Oats, Shakespeare, Vimto, Churchill, Norwich City, Horlicks, Tennyson, The Archers, Gregg’s the Bakers, Bovril, Darts from the Ally Pally, pork pies, Maggie Smith and Alan Bennet, soldiers in egg yolk, Wimbledon  – you can complete the list yourself I’m sure. And now I’m told I have to leave all this. I don’t understand. I really don’t understand.

According to one emailer it’s the Sun newspaper that says that I’m going. But of course these things catch on and now it seems to have become a truth. Despite being nonsense from first to last. How very, very odd.

I have, it’s true, had an American ‘green card’ for years – ever since I bought an apartment in New York in the 90s. I sold that in due course and last year bought a place in Los Angeles. But that was nothing to do with stamping my tiny jewelled heel and sweeping from Britain with a sniff and a sneer because Twitter got so smelly.

Seems odd to have to write this and yet if I don’t, the untruth of my going to live in the US might harden into an accepted truth with all the concomitant confusions and complications that would entail.

So I’m afraid you will have to put up with me for a little while longer yet.

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