Historians are terrible abusers of words, but to no other do they owe a fuller apology than 'emerged'.

A few years ago the climate campaign 10:10 released a short film co-written by Richard Curtis, known for his work on "Blackadder" and a household name as the author of "Four Weddings and a Funeral".

Entitled 'No Pressure', the film predicts terrible consequences for those who don't 'join in' with the consensus view on climate change, and shows these people exploding horrifically. One vignette presents a broadcaster in a sound-proof recording booth, the glass window of which is suddenly covered in blood, the remnants of her eyeballs, still joined by the optic nerve, sliding slowly down the glass. (It is still available on YouTube, though I have not refreshed my memory of the facts.)

The films became instantly notorious, to the all-but universal discredit of 10:10, which never recovered. Curtis was understandably embarrassed and made a number of evasive remarks to the effect that it was very difficult to be funny about serious subjects, which is a sound observation but should perhaps have warned him off the attempt. Humour is always insidiously suasive rather than intersubjectively argumentative; it employs the black arts to reduce the value of one thing relative to that of another, while at the same time offering the audience the opportunity of inhabiting a safe location, within the chalk circle, either above the comparison or on the favourable side of the balance. In a serious discussion it is correctly mistrusted as betraying a lack of substantial grounds.

Nevertheless, Curtis has been forgiven, and largely on the grounds that 'No Pressure' was a mistake, an aberration quite out of and other than the benevolent character that was the author of 'Love Actually'. The point is fair, and I am not about to suggest that Curtis be retried; nevertheless, it should be acknowledged, I think, that in his film for 10:10 he was doing what he had always done before, with considerable skill and to general acclaim, and what he has continued to do since. Namely, act as a sensitive retailer of the received wisdom, the unconsidered and principal or activating views of those around him; he collects these voiceless opinions, concentrates and returns them to the audience conceptually unchanged but objectified and immediately intelligible. Mostly, this ingenious reflection is welcome to all, since he takes his hints from a very broad population. But such talents made him a dangerous partner for a more exclusive organisation such as 10:10.

Some have said that Curtis should have realised what a monster he had created, and suppressed the film. Certainly, it would have been prudent; but that would have been dishonest to his art, which though modest in kind has a mystery that must be respected as much as any other; and overall, I think he deserves credit for consenting to the release of 'No Pressure'. He enlightened the public at some cost to his reputation. One cannot ask more of a writer.

A further short article on Wyndham Lewis has been uploaded to the publications page. "The Sin Against Genius: Settling Scores in the Human Age", suggests that one of the figures in Lewis's late novel, a second-rate extension of the vastly superior Childermass (1928), is a malicious representation of Charles Prentice, Lewis' one-time editor at Chatto & Windus. While spiteful and trivial in itself this satirical portrait provides, I think, a reminder that Lewis was no gentler in his later age than he had been in the 1920s and early 1930s. Alternatively, while there is certainly, as many of critics of Lewis suggest, a discontinuity between the writings after the later 1930s, and those that had preceded them, this is a difference in quality not thought.

Three new articles on Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) have been added to the publications page. All are previously unpublished, and date from ca. 1993, with a little re-writing in subsequent years.

I have not made any attempt to revise the arguments or check the evidence or the quotations, though the texts have been tidied up and reset. They can be read independently, but probably make more sense if examined in the following order, before and after the piece on The Doom of Youth published here last year:

1.  "Wyndham Lewis' Hitler: Content and Public Reception: the Truth" is a somewhat revised chapter from my doctoral dissertation. I make no apologies for the title. When it was written the misconceptions about the book were so numerous that the corrections offered in this study seemed to me, and still seem to me, to represent a major improvement.

2.  "The Doom of Youth: Wyndham Lewis' Conspiracy Theory'". Published on www.libellus.co.uk last May, this article discusses in detail one of the rarer and most unread of Lewis's works from this period.

3. "Two Filibusters in Barbary: Wyndham Lewis and Alfred Rosenberg" is highly controversial, or was so when it was written. It suggests that Lewis knew the writings, at least, of Alfred Rosenberg and was to all appearances convinced by many elements of Rosenberg's cultural diagnosis. As far as I am aware this suggestion is novel, though I have myself touched on it very briefly in a footnote to the study of Doom of Youth, above.

It was while working on the first of these pieces that I first realised that the received wisdom about Lewis in the non-specialist world (i.e. outside the charmed circle of Lewisians), namely that he was for at least parts of his writing life an anti-semite, was far from being an error and, if anything, understated the case. In my view, anti-semitism was a crucial motivating component in his work throughout the 1920s and at least part of the 1930s, and (at this point I become less assertive but still suspicious) arguably to the end of his life.Whether it was as important as I think it, others will decide. In any case, it is reasonably certain, I argue, that Lewis's interest in Nazism was grounded in a reading of the philosopher-painter Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the Völkischer Beobachter and leader of the party during Hitler's imprisonment, not in Hitler himself. I have often wondered whether archival research in Germany would provide evidence of a personal relationship or correspondence with prominent members of the Nazi movement, but this is work for someone else.

My point in publishing this material now is that since the mid 1990s understanding of Lewis's anti-semitism has deteriorated still further, largely, I think because of the surprisingly mistaken observations of Anthony Julius, in his influential book, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form CUP, 1995), where, misled by mainstream Lewis scholarship, he writes that:

"Admirers of Wyndham Lewis's work freely concede its anti-Semitism. Essentially trivial, it took the form of personal abuse or a bellicose, political invective. He didn't care much for or about Jews; he routinely said as much. The anti-Semitism in his fiction and poetry is typically casual, unreflective, and slight: 'Is he a Nigger,/ A Chink, a Jew, or some yet odder figure'; 'Chacun son Jew! is a good old english saying.' This is an anti-Semitism that lacks commitment. His portrait of Lionel Kein in The Apes of God is more hostile to the friend on whom it was based than to Jews as a whole. It is not so much anti-Semitic as anti-Schiff [...]. The contrast here with Eliot's anti-Semitism is striking [...] Eliot's Jews tend to slide into anonymity, while Wyndham Lewis's bloom into an extravagantly personal eccentricity. The anti-Semitism of his critical prose is as bluff and unreflective as that of his fiction. Though vigorously, even splenetically expressed, it lacks consideration. Again in contrast to Eliot, there is no sign of any pressure of thought behind the anti-Semitism; it is unthinking. [...] This is an anti-Semitism without sting. It is simply the only language Lewis knows." (pp. 187-188)

None of this is right, but it has had the effect of closing down debate on the matter (see for example the Wikipedia entry on Lewis). As the material in the papers I am releasing shows, Wyndham Lewis's anti-Semitism was profound, interested, persistent, intellectual, substantial, committed, principally racial (and only secondarily personal), self-conscious, evasive, intense, learned, and driven. In short it was programmatic.

It is commonplace to refer to science as the religion of our age, but this is wrong in the sense that it fails to capture those differences we actually observe; but it is understandable as a response to the overstatement of difference between the network of propositions we see in a snapshot of early 12th Century life, say, and that available to us today. There is more continuity here than the advocates of 'science' will admit, and the assertion of that continuity is an important truth. But to do so by describing science as just our version of religion goes well beyond this into satire by attempting to erode respect for science, to cut it down to size, or put it on a level with religion. But this is futile; the technological power of scientific propositions is manifestly superior and undeniable.

Nevertheless, the continuity must be respected, and accounted for, in our theory, and a simple and just way of achieving this end is to see religion as the science, or part of the science of the past, and very poor science too.

The particular merits of this approach are:

a) No difference of kind is asserted, but degrees of quality constituting difference are recognised.

b) No difference of kind in psychological experience of science and religion is asserted, but difference in complexity and in consistency with experience of the world, or evidence, is recognised. (In other words, both can seem entirely normal to the subject, but the lack of complexity in the religious view is noted, as is is lack of correspondence with the world.)

c) No difference of kind in the network of propositions is asserted, but improvements in the principle of extensionality are recognised, as is flexibility in the face of error. (I.e. the religious network tends to be systematic in the sense that faulty propositions tend to drag down many other connected propositions. Then when facts challenge religious propositions, the priests and other interested parties will resist the facts. This is also true of modern science, notoriously so in fact, but it is so to a much lesser degree; indeed it is statistically true, rather than absolutely so, that science changes under pressure from the facts.)

In summary, the continuity between states of knowledge is best recognised by granting that our science has improved over time. In the states that we think of as 'religious' it was extremely poor, today it is relatively better, though with many areas in which improvement is possible. It is better in the sense that, statistically not absolutely, our network of propositions and the use we make of them is flexibly responsive to the facts of the world as we can see them, and delivers greater technological power.

Did Kipling prophesy the Google Glass? Yes, but perhaps a hundred others did it too. Ideas are cheap at any time, and vague gestures towards faint possibilities in the far future erupt in any idling intellect like daisies after spring rain. Nevertheless, he gets credit for this well-aimed shot of 1885:

"Ever used a telephone?" said Le Diable Boiteux airily. "Sometimes" I answered; the telephone in my office being the bane of my daily life. "That's all right" said the Le Diable Boiteux. "You will see when you put them on, that this pair of glasses is to the eye exactly what the telephone is to the ear. One hundred and fourteen years hence similar instruments will be invented by your kind, when you shall have brought electro-magnetism to a higher pitch of perfection."

("My Christmas Caller, or the Prescription of Sieur Asmodeus", Civil and Military Gazette (25 Dec. 1885), in Thomas Pinney, ed., Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-88 (Macmillan: London, 1986), 128.)

The glasses are voice and mind controlled and "will work as fast as you can think", the devil explains, thus allowing the user to rapidly investigate any subject or view and listen to though not speak with acquaintances and relations. However, the outcome is not quite what the human user expects or would wish for, and here perhaps is Kipling's most interesting prediction:

"I tested their powers exhaustively [...] They enabled me to see and hear as quickly as I could think, and also to understand that Hastings Macaulay Elphinstone Smallbones had disappeared from the thoughts of all the great family of Smallbones as well as from the minds of his friends. [...] I was penetrated with a deep sense of my personal insignificance – a wholesome but unpleasant experience which some men go through life and miss." (129)

Wholesome it may be, but also dangerously disturbing; and while this story ends happily with Hastings waking from his dream and rushing out to a Christmas party, the seed of doubt is sown in the reader's mind. However, as Kipling realised, without the Devil's glasses his contemporaries were relatively safe because they knew so little and could only with exertion know a little more. In the vale of unknowing self-respect flourishes, being a shade loving plant. Before information began to flow in such quantities and with such ease did anyone really and for more than a moment believe and understand themselves to be ignorant, friendless and insignificant? I suspect not; they had little enough reason to do so. For us the situation is more difficult; knowledge chases us round every corner and into the blind alleys where we chose to hide. No wonder that we have developed electronic social networking alongside universal and almost instant data; it is a necessary analgesic, a useful fiction, a trompe l'oeil to people with smiling faces the gaping void.

This new piece, downloadable, from the publications page, tries to explain why the children's glove puppet drama also appeals to adult males:

The explanation is straightforward: Punch is a vision of freedom, but a freedom that we would not wish others to enjoy.

Much of the knowledge in any field is tacit, that is to say not explicit in the writings of those working in the field, but held instead as mental representations communicated between thinkers viva voce, in lectures, seminars, tutorials, and most importantly in conversation. The degree to which a field is tacit and explicit varies considerably, with the humanities being towards the the tacit end of the scale and the sciences towards the explicit end. Mathematics is as explicit as any, but I understand from my acquaintances in that area that much knowledge there is in fact tacit.

It is interesting to note that that a concrete and information rich study such as history tends toward the tacit, while the abstract and informationally selective field, such as physics, tends towards the explicit. This point underlies the very much less helpful subjective/objective distinction. That is to say, being relatively explicit, the sciences are in a better position to reach intersubjective agreement on novel propositions; while the humanities rely to such a degree on tacit understanding that this level of within group agreement inhibits, obscures and can be mistaken for free discussion and testing of fresh ideas.

There is some fun in the news about the 'historical present' – "King James comes to London for the first time... Gladstone gives his budget speech and drinks a mixture of wine and raw eggs to refresh himself" – with pundits and media personalities taking sides (Eg. "John Humphrys labels Melvyn Bragg pretentious for his use of grammar").

This is a growing and controversial subject, and I should admit immediately that I dislike, not the tense itself; it's just a grammatical option, but the motivations underlying its usage. In other words, I understand its appeal, and for that reason think it over-used. But it has uses: the increasingly widespread appearance of the historical present in, for example, popular history and filmed narration definitely has a justification, though some major drawbacks. On paper its advantages are fewer, and in some respects it seems to me a retrograde step that sacrifices cool distance (the simple past is very cold, very far off) for warmth and immediacy.

That it is well-established is quite true, but it belongs to oral narration, which is almost theatre, and makes the transition to the printed page with great difficulty. Compare, for example, Anstey's classic late Victorian sentimental recitiation, "Burglar Bill of Pentonville" (1888), which employs this tense to natural effect ("Reely, Miss, you must excoose me!"/ Says the Burglar with a jerk"), to the Ahlberg's loosely derivative book of 1977, Burglar Bill, where it becomes an embarrassment ("When he comes to the first house he climbs in through the bathroom window and shines his torch around"), partly because it is applied with so little variation, an error that Anstey scrupulously avoids.

Of course, on television and on film the viewer may reasonably wish for the lively presentation made possible by the historical present. However, by bringing the viewpoint so close to each element in a sequential narrative the identification of any but simple causal relations between them adjacent pairs is weakened. This is a very substantial disadvantage, suggesting that the benefits, which are real, are dearly bought.

The presenter, for his or her part, will be drawn to the historical present not only because it pleases their viewers, a reasonable motive after all, but because it places the events under consideration at the same temporal nexus as the narrator; in other words, the narrator describes the event as if it were unfolding in real time simultaneously with his own utterance, as if he were a super-observer, not merely present, though this is an important consideration, but actually within the event or its persons. This lends a specious authenticity to the account, and pre-emptively counters scepticism by implicitly asserting that this is a participatory witness statement, though paradoxically made simultaneously from all points of view: "The King strides into the Commons... The ] members observe him with a mixture of shock and disdain". This is a striking ploy, but hardly creditable, and all the more suspicious for its undeniable power. Indeed, to be blunt it is not a candid way to discuss history, and leaves the recipient far too little room for criticism. Careful writers will avoid it.