Johnson at Ten:The Inside Story

From his 2019 election landslide (‘Get Brexit Done’) to his downfall last summer, Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell recount Boris Johnson’s term as UK prime minister in Johnson at Ten: The Inside Story. They cover Johnson’s “callous amorality” during the coronavirus pandemic (“Let the bodies pile high in their thousands”, first reported by the Daily Mail on 26th April 2021), and his ethical and even legal shortcomings. (In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Prime Minister’s advice to Her Majesty was unlawful,” and Johnson was fined last year for breaking coronavirus lockdown rules.)

There are some extraordinary details in Seldon and Newell’s book. They quote Johnson proclaiming to staff, “I am the Führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions”. Whereas former PM John Major famously called rebel Tories “bastards”, to Johnson they were “c**ts, utter c**ts.” (Apparently he “would use the C word a lot”, in an attempt to bond with senior staff, though the authors censor the profanities. Ironically, a cabinet minister called Johnson a “cosmic cunt” last year.) After the EU tried to ban exports of coronavirus vaccines, he told French President Emmanuel Macron: “I will hold you personally responsible for the deaths of the British people”.

Sebastian Payne has already written a detailed account of the fall of Boris Johnson, and he concluded that there were “three Ps that brought down the prime minister”: the Owen Paterson, Chris Pincher, and ‘partygate’ scandals. Seldon and Newell suggest an alternative (and non-alliterative) trio, citing three flaws in Johnson’s personality that made his downfall inevitable: “an inability to value truth and to set or pronounce on moral boundaries; to recognize merit, appoint the best people and trust them to do their jobs; and to stick by any decision or person without changing his mind.”

Payne’s account of Johnson’s final days in office includes a brief quote from a phone call between the PM and Michael Gove, who asks if Johnson is going to resign. Johnson replies: “Mikey, mate, I’m afraid you are.” (Tim Shipman used the same quote in The Sunday Times on 10th July 2021.) In contrast, Seldon and Newell quote a long extract from the call, without the “Mikey, mate” line. They also quote a conversation during which Nadhim Zahawi tells Johnson: “The herd is moving”, which could have inspired Johnson’s resignation speech (“when the herd moves, it moves”).

Seldon is the author or co-author of books on every UK prime minister of the past thirty years, including Cameron at Ten. He and Newell spoke to more than 150 senior sources for Johnson at Ten, including on-the-record interviews with Sajid Javid (Johnson’s former chancellor), Graham Brady (Chairman of the 1922 Committee), and Pippa Crerar (the Daily Mirror journalist who broke the partygate story, now political editor of The Guardian). Tim Shipman’s All Out War and Fall Out are in-depth accounts of Johnson’s role in Brexit, and his successor Liz Truss is profiled in Harry Cole and James Healey’s Out of the Blue.

Betrayal:The Final Act of the Trump Show

In Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, Jonathan Karl covers Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the insurrection by Trump supporters who believed his lies about the 2020 US presidential election. This is the eighteenth Trump book reviewed on Dateline Bangkok (or the nineteenth, if you count the audiobook The Trump Tapes). The others are: Confidence Man, Fire and Fury, Too Much and Never Enough, Fear, Rage, Peril, I Alone Can Fix It, A Very Stable Genius, Inside Trump’s White House, The United States of Trump, Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, The Room Where It Happened, Team of Five, American Carnage, TrumpNation, and The Cost.

Trump’s last year in office was reported more extensively in I Alone Can Fix It and Peril. But Karl’s book—which is partly a memoir of his experience as an ABC News correspondent—does contain some new details. He writes about his “strangest ever meeting” with Trump, an off-the-record Oval Office discussion in March 2020 during which Trump kept Vice President Mike Pence waiting while he traded political gossip.

Karl interviewed the former president at Mar-a-Largo and asked him to confirm an extraordinary quote first attributed to him by The New York Times in 2021. Did he really tell Pence, in a phone call on the day of the insurrection: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy”? “I wouldn’t dispute it,” is Trump’s remarkable reply.

Life and Death: Art and the Body in Contemporary China

Think of a shocking or scandalous work of art. An artwork that’s provocative, controversial, or offensive. Whichever painting, photograph, or installation you have in mind, its shock value almost certainly pales in comparison with the art in Life and Death: Art and the Body in Contemporary China. Silvia Fuk’s book, published in 2013, is the first to examine the use of human remains, ashes, and blood by contemporary Chinese artists who “challenge the boundaries of art, morality and law to the extreme.” The book features rare photographs of some of these artworks, though they’re all black-and-white.

Yang Zhichao used a mould to create dice made from his own congealed blood, in a performance titled Macao (澳門). Sun Yuang and Peng Yu collected unclaimed ashes from crematoria, and mixed them with plaster to sculpt One or All (一個或所有), an architectural column. They also transfused some of their own blood into the bodies of Siamese twins, for a performance titled Link of the Body (連體). For Ruan, Xiao Yu grafted a baby’s head onto a bird’s body. (Ruan, which also appears in The Museum of Scandals, is a Chinese neologism that the artist coined to represent this chimera.)

Zhu Yu is China’s most extreme contemporary artist. He suspended a human arm from the ceiling for his installation Pocket Theology (袖珍神学 图片; not included in Life and Death). For Intellectual Brain (全部知識學的基礎), he puréed six human brains and sold the resulting paste in jam jars labelled ‘do not eat’. Infamously, he ignored his own advice with Eating People (吃⼈), photographs of him apparently eating a foetus. Even more offensive was Sacrifice (献祭), for which he artificially inseminated a surrogate mother and seemingly fed their aborted foetus to a dog. (Did Zhu Yu use real foetuses in his work, as he claimed in the Channel 4 documentary Beijing Swings? This is difficult to verify, though Fuk takes him at face value.)

Art such as this, transgressive to the point of illegality, has very few equivalents. Perhaps the only comparative example is Rick Gibson, who was convicted of outraging public decency after exhibiting two tiny foetuses as earrings at a London gallery. Fuk doesn’t cite Gibson in Life and Death, though she does discuss other less extreme artists in relation to the Chinese works in question. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s morgue videos are examined in detail, and she suggests Marc Quinn’s Self (a cast of the artist’s head made from his frozen blood) as an inspiration for Macao. Ruangsak Anuwatwimon’s sculpture Transformations, made—like One or All—from human ashes, is not included.

Shit:An Investigation

Andres Serrano’s Shit exhibition, held in 2007, featured mural-sized images of feces excreted by various animal species (and the artist himself, titled Self-Portrait Shit). The feces in question appears in close-up, photographed against brightly coloured backdrops. The exhibition catalogue, Shit: An Investigation, reproduces all sixty-six shits.

This is not the only controversial and potentially offensive subject tackled by Serrano. In fact, his work has broken all kinds of artistic taboos, with self-explanatory photo series such as A History of Sex, The Morgue, and Bodily Fluids. He is arguably the world’s most provocative photographer, and an image from his Immersions series—Piss Christ, a crucifix submerged in urine—is the most famous artwork to be accused of blasphemy. His subject matter may evoke shock or disgust, though his glossy, vibrant images are also visually appealing; in fact—as is the case with Piss Christ, for example—their transgressive nature is often not apparent until the title is revealed.

The use or depiction of shit is rare in modern art, though there are a few examples besides Serrano. Piero Manzoni sold cans apparently containing 30g of his own feces, Artist’s Shit (Merda d’artista). Chris Ofili affixed balls of elephant dung to his Upper Room paintings (and, controversially, The Holy Virgin Mary). Gilbert and George photographed their feces for The Fundamental Pictures and The Naked Shit Pictures. Santiago Sierra’s Anthropometric Modules installations were blocks of dried human excrement, collected and moulded by scavengers in India.

A handful of artists have also used excrement as a paint medium. In 2015, New York artist KATSU painted a portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg using his own excrement. This year, British artist Dominic Murphy painted a portrait of Vladimir Putin with a dog turd. Werner Härtl has been painting with cow dung in Germany for more than a decade. Pablo Picasso’s granddaughter Diana Widmaier has claimed that he used his daughter Maya’s feces to paint an apple for a 1938 still life.

The work that’s most similar to Serrano’s Shit catalogue is Cacas: The Encyclopedia of Poo, a photobook credited to Oliviero Toscani though in fact photographed by his sister, Mariosa Toscani Ballo. Like Shit, Cacas also features close-up images of the excrements of various species, though they are photographed against clinical white backgrounds.

Patchwork:A World Tour

Patchwork: A World Tour, by Catherine Legrand, was originally published in French as Patchworks: Une mosaïque du monde. Patchworks is the second recent French-language survey of international patchwork textiles, though this translation, published by Thames and Hudson, is the first book on the subject in English. (Caroline Crabtree and Christine Shaw’s Quilting, Patchwork and Appliqué: A World Guide, a previous Thames and Hudson publication, also covered international patchwork, alongside other textile techniques.)

Legrand’s book, like patchwork itself, is a colourful collection of material, assembled and juxtaposed. The scope is truly global: there are chapters on all continents with native populations, with the exception of Australia. (Therefore, Aboriginal patchworks are unfortunately omitted.) Patchworks from more than thirty individual countries are included, with China and the US receiving the most extensive coverage. The patchworks photographed for the book—most of which are quilts and items of clothing—are sourced from an impressive variety of museums and private collections. The full-page, close-up illustrations are superb, and there’s a comprehensive bibliography.

Kinetismus:100 Years of Electricity in Art

The publishers of Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art—the catalogue of an exhibition held last year at the Kunsthalle in Prague—describe it as “the first comprehensive survey of art forms based on electricity and electronics.” The book explores a century of “plugged-in art”, which it distinguishes from the “unplugged art” (equivalent to acoustic music) that existed before the twentieth century.

The title Kinetismus comes from a term coined by Zdeněk Pešánek, “the father of neon art”, and his kinetic light sculptures were the initial inspiration for the exhibition. The catalogue builds on the work of curator Frank Popper, whose books include Origins and Development of Kinetic Art and Art of the Electronic Age. Peter Weibel, who co-edited Kinetismus with Christelle Havranek, previously co-edited the monumental Light Art from Artificial Light (Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht) catalogue.

Kinetismus is divided into four broad categories: cinematography, kinetics, cybernetics, and computer art. Cinematography is represented by early abstract ‘absolute’ films such as Hans Richter’s Rhythmus ’21 (‘rhythm 21’), Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony (Diagonalsymphonien), and Walther Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Opus I (‘light show I’). Kinetic sculptures include a replica of Naum Gabo’s groundbreaking Kinetic Construction.

Aquatint:From Its Origins to Goya

Aquatint, by Rena M. Hoisington—the catalogue of a 2021 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—is the first general history of aquatint printmaking for more than a century. The only previous work on the subject, S.T. Prideaux’s Aquatint Engraving, was published in 1909.

The full title of Hoisington’s book is Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya, though the origins of aquatint are a matter of debate. As Prideaux put it: “There seems to be no one person to whom the actual invention of aquatint can definitely be assigned.” Writing 112 years later, Hoisington agrees that “the designation of an artist as the “first” to invent or use acquatint is often complicated”.

The earliest potential aquatint pioneer is Jan van de Velde, whose circa 1653 portrait of Oliver Cromwell has an aquatint background. In The Art of the Print, Fritz Eichenberg argues that the technique “may have been used” by van de Velde, though Prideaux dismisses this, believing that “it is more likely that the attribution is mistaken and that the background was added later.”

Arthur M. Hind’s A History of Engraving and Etching notes that Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, working more than 100 years after van de Velde, is “generally regarded as the inventor of aquatint.” Prideaux concurs with this view, though Hoisington credits Le Prince as aquatint’s populariser rather than its creator: “Le Prince himself fully acknowledged that he did not invent aquatint, but he proudly took credit for perfecting it.”

Hoisington seems to support the case for van de Velde, writing that aquatint “was invented in the Netherlands in the 1650s,” though she relegates van de Velde’s name to a cursory footnote. As it omits any details of the van de Velde attribution and instead skips forward a century to Le Prince, Hoisington’s book cannot be described as a comprehensive study of aquatint’s origins.

Regardless of who invented the technique, it flourished throughout Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, and Hoisington covers this acquatint ‘golden age’ in unprecedented detail, though most illustrations are from the National Gallery of Art’s permanent collection. Aside from Le Prince, there are chapters on several other artists, including Paul Sandby, who coined the term ‘aquatint’ in the title of his series XII Views in Aquatinta from Drawings Taken on the Spot in South-Wales. The book culminates with a chapter on Francisco Goya, the artist who “harnessed aquatint’s tonal darkness to his artistic vision like no other.”

“112”

Posters calling for the abolition of the lèse-majesté law were removed from the National Book Fair in Bangkok yesterday, on the orders of a plainclothes police officer. Staff at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center removed nine posters from a stall run by The Commoner, before the event opened today. The fair runs until 9th April.

The posters featured a “112” logo, a reference to article 112 of the Thai criminal code. A graffiti artist was arrested on 28th March after he spray-painted “112” onto the outer wall of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok. The temple is part of the Grand Palace compound, and therefore a highly symbolic and sensitive location for such a slogan.

This is the third time that police have confiscated items from stalls at the book fair. Last year, a banner featuring hashtags such as #รัฐบาลเผด็จการ (‘dictatorial government’) was removed from the Same Sky Books booth, and t-shirts were confiscated from Same Sky’s booth in 2014. (The Commoner previously published สมุดระบายสีเสรีภาพ/‘freedom colouring book’.)

Anatomy of Time / Come Here / Worship

Anatomy of Time / Come Here / Worship, published this week, explores the making of three recent independent Thai films: Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s Anatomy of Time (เวลา), Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Come Here (ใจจำลอง), and Uruphong Raksasad’s Worship (บูชา). The book gives a valuable insight into the creation of each film: Anatomy of Time is particularly well covered, with a production diary, director interview, and the complete script; there are also long essays by the directors of Come Here and Worship. Early copies of the book come with film posters, and all copies include links to watch the three films online.

Anatomy of Time made headlines this week as, despite its critical acclaim, it was excluded from consideration for the Suphannahong National Film Awards. The awards organisers, the National Federation of Motion Pictures and Contents Associations, now require films to sell a minimum of 50,000 cinema tickets in at least five provinces, to be eligible for awards nomination. These commercial stipulations effectively remove independent films from awards contention.

End in This Generation

Karntachat Raungratanaamporn’s photobook End in This Generation was published this week, in a limited edition of 500 copies. Karntachat has photographed the recent wave of anti-military student protesters, and the book documents the protests from 10th August 2020, when Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul called for reform of the monarchy, until 12th December 2021, when demonstrators announced that they had collected more than 200,000 signatures on a petition to abolish article 112 of the criminal code (the lèse-majesté law). (One of the most powerful photographs shows “112” carved into Panusaya’s arm.)

End in This Generation is the latest of a handful of photobooks devoted to the protest movement, the others being There’s Always Spring (เมื่อถึงเวลาดอกไม้จะบาน), EBB, #WhatsHappeningInThailand, and No God No King Only Human. Like No God No King Only Human, it’s a larger, coffee-table book, and—in another similarity between the two publications—its title is one of the protesters’ slogans (ให้มันจบที่รุ่นเรา), aligning the book with the aims of the protest movement.

No God No King Only Human and End in This Generation both have their fair share of stunning images, though the glossy colour photographs in End in This Generation are even more striking. Unlike in No God No King Only Human, the photographs in End in This Generation are presented in chronological order. Both books provide dates and locations for each image, though End in This Generation also features a timeline of the protest movement.

Global Ikat:Roots and Routes of a Textile Technique — The David Paly Collection

Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth, currently on show at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington, is a comprehensive global survey of resist-dyed ikat fabrics. The exhibition catalogue, Global Ikat: Roots and Routes of a Textile Technique — The David Paly Collection, includes chapters on the history of ikat in India, Africa, Europe, Japan, Asia, and the Americas.

The fabrics in the Seattle exhibition, and those illustrated in Global Ikat, are largely drawn from the private collection of David Paly (some of which he has donated to the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.). The catalogue is significant, though, as the first international history of ikat: the publisher accurately describes it as “the first time all the different iterations of this textile have been comprehensively brought together in one volume”.

The catalogue essays include detailed explanations of regional textile terminology (Japanese figurative designs known as e-gasuri, for example), and there is an extensive international bibliography. The first English-language book to examine ikat dyeing was Jack Lenor Larsen’s groundbreaking The Dyer’s Art: Ikat, Batik, Plangi, published in 1976 and now unfortunately out of print. The best general survey of textile history is 5,000 Years of Textiles by Jennifer Harris.

“It was like setting a time bomb...”

Three people who sold a book about Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protest movement have all been jailed. They were among six people arrested in January, and had been held in detention until their trials began on 17th March. The three pleaded guilty, and they were sentenced on 20th March. In his summing up, judge Peter Law said that the book could have reignited the protest movement: “It was like setting a time bomb”.

Free HK Media founder Alan Keung, who had promoted the book online, received an eight-month sentence. Alex Lee, the owner of the booth where it was sold, was sentenced to five months. Lee’s wife Cannis Chan, who edited the book, was sentenced to ten months.

The untitled 300-page book, featuring photographs of the protests, went on sale on Christmas Day last year at a Lunar New Year fair at Ginza Plaza. It was distributed by the Shame on You Grocery Store (影衰mi杂货店), and forty-three copies were seized by police, who described it as “a seditious book about a series of riots”. (400 copies had been printed by Copyman.)

In 2021, the publishers of the Sheep Village (羊村) series of children’s books about the protests were also arrested on sedition charges. They were sentenced to nineteen months in prison last year, and earlier this month two men were arrested merely for possessing the books.

Sheep Village

Two men were arrested in Hong Kong yesterday, for the possession of seditious publications. The charges relate to the Sheep Village (羊村) series of children’s picture books published in 2021, and the men face up to a year in prison if found guilty. (The publishers of the Sheep Village books were convicted of sedition last year. The books are now being distributed from the UK, and are also available online in English translations. The publishers of another book are also awaiting trial in Hong Kong.)

One of the books, The Guardians of Sheep Village (羊村守衛者), is an allegory of Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests. Another, The Twelve Warriors of Sheep Village (羊村十二勇士), refers to a dozen Hong Kongers who were arrested in 2020 when they attempted to escape into exile by speedboat. The third book in the series, The Cleaners of Sheep Village (羊村清道夫), is a reference to medical workers who went on strike in an attempt to force Hong Kong to close its border with China at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Nine Folk Tales

Are children’s stories traditional or old-fashioned? Do they teach age-old values or foster outdated stereotypes? Could they even have a propagandist function, promoting conformity and obedience? The editors of Nine Folk Tales have commissioned nine new versions of classic folk tales to subvert the narratives that children are usually spoon-fed, and to encourage critical thinking. Rubkwan Thammaboosadee and Palin Ansusinha have produced a box set of revisionist folk tales, drawing on examples from Aesop’s fables, the Brothers Grimm, and several traditional Thai tales. In Eat Your Stories (กินเรื่องราว), their reader’s guide to the collection, they argue that these familiar fables “teach us to stay within the moral framework ruled by social inequality.” In a nutshell, the objective of their updated folk tales is to “dismantle old tales by telling new ones”.

The new folk tales are allegories that promote social and economic equality, justice, and freedom. The nine books are: The Frogs Who Desired (กบเลือกนาย) by Narsid, My Mother’s Memory (ความทรงจำของแม่ปลาบู่) by Thiptawan Uchai, Girl with a Face of a Horse (แก้วหน้าม้า) by Ping Sasinan, In Hunger (ก่องข้าวน้อย) by Namsai Khaobor, The Fisherfolk’s Journey (ตาอินตานา โชคชะตาและปากท้อง) by Laksanapon Tarapan and Wiriya Wiriyapat, Rabbit and Turtle (กระต่ายกับเต่า) by Sanprapha V., A Ghost Story (ผีทักอย่าทักตอบ) by Arty Nicharee, Buffaloes Dream of Being Human (ควายอยากเป็นคน) by Tepwut Buatoom, and Little Red Riding Hood (หนูน้อยหมวกแดง) by Rubkwan Thammaboosadee.

Buffaloes Dream of Being Human

Some of the tales have political subtexts, the most overt being Buffaloes Dream of Being Human, a fable in which a group of buffaloes seek a better life in the big city. In Thai, kwai (‘buffalo’) is an insult aimed at poor voters, especially those who supported former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s video Silence addresses this pejorative, and it has been reclaimed by some pro-democracy protesters.) The story includes thinly-veiled references to Thaksin—“Monkey, a friend of the buffalo, was elected as the city’s governor”—and the yellow-shirt protests that paved the way for his removal from office: “A mob of the ‘Louder Voices’ expelled Monkey from the city.” (Similarly, Charuphat Petcharavej’s short story Hakom/ห่าก้อม also features a proxy for Thaksin: “A group of villagers had driven him out of the village”.)

My Mother’s Memory

Another book in the set, My Mother’s Memory, indirectly confronts the violence suffered by the Octobrist generation in the 1970s. This disturbing tale ends with the young protagonist’s realisation: “the nightmares that I had were the result of me swimming in memories of the past. The memories of people who I might not even know. I have been carrying these heavy memories all this time.” As the editors explain in their reader’s guide, these collective memories of state violence are whitewashed from history: “Our emotions and memories carry alternative histories which are not written or taught in school history books.” (This theme of state whitewashing has been explored by numerous artists and writers, including Vasan Sitthiket, Tawan Wattuya, Sutee Kunavichayanont, Sirisak Saengow, Prabda Yoon, Thongchai Winichakul, and Emma Larkin.)

The Frogs Who Desired

If Buffaloes Dream of Being Human and My Mother’s Memory reflect the experiences of previous generations of pro-democracy protesters, The Frogs Who Desired is an allegory for the students who are currently protesting for political reform. Based on Aesop’s fable The Frogs Who Desired a King—which is itself a pertinent cautionary tale about absolute power—The Frogs Who Desired ends with the slogan “NO GODS OR ANY RULERS SHALL SAVE US, EXCEPT OURSELVES”, a paraphrase of the student protesters’ motto ‘no god, no king, only human’.

The editors point out that The Frogs Who Desired has a “purposefully shortened title”, which was presumably an ideological decision rather than a legal concern. Another book in the series, In Hunger, features a poor farmer who recalls that “a stranger with a cruel smile preached us to stay humble”. Like Buffaloes Dream of Being Human, In Hunger challenges this notion that the poor must gratefully accept their lot in life, which the editors describe as a “mechanism that keeps everyone ‘in their place’.” (Precisely the same argument is made in relation to the ‘sufficiency economy’ philosophy in Saying the Unsayable.)

Nine Folk Tales is the latest of several children’s picture books with political themes. Last year, Suwicha’s สมุดระบายสีเสรีภาพ (‘freedom colouring book’) featured a symbolic blue elephant. There have also been two sets of picture books published by Family Club and the Mirror Foundation that feature similar political allegories. This recent trend began in Hong Kong, with the Sheep Village (羊村) series, the publishers of which were jailed last year.

Fear

Manit Sriwanichpoom’s photography exhibition Fear (กลัว), held in Bangkok and Singapore in 2016, documented the volatile political atmosphere in Thailand prior to the 2014 coup, and the initial period following the junta’s takeover. The excellent accompanying catalogue remains a valuable record of a timely yet politically sensitive exhibition.

Discussing the title, Fear, in a short interview published in the catalogue, Manit explains that “today’s great fear is over something we can’t discuss aloud.” This has echoes of Taiki Sakpisit’s short film The Age of Anxiety (รอ ๑๐), which addressed the fear of the death of King Rama IX in the twilight of his reign. The link is reinforced by the catalogue’s cover image: a photograph of an 1868 solar eclipse predicted by King Rama IV shortly before his death.

Manit bravely included large-scale portraits of National Council of Peace and Order and National Legislative Assembly members (the coup leaders and the legislators they appointed), pixellated to obscure their identities. Though their individuality is denied, their uniforms are still visible, presenting them en masse as a faceless—and therefore inhuman—authoritarian entity. Similarly, screengrabs of technical glitches during coup leader Prayut Chan-o-cha’s first televised Return Happiness to the People (คืนความสุข ให้คนในชาติ) speech highlight the vulnerability behind the propaganda façade.

Although Manit satirised the junta’s populist propaganda, he was also critical of the government overthrown by the coup, and he endorsed the People’s Democratic Reform Committee protesters who laid the groundwork for the military takeover. The catalogue describes the legacy of former PM Yingluck Shinawatra, subject of another photo series, as something “we now long to forget.” Introducing photographs of police vehicles vandalised beyond repair by the PDRC, the catalogue even claims: “these cars were not destroyed; merely overturned and coloured... They could still be saved to run upright again.”

The most powerful work in the Fear exhibition was the short video Primitive (ป่าเถื่อน), a montage of sixty-five photographs of bloodstains on the base of Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, accompanied by plaintive cello music. These dark red smears—one of which appears on the back cover of the catalogue—are grisly reminders of an attack on PDRC protesters on 15th May 2014, when three people were killed by unknown assailants heavily armed with M79 grenade launchers and M16 automatic rifles.

“A seditious book about a series of riots...”

Six people arrested in Hong Kong on 17th January are facing sedition charges for selling a book documenting the city’s 2019–2020 pro-democracy protest movement. The untitled 300-page book went on sale on Christmas Day last year at a Lunar New Year fair at Ginza Plaza. It was distributed by the Shame on You Grocery Store (影衰mi杂货店), and forty-three copies were seized by police, who described it as “a seditious book about a series of riots”.

In 2021, the publishers of the Sheep Village (羊村) series of children’s books about the pro-democracy demonstrations were also arrested on sedition charges. (They were sentenced to nineteen months in prison last year.) The protest leaders—including Joshua Wong, a veteran of the 2014 ‘umbrella movement’—went on trial this week, charged under the Safeguarding National Security law imposed on Hong Kong by the Chinese government.

“Exploitation of audio of President Trump…”

Donald Trump is suing journalist Bob Woodward and the publisher Simon and Schuster for $50 million, alleging that Woodward’s audiobook The Trump Tapes was released without prior authorisation. Woodward interviewed Trump nineteen times as research for his book Rage, and the audiobook features complete recordings of those interviews. Trump’s lawsuit, filed on 30th January, accuses Woodward of “systematic usurpation, manipulation, and exploitation of audio of President Trump”, and claims that the publication of the tapes violated Trump’s copyright.

In many of the interviews, Woodward tells Trump: “I’m turning on my tape recorder”, a reminder that these are on-the-record conversations being recorded with consent. He didn’t discuss the prospect of an audiobook with Trump, because he wasn’t required to do so. Woodward is legally entitled to release the tapes, because he—not Trump—recorded them. Just as the person who presses the camera shutter automatically assumes copyright of the resulting photograph, the person who presses ‘record’ owns the copyright of a sound recording (if the recording is made with permission).

The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story

In The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story, Sebastian Payne gives a comprehensive insider’s account of the final months of Boris Johnson’s premiership, which he describes as “the most remarkable political defenestration in modern British political history.” Until recently, Payne was the Whitehall editor of the Financial Times and the host of the Payne’s Politics podcast; he interviewed Johnson for his first book, Broken Heartlands.

Payne concludes that there were “three Ps that brought down the prime minister — Paterson, partygate and Pincher”. He sees Johnson’s downfall as an inevitable result of the former PM’s belief that the rules don’t apply to him: “it was always going to come to a premature and sticky end... Johnson resists the idea that he has to bother with the consequences for his actions that normal people have to contend with.” (The ‘three Ps’ theory was first mentioned last August, on the BBC podcast Boris.)

After Conservative MP Owen Paterson was accused of lobbying, Johnson authorised a scheme to rewrite the disciplinary process, a blatant “Tory ruse to save one of their own” that united both government and opposition MPs against it. The ‘partygate’ and Chris Pincher scandals were more personally damaging to Johnson, as in both cases he was, in Alan Clark’s famous phrase, “economical with the actualité.” He falsely claimed in parliament that no parties had taken place at Downing Street during the coronavirus lockdown, and he falsely denied any prior knowledge of MP Chris Pincher’s reputation for sexual harassment.

The heart of the book is an epic forty-page account of Johnson’s last two days in office. This detailed coverage of ‘the bunker’ expands on a similar report by Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times (from 10th July 2021). Payne and Shipman both quote Johnson’s arch response after Michael Gove asked if he would resign: “No, Mikey, mate, I’m afraid you are.” Payne also recounts Johnson telling Gove: “they’re going to have to prise me out of here.” Gove and Johnson’s relationship was one of the most fascinating in modern British politics, and Johnson is, as Payne puts it, “the most compelling political campaigner of his generation”.

Jacinda Ardern: I Know This to Be True — On Kindness, Empathy and Strength

Geoff Blackwell interviewed New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on 8th November 2019 as part of his I Know This to Be True project for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, a series of interviews published in 2020 and intended to “inspire a new generation of leaders.” Video extracts from those interviews were then repurposed for Live to Lead, a Netflix series directed by Blackwell, which was released on New Year’s Eve 2022.

In his (short) Ardern interview book, Blackwell asks about her personal values, and she explains that she is “really driven by empathy... that’s probably the quality we need the most.” Similarly, in another 2019 interview, she told author Supriya Vani: “the world needs empathetic leadership now, perhaps more than ever.” (Vani’s Ardern biography is subtitled Leading with Empathy, and Blackwell’s subtitle has a similar theme: On Kindness, Empathy and Strength.)

Blackwell’s and Vani’s interviews are both rather soft and apolitical, focussing on Ardern as an inspirational leader. But Ardern does make a surprisingly candid admission in answer to Blackwell’s question about trusting her instincts: “All I could be was myself. And that’s all I’ve ever tried to be. And if that means I’m successful on behalf of New Zealand, that’s great, and if it means that I’m not, then I’ll still sleep at night.”

Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy

Jacinda Ardern became New Zealand’s Prime Minister in 2017 on a wave of ‘Jacindamania’, and her relentless positivity boosted her reputation on the world stage. (She has been a guest on The Late Show, and Spitting Image caricatured her quite convincingly as Mary Poppins.) She passed gun-control laws with incredible speed, and was equally successful in minimising the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. In recent months, rising inflation and a looming recession have sharply dented her domestic popularity, though this has not affected her international image.

She has consistently refused to cooperate with her biographers, though Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy was promoted in 2021 as “[t]he first biography to be based on interviews with Ardern”. At a press conference on 21st July 2021, Ardern made clear that she was misled by the authors, who had not told her they were writing a biography: “certainly the claim that it was an exclusive interview for the purpose of writing a book of that nature is not true”. Co-author Supriya Vani interviewed Ardern in 2019, on the understanding that the book was about female leaders in general. Co-author Carl A. Harte claimed that coronavirus restrictions precluded interviews with other leaders, though Ardern was interviewed via Skype, which the pandemic would not have prevented.

More plausibly, the pandemic prevented the authors from visiting New Zealand while researching the book, though surprisingly this did not affect the amount of ‘colour’ and atmospheric detail they included. Ardern’s childhood home, Murupara, for example, is described as “a place that feels as if it is drifting, somehow behind in time... The town’s beauty is itself beguiling, but the land here has its dark secrets.” These lengthy descriptions, and others, are all examples of armchair tourism, and further padding is provided by extraneous career summaries of several former New Zealand politicians.

Vani wrote an online article for Writer’s Digest on 9th June 2021 titled How to Write a Biography of a World Leader. Her first tip was: “make sure you can resonate with the qualities of the leader to ensure you’re writing a positive biography.” Unfortunately, she followed her own advice, and her Ardern book borders on the hagiographic. (It often refers to Ardern by her first name, emphasises her “kindness” and “well-rounded humanity”, and even compares her to Churchill.) But on its own terms, as an inspirational account of empathetic leadership, the book is well written and researched. Perhaps Ardern’s relentless positivity rubbed off on Vani; if so, it was more appropriate to her first book, Battling Injustice.