The Labour years: Could have done better

Back to 1997: Tony Blair is greeted by hundreds of supporters as he arrives in Downing Street as prime minister for the first time. Photograph: Adam Butler/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

As Labour elects a new leader, we look back on the record of the last 13 years. How can the incoming leader repeat Labour's successes and avoid past failures?

In recent weeks, star players of the Labour era have rushed to spill the beans, each telling his or her own self-justificatory versions of the inside story. We examine the hard outcomes: the ambitions realised, the targets missed and the reasons why.

This is a timely reminder, as the coalition plans to roll back all the extra spending of recent years, ending many of Labour's programmes and shrinking the state back as if the last 13 years had all been a dream.

Labour came to power in 1997 as a historically necessary government, ready to restore a near derelict public realm that had fallen shamefully far behind standards among its European neighbours. There was no doubting the overwhelming public desire to see public services replenished after years of Tory imprudence and swindling capital spending. Health and education were pressing public priorities. Here, we focus on domestic policy – though foreign catastrophe marked out the era just as surely.

The problem was paying for it. Labour never dared make the political case for increasing the tax take, and failed to adjust spending when growth dipped after the first years of the new century. But above all, Labour never trusted the British people enough to confront them with the grown-up facts of life – better services have to be paid for. So Blair soothed middle England while Brown levied a little more tax by stealth.

Dare the new leader be more honest about the price of public improvements, and abandon that New Labour pretence that we can have Scandinavian quality on US tax rates?

Economy

In the 13 years Labour was in power, GDP per head grew by 20% in real terms. Had that sum been shared out equally, everyone would have had £3,840 more in January 2010 than in May 1997, measured in 2009 prices. That was enough to buy a third of a new Ford Fiesta, a week in Lanzarote for six, a breast enlargement operation, a year's university tuition or a year's social housing rent. Averaging the good and the post-crash years, annual growth in GDP per capita was 1.6%. The 1948-1998 average had been 2.2%. Labour bucked no trend.

Still, average unemployment fell, from 9% between 1992 and 1997 to 5.5% between 1997 and 2007. What Labour brought to the party was jobs, many of them in the public sector. As the coalition takes them away, unemployment looks like reverting.

Moses-like, Brown dominated the Treasury in 1997, his tablets commanding prudence and restraint. But this prophet fawned on financial power and worshipped its excesses. Capital will be safe with Labour, he told the boardrooms. Corporate taxation was kept low – it was second lowest among the G7 in 2009. Profits beckoned as the state divested itself of air traffic control and defence research, pushed contracting in health and IT, guaranteed returns for the companies owning water, nuclear and train companies and (though this changed later) soft-pedaled on competition inquiries in defence, communications and energy.

Until the recession, Labour's vision excluded making things. As Simon Topman, a businessman, told us: "They talked down manufacturing. They said it was all over and globalisation was inevitable. They never said they believed in us. Waves of these negative messages coming from the top meant no one wanted to invest either. Fathers I know in manufacturing told their sons it was all over, lots took early retirement and sold out rather than buy new machinery and invest in the future."

When Labour came into power, tax amounted in total to 35% of GDP. Anti-statists liked to conjure up a government behemoth consuming the nation's hard-earned produce, with Brown intent on fattening the beast. Yet under Labour, the tax-GDP ratio peaked at just over 36% in 2001 then fell, returning to 36% in 2007-8. The trouble then, and now, is that the national appetite for services and benefits exceeded that. Labour tried to bridge the gap by stealth. Its new leader has to pick up from its failure to make ends meet.

The verdict: Macroeconomic good fortune and public spending produced good years; the City's fallibility was proved in the crash. 5/10

Health

Labour took 1997 as a mandate to spend, and from 2000 it did - by 7% a year in real terms in the next decade. They left the NHS in better health, its shabby face scrubbed up. Waiting times for elective surgery were the touchstone; they fell to unprecedentedly low levels.

But the price the NHS paid was political fixation on minutiae; not just organisation but operations, clinical practice and recovery rates. Plans and edicts spewed out. Patients were largely oblivious; what mattered was the extra money. Here Labour came closest to an honest bargain with people, who kept telling pollsters they wanted more and better healthcare. The 2001 increase in National Insurance was pegged explicitly to increased spending, and won popular support.

New money bought physical transformation, immediately visible to patients and relatives coming through those shiny glass atriums, though they might moan about car park charges. Capital spending rose from £1.1bn to £5.5bn over the decade to 2007-8. That money built 100 hospitals, pushing the average age of NHS buildings down dramatically: in 1997 half were Doctor in the House, by 2010 most were House (by then only a fifth of NHS buildings dated from before 1948).

"No one could justifiably deny the past decade has seen an improvement in quality in the NHS," disinterested foreign observers concluded in a 2009 Nuffield Trust study. But dementia and dentistry remained Cinderella services. Labour bequeathed social care costs and conundrums to their successors. As for value for money, they stuffed the clinicians' mouths with gold and gave other staff a gilded "agenda for change".

Endless "reforms" perpetrated by Blair, Alan Milburn, Patricia Hewitt, John Reid and their advisers consumed time and goodwill in chopping and churning. Labour could not quite bring themselves to state a redoubtable truth. The NHS, big and baggy, with all its anomalies, worked pretty well. What the anorexic patient they inherited in 1997 needed most was fattening up. But gradually. Force-feeding was the wrong therapy: the NHS probably got too much extra, too fast.

A lot of British people were in a not dissimilar position, eating and drinking too much. Labour knew the public health score, but ducked dealing with the food and drink manufacturers, let alone the social inequalities at the root of much obesity. Everyone was living longer – good news. But the gap in life expectancy between men in poorest areas and the average grew by 2%.

"The question is how to get the public engaged with the services they've got," Averil Dongworth, chief executive of Chase Farm hospital told us. Labour found no formula for getting people to take responsibility in health. As for its repeated reorganisations. "Going in a circle? I'd say three or four times round in a circle." In the Con-Lib era, she will have more pointless circuits to do.

The verdict: Labour saved the NHS, but meddled. 8/10

Education

A tide of new money washed through schools. Primary school spending per pupil went up by a third in real terms in the eight years after 2000. After 1997, teacher numbers in England grew by 32,000; schools recruited 100,000 more teaching assistants and 70,000 more support staff. By 2008 capital investment was running at eight times the 1997 level of £1bn.

Labour hit their target of having 80% of 16-18 year olds in learning of one kind or another in 2004. In the 10 years after 1997, undergraduate and postgraduate numbers together rose from 1.8 million to 2.4 million. Blair, in the manner of his unprepared and uncosted declaration on child poverty, committed the government to a target of half all 18-30 year olds graduating: that reached 45% by 2009.

Average teacher salaries increased by £5,000 a year, up 17% in real terms between 1997 and 2007, with head teachers getting 32% and newly qualified teachers 13%.

At Oakthorpe primary school in Enfield, north London, veteran head George Cumner-Price did not hesitate for a moment in declaring teaching quality to be immeasurably better. His formula could start the daily maths lesson: quality teachers + more of them = better results.

Attainment in primaries increased markedly between 1998 and 2000, but plateaued. In Labour's last summer results, the number reaching the standard for their age group in English was down one point to 80%, ending the upward trend of the previous 15 years. A fifth of England's children still left primary school neither literate nor numerate enough to cope with secondary education, and likely to end 11 years of compulsory education with no useful qualifications.

Half of all secondary pupils left with five good GCSEs. But in almost 1,000 secondary schools, only one in three pupils made the standard in English and maths at 16. Ministers noted proudly that average school performance in 1997 had become the bottom marker by 2009 – not bad. Progress was fastest in poor areas, especially in London.

Yet something went awry. Teachers resented Labour for intrusive targets and "deprofessionalisation". Gleaming new independent academies in the poorest places were handed over to businesses and churches. Faith schools multiplied in a secular nation, increasing social segregation.

Despite national literacy and numeracy strategies, improvements in results undershot ambitious targets set. More children stayed on longer and learnt more under Labour, but successive ministers were defeated by the same hard old truths about British society: background and parental income trump classroom.

However, international comparisons do record movement up the ladder. England's pupils now perform about as well as their peers in the rest of the developed world, providing little cause for panic, but also faint cause for celebration.

Cinderella sectors benefited, notably further education. John Hogg, principal of the gleaming new Middlesbrough College said Labour had made a difference, especially to those who failed at school. "They made us feel we mattered. Maybe it started with Blunkett as their first education minister and the kind of education he'd had. He understood about second chances from his own dreadful education."

The verdict: Blair's "education x 3" mantra got results, but social divisions in educational destiny stayed all but unchanged. 6/10

Equality

Labour stopped inequality getting worse. Child poverty would have been 6 to 9% higher without their measures. The Gini coefficient of inequality would have gone up three points rather than by the two it did rise under Labour. A one-point mitigation – that was Labour's achievement.

Yet they emphasised equality in school attainment, public health, deprived communities, early years, the New Deal, the minimum wage and tax credits. The government worked hard at welfare to work. We spoke to a Jobcentre Plus official who started to sound like a Soviet-era farm worker praising the beetroot crop - but sincere and far from untypical in her zeal to help young people into work. The National Audit Office reports that she and her work and pensions colleagues scored better than the private and voluntary agencies Labour brought in, and to which the coalition will hand everything over.

Blair said if he did not leave behind a fairer Britain, he would have failed. He failed, Brown too, despite using the words "fair" and "fairness" 40 times in his 2008 conference speech. Yet Blair made that extraordinary promise to halve the number of poor children by 2010 and, in 2009, Brown secured the Child Poverty Act, formalising the commitment. In 1997, Labour inherited 3.4 million poor children – 26% of all children. By 2007 there were still 2.9 million. That meant half a million children no longer lived in poor households, an achievement: a cut of quarter compared with that promise of half.

Lone parents, whatever the tabloids said, were going to work outside the home. Thanks to the New Deal, their employment rate rose from 45% in 1997 to 57% 12 years later; Labour had wanted 70%.

The inequality that hardly dared speak its name was social class. On its deathbed, Labour recognised that society was closed: 45% of senior civil servants, 70% of finance directors and 75% of judges were privately educated – as were the victorious prime minister and deputy, after the election. Labour's replacement by a cabinet of Old Etonians and Old Westminsters, 18 of them multimillionaires, said it all: no plates shifted in Britain's social geology.

Labour would not admit that "Broken Britain" was in truth "Unequal Britain", manifest in everyday ill health, obesity, drunkenness, truancy, school failure, teenage motherhood and childhood unhappiness.

The verdict: A for effort, C for barely touching Britain's class structure. 6/10

The verdict

Labour left behind a sprucer public realm. Schools, FE colleges, hospitals and clinics, benefits offices, children's centres, arts and sports venues, parks and museums were all renovated, restocked and rebuilt. Look around, especially in the cities of the north, to see buildings and public spaces that will mark Labour's era for years to come, despite the cuts.

It's a decent list. Public services measurably improved. Bus passes, the right to roam, arts and science funding, civil partnerships. But the roster of failure and weird policy includes casinos, lapdancing, late drinking, the explosion in prison numbers, 28-day detention without trial, the incarceration of refugee children – and the bizarre House of Lords, where 92 ermine-clad aristocrats hang on, like zombies defying democracy. MPs' expenses were an accident waiting to happen, while Labour's constitutional conservatism failed to clean up party funding, or bring in the proportional voting for the Commons it enacted for Scotland, Wales and the Greater London Assembly. A Labour vision for the UK shimmered, then dissipated. Devolution was supposed to run alongside re-legitimisation of government inside England; instead, Labour toyed with regional assemblies, mayors and city regions, only half-formed.

Cuts in carbon emissions were promised but not delivered. All those criminal justice acts and extra police had a limited effect on crime, which continued its long-run international decline. Take Asbos. An innovative attempt to address a genuine problem of disorder on estates – worth experimenting with in local areas – became a national panacea, which did not work.

Labour's housing record was poor. Despite the boom in prices, few new homes were built and state-supported construction did not compensate, though many council houses were refurbished. One result was to intensify the impact of a steep rise in immigration in poorer areas.

However it was not foreigners at home but Labour's intervention in a foreign country that did the worst reputational damage. If you leave out the particulars of the Iraq episode - Blair's character, the pusillanimity of Labour MPs and the dodgy dossier – the war was business as usual for British foreign policy. British soldiers were deployed because British policy was aimlessly committed to "punching above our weight", as if that were in itself a goal. A desperate desire for influence in Washington and at the UN top table led both to the war in Iraq and over-commitment in Afghanistan. The early rash promise of an "ethical foreign policy" was best met with a pledge to hit the UN target of giving 0.7% of GDP in aid. In 1997, the Tories paid just 0.26%. By 2005 that had doubled, but it was still short and would not have reached the target until 2013.

Some say Blair, Brown, Mandelson and the New Labour architects had concluded that Britain was unchangeable and besides, for at least two of them, the seductions of wealth had welded them to the plutocratic status quo. If so, it is a category error to judge them against progressive goals they didn't have. But why then would Blair have made that astonishing pledge to end child poverty? Why the plentiful targets devoted to the socially excluded? Labour knew money spent on tax credits for poor families was of no political use: the families who gained most gave Labour little credit, and many didn't vote. Beneath the faint-heartedness, wrong directions and the misinterpretation of the public will, Labour's heart was still beating to the left.

Britain was a better place for the election of Labour in 1997, with that great red carpet of opportunity before it. But did Labour do as well as it might, given the constraints, the baggage it carried and the circumstances over which it lacked control? No, because it did not convince the people, who by 2010 were susceptible to the Tories' anti-Big Government message. No, because Labour's state was too often oppressive and ineffectual at the same time.

Not enough altered in the fabric of a country so strongly defined by class, regional disparity, inequality, individual and commercial under-achievement. Nor did Labour summon the nerve to challenge the owners and perpetrators of mean-spirited British journalism.

Labour's new leader may lack Blair's political genius, but perhaps will have a clearer sense of direction and a more generous understanding of Britain's capacity for responding to arguments for greater fairness; based this time on an honest calibration of the respective size and obligations of public and private, rich and poor.

Overall verdict: Labour showed what the state could do to improve lives and chances, but never made, nor won, the case for its extra costs. 6/10

Extracted from The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, published by Granta at £18.99. To order a copy for £14.49 with free UK p&p visit guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846. Buy both The Verdict and Unjust Rewards: Ending the Greed that is Bankrupting Britain by Polly Toynbee for £19.99 (save £7.98).

The Vikki LaMotta Story: Jake, Raging Bull, Playboy, Sinatra and The Mob

World hold up Jake LaMotta binds his three-year-old son Jackie, whilst watching his mother Vikki prepare for a 'Mrs New York City' competition in 1950. Photograph: AP Ricky Hatton used to talk about a "red mist" which descended upon him sometimes in a ring. It cost him his dual biggest fights against Floyd Mayweather Jnr as well as Manny Pacquiao and, away from a ring, he suffered from a identical impulse, an overwhelming urge to "go for it".Yet dual weeks in rehab, a detriment of his licence as well as a 20,000 fine do not appear to have convinced a Hitman he has a complaint with splash or drugs, even though he clearly has issues adjusting to hold up after boxing. Fighters can be similar to that. As shortly as they stop desiring they're a little version of superman, it's all or zero mostly nothing. No contestant carries a penetrating baggage boxers are lumbered with. It comes in most forms as well as a crime piece is long.While Hatton has done zero some-more than fall chase to tellurian insanity as well as put his trust in a crony who ran to a newspapers with an damning video, he might great from celebration of a mass about an additional exposed part of of his calling whose urges were far some-more destructive as well as sinister. The British book of Thomas Hauser's ghosted journal of Vikki LaMotta is just out as well as it shines fresh light upon a male in whose shade she walked, her father of 11 years, a Raging Bull.Vikki, who died 5 years ago, aged 75, once asked Jake, after receiving nonetheless an additional violence from him: "Why did we do it? What probable reason could we have had for hurting me so badly?"He said: "I did it because we desired you. we suspicion it would dismay we in to coming behind to me. Besides, we get harm all a time. It doesn't mean anything."LaMotta made no eminence in between himself as well as his wife. Pain was incidental, paltry almost. He was ad! ditional ly a prisoner of drink. Vikki relates how he would keep a diary in his waning days as a fighter: "Alcohol seems to stay in your complement as well as doesn't want to come out"; "Drank too most as well as got sick"; "Ate bad as well as drank bad"; "Black Friday, drank all day"; "Ate bad, drank bad, gained 8 pounds in one day".The 89-year-old LaMotta right away lives in New York and, for a cost of a great suit, he will reheat these anecdotes. If it were not for Jake, we would not have listened of Vikki, of course. But, were it not for Martin Scorsese's evocative 1980 movie, Jake's story would have rotted in a vault with a thousand others. Instead, they have all found celebrity with each other.Hatton is frequency a raging bull. He is a good-natured as well as decent man. But he has demons of his own still to fight, just similar to Jake as well as all a others.

Get Wild – How to Set Your Creative Beast Free

from Write to Done by guest

A guest post by Karen Daniels of Zen Copy

People are often baffled over creativity and wonder where it comes from – and where, for goodness sake, can we get more of it? What we do know for sure is that creativity is not some mystical magical aha! that descends upon a chosen few who are our creative superiors.

Creativity is, in fact, born with each of us and remains until we die – or beyond.

Observe a child doing everyday activities and it’s hard to miss that they bring creativity with them in everything they do, and everywhere they go.

As adults, on the other hand, for some reason we feel the silly need to plan creative time as if it wouldn’t happen otherwise.

We can blame it on our tight schedules and overly committed lives, but the bottom line is planning for “creating creativity” is a bit like telling a creature, say a lion, that you’ll feed it once a week and it’s not allowed to be hungry beyond that. Under these circumstances a lion will probably do one of two things; 1) Eat your arm the first chance it gets or 2) Wither up and die.

Oh yes, my friend, those brain storming sessions you schedule on your calendar between 10 and 12 on Thursdays is sucking the life of your real creativity.

So what happened? Where is that creative child within you that wants to come out and play? Is she buried too deep? Is he wandering someplace alone and angry inside your head rather than running the hills?

Well, no matter what reasons have contributed to your penned up creativity, it’s not too late. By having a few personal playtimes, you can learn to set your creativity free.

To play every day.

Without planning.

So here we go.

Poof! You’re in Preschool

This first exercise is a warm up – to get your body to remember. Get out a piece of paper and pull out the crayons. What? No crayons in the house? Go get some. We’ll wait.

• Now sit down and draw a totally useless picture of nothing at all. If you have kids, do this with them. If not, turn on cartoons. Now, just scribble some colors – but you must not spend time thinking, just do. You can use one color or forty-two. No matter. Fill in all the white space, or leave lots of white space. Whatever your whim. But, and this is important, no do-overs. What you see is what you get.

• When you feel done, use a crayon to proudly sign the picture. Now, brace yourself – this is the really hard part that may cause you anxiety – I want you to put your picture in a special frame and hang it on the wall. Not in the back of the closet but somewhere prominent.

Let’s Play “Name that Color”

Again, get out a fresh sheet of paper and your handy box of crayons. Before you do anything with them let your eyes roll over the colors.

• Now, touch each crayon and name the color. Not the color it says on the crayon, and don’t say green or red or brown. Listen to all those voices in your head and name those colors with abandon, using words like squashed-pea-green, severed-arm-blood-red, lion’s-mane-brown or dancing-fairy-silver. Unlike in real school, here you are rewarded with high points for outlandish names.

• Select one of the colors that most appeals to you at this moment. Is it crazy-dog-yellow or the ocean-ship-blue? Whatever your choice, write a couple of simple sentences on your paper. And to take the stop-thoughts away, use some of the color words of your crayon in the first sentence to get you going.

• Feel free to write your whole story around your newly named crayon colors. For example; “It’s so crazy dog hot here today. The yellow sun just won’t quit, making me long for an ocean ship, with everything blue.” If you find yourself feeling stuck, don’t spend time. Throw down that crayon and pick up another. The point is, just write something. In color. Your color.

You Are What You Color

Now you are going to play. Every day for a month.

• Don’t plan this last part, and don’t do it at the same time every day. Just keep your crayons handy. Then, when you sit down to write, pick your favorite colors of the moment and scribble before you begin writing. Or when you sit down to have your coffee, write a few colorful sentences. The only rules are – only with crayons and no seriousness allowed.

• When you are writing, if you find yourself stuck, or seeking impossible perfection – Stop. Then pull out your crayons and look. Look at the colors. Remember the names. Think of new names. Write a few silly sentences. Use your color for that day as a method for unsticking yourself and helping you speak with your authentic voice.

These personal play times are designed to help you learn to bring your creativity out – and not just when you’ve marked it on the calendar. We get stuck because we’re trained ourselves that way. Crayons help bring us back to our kid-selves, to a time when we didn’t know what stuck was. Use color to get back in touch with the fun in creativity, and over time you’ll find it gets easier and easier to use your creativity whenever you want.

Feed your creativity with childish fun and you’ll see that it truly is a creature that loves to run wild and free.

Care to share and help inspire someone else? We’d love to hear some of your color names, or read some of your crayon-induced sentences. And next time your boss schedules one of those brain storming sessions, bring enough crayons and paper for everyone and share the fun.

Karen Daniels has her M.A. in psychology, is an author, mom, creativity lecturer, and online content specialist who writes Zen Copy , a blog which promotes creative growth and achieving success through effective online writing.

How to Write When You’re Scared Spitless

from Write to Done by guest

A guest post by Jean Sarauer of Virgin Blogger Notes.

It’s 7 a.m., and I’m in trouble.

I’ve got a guest post due for a popular blog in a few hours . . . A new writing client expects an outline of a marketing piece first thing tomorrow . . . The pitch I submitted to a local magazine was a hit, and now the editor wants the article for the next issue.

You’d think such a sizzling stack of opportunities would have me salivating all over myself.

Instead, I’m scared spitless. My heart pounds, my stomach lurches, and fear has me pinned to the mat.

If you’ve been writing for more than 7.5 seconds, chances are you’ve spent some face-time with fear too.

Maybe you’ve experienced:

• Fear of failure.
• Fear of writer’s block.
• Fear of rejection.
• Fear of success.
• Fear of criticism.
• Fear of financial ruin.

Whew!

With a list like that cheering us on, it’s a wonder we ever string more than two sentences together.

Still, the show must go on, and just as actors learn to work with stage fright, we writers must carry on with page fright.

For me, carrying on means experimenting with self-coaching techniques to find the ones that let my creativity flow despite an ever-present fear-factor. Through testing, tweaking, and combining these methods, I’ve created a simple process to help myself and other writers move from paralyzed to productive.

Here’s how it works:

1. Recognize fear. Fear is a shape shifter. Although it’s easy to spot when it’s smacking us around in a full-frontal assault, sometimes it’s masked in behaviors like mindless eating or dawdling in the face of deadlines. These forms of fear may seem harmless, but they undermine our work and health and need to be seen for what they are.
2. Return to reality. When I’m in the midst of a major fear-fest, my body is present, but my mind drifts to faraway lands where rejection lurks under every lamp post. To shrink fear and get back to reality where I can get some work done, I breathe deeply and slowly, touch objects in my physical environment, and stretch to release tension from my body.
3. Stop struggling. Just like a snare tightens around a frightened, struggling rabbit, fear’s claws sink in deeper when we resist it. Fear is an instinctive, as well as a conditioned, response to the risk that’s part of living a creative life. When I remember that, I save my energy for writing instead of squandering it in an eternal wrestling match.
4. Listen. Even though I don’t applaud its arrival, fear often delivers important messages. I’ve learned to sit quietly for a moment and ask myself what I’m really afraid of. This helps bring insecurities, triggers, and potential dangers to the surface where they can be addressed as needed.
5. Recommit. Writing is a choice. We have the option to let our blogs sit dormant, turn down writing jobs, and break contracts. When we’re scared, we forget there’s a whole world of ways to be creative and make a living, and that we chose this one. Consciously recommitting to our work, if that’s truly what we wish to do, restores our sense of power.
6. Get in the flow. Practicing the previous steps puts fear into perspective; moving into the creative process helps keep it there. The key is to work quickly, staying immersed in the writing process, without judging the work. For me, this means writing ‘fat and fast’ rough drafts without thought to sentence structure or punctuation. As my fingers move across the keys, words appear on the screen, and momentum builds. If my project is in later stages, I’ll work in quick sweeps, making easy changes without getting bogged down in the pursuit of perfection. My work will need fine tuning soon, but right now, it’s all about building up that momentum.
7. Take a breather. I’ve learned the hard way that fear sneaks up on me when I let my batteries run low. Even though taking breaks is the last thing my creative spirit wants to do when it’s on a roll, I step away for a few minutes here and there to refresh and recharge.
8. Sculpt and polish. Words like ‘revise’ and ‘edit’ make me twitchy, so I use softer language like ’sculpt’ or ‘whittle’ to describe the home stretch activities. At this stage doubts can pop up fast, and doubts are to fear what gasoline is to a flame . . . . Whooosh! If you feel that big fiery rush of fear come over you as you polish your work, acknowledge it, take some deep breaths, and keep working if you’re able. If not, repeat the above steps as needed to complete your project.

I’d love to tell you that practicing this process will eliminate your writing fears forever, but that’s not true. Odds are, fear will be waiting at your desk in some form the next time you start a new project, work with a new editor, or shift writing gears. Perhaps, it’s already there.

That’s okay though. We’re all fraidy-cat writers sometimes, and there’s no shame in that. No, the only real shame would be if we let our fears hold us back from experiencing the wild adventure of this writing life.

Your turn: How do you deal with your writing fears?

Jean Berg-Sarauer is a writer and blogger living in beautiful northwestern Wisconsin. She provides information and inspiration to beginning bloggers at Virgin Blogger Notes.

How To Have Zen In Your Pen Again And Again

from Write to Done by guest

A guest post by John Sherry of Real Simple People

We all want the write stuff. The ability to craft wonderful words that inspire, motivate and delight. Words that simply flow freely and naturally from our imagination to the page. Deep stuff. Powerful stuff. Magical stuff. Like a kind of creative Zen state in literary action.

Leading to brilliant blogs, awesome articles or best selling books that make their mark. With us being the veritable master of creating cracking content with effortless ease. Of having a penchant with the pen.

Wouldn’t that be great?

But right know that may seem somewhat far fetched. You’ve come to a halt. Nothing new to say it seems. The writing on the wall for your writing career.

Busy daily lives full of chaotic minds jamming any potential creative spark. Mundane Mondays and weary weekends hardly making you a source of stimulating sentences. You are tired and dispirited. You can’t switch on because you can’t switch off.

Maybe this is you….?

• You get writers block on a regular basis
• New ideas are increasingly hard to find
• Your are having less drive and energy with your writing
• You are tempted to do other things
• Everyone else’s writing seems better than yours

Don’t fret, it’s a common condition; authors ailment, I call it. Even the great and good have succumbed to it. Everyone loses track. Has energy dips, dry spells and inspirational indifference. I often wonder what the original names were that Shakespeare gave to his plays when he was under its spell. High Season Nights Asleep or A Big Fuss About Not Much At All before he got the titles just right.

It’s part of being the finished article to create the finished article.

But don’t put down your pen just yet. Don’t still that quill. You can get your manuscripting mojo back like never before. And connect to a fertile supply of inventive ideas that turns your writing from horrific to prolific.

The yen for zen can start again and here’s how.

Outside Influence

To fan the flames inside you need to get outside. Leave your four walls and go where there are no walls to artistic flair. The open air. Or people watching as it is popularly called. Take a space and simply observe. See people go by. The rich tapestry of life.

Wait and watch. Don’t take notes initially. Just drink in the scene in front of you from the different people who pass by to their fashions or conversations, even their movements. See what stirs in your imagination. Soon you will notice little nuances. Maybe the sun will come out and change what’s in front of you even more. Perhaps an old couple will totter by holding hands which could trigger memories of your younger love life or the joys of stable marriage or simply the power of holding hands. Let it transport you.

There is a rich oasis outside and in so many locations. Airports. Town centres. Parks and seasides. Even your own local area backyard if you take a look. The world awaits with a world of possibilities. Get outside.

Get Moving

When people are stuck they aren’t moving. And that includes the mind. You are stuck because your head is stuck too. Thinking the same things and doing the same things. Repeatedly. You need a different kind of movement. A complete system type of one.

Get moving by doing something active that activates adrenaline, boosts endorphin production and gets blood flowing. This ending of stagnation within the body will also touch the mind connected to it. Now it doesn’t have to be too heavy. An hour or so gardening will suffice. A bicycle ride will do. Or better still gentle exercise like swimming. Even Tai Chi works as it balances mind and body. Something that gets the heart working and a new flow started. One that will lead to a feel good factor which stimulates brain activity. That pumps and feeds a fresher outlook into your pysche and your pen.

Take Laughter Medicine

When writing begins to falter the grumps can take over. A serious air starts to hang around. You get narky, touchy or frustrated which, in turn, forms a vicious circle of gloomy expectation. Deflation soon becomes depression as dark moods descend. It all seems a waste of time.

Do the opposite. Seek out an injection of humour and laughter. Spend time with people you find funny or who tell funny stories as there could be great material there. Gather friends and family together for silly nights playing games. Or watch comedy shows and films that help you laugh your troubles aside. This awakens a jovial atmosphere which is far easier to work in, live in and discover inspiration in. It’s a real health giving medicine too!

Blogger’s Bonus

Finally, if you are a blogger, here’s a bonus tip for top notch inventiveness.

Check out other blogs especially those in your niche or similiar sector. Not specifically just to read some excellent posts by other bloggers, but to utilise the comments section. Successful blogs get oodles of comments, normally by other bloggers keen on their subject matter. Being writers themselves they often leave a micro post with cracking insight as a comment.

Now, if one post has 30 comments and there are 50 posts on that blog, just imagine what great thoughts could be generated from reading all of them? If that’s your genre they will be talking your language and giving you free input. Minimum time investement, maximum impact!

Inspiration is everywhere but we need to be in a state to witness and record it. Not a right state but a write state. A calmer and more carefree one. Practice these and you will soon unlock a more relaxed yet potent awareness in which your pen becomes the zen and you the master of the written word.

***

John writes his blog on how to live as a real simple person with tips anyone anywhere can use for a carefree, uncomplicated life. At Real Simple People he believes life isn’t rocket science, but rocket salad. He is a member of the A-List Blogger Club.

The A-List Blogger Club is an absolute goldmine. Not only do you have access to all the information you need to start, develop and publizise your blog, you also can also interact with fellow-bloggers worldwide. It’s a true community full of helpful people where friendships are formed, advice and support shared, and encouragement is standard. I’m honest, I can’t be without it. ~ John Sherry of Real Simple People

Eat, Pray, Blog

from Write to Done by guest

A guest post by Katie Tallo of Momentum Gathering.

If you could order it off a menu you would. “I’ll take the life changer please. You know, the holiday where I get to indulge in the best food on the planet, quiet my deeper self and discover true, passionate love. That one.”

Reality check please!

The majority of us order whatever canned vacation the tour companies dish out. Once a year, we take a direct flight to some cheap southern locale where we eat greasy buffet food and drink enough watered-down booze to dull our deeper selves.

Or we sign up for a whirlwind tour that leaves us exhausted but self-satisfied that we saw it all, did it all and tried it all, even if we did have to drag our asses through sixteen cathedrals, forty-two museums and a dozen cheesy tourist destinations in seven days. It’s no wonder your passion gets left on the tarmac back home.

Blogging can be similar. Despite a suitcase full of inspiration when you start out, a blogger’s journey into the big bountiful blogosphere can feel like a cut-rate all-inclusive — a giant buffet that all starts to taste the same or a whirlwind tour of the endless avenues you can venture down towards becoming the best, the happiest, the richest, the most SEO-savvy, the most honest, the most strategic, the most prolific blogger on the bus.

It can leave you feeling dizzy, exhausted and ready to pack up and head back to your home page.

But there is hope for the travel weary blogger. There really is somewhere out there other than destination blahosphere. In fact, there is a journey that once embarked upon can be that life changer – that adventure that enriches your senses, awakens your soul and engages you in a love affair with life. Here’s your ticket!

Clear Your Path

Clear away the flood of subscriptions, feeds, follows, obligations and guilt clogging your path. Let go trying to be perfect, trying to keep up, trying to comment, connect, moderate and post all the time. You cannot do it all, see it all and engage with everyone. The blogosphere is just too big. Let go the whirlwind tours. Your family will thank you. Feed your soul, not your inbox. Feed it with what brings you to tears, gives you shivers, empowers you and resonates most deeply with you. That is enough.

Create Your Own Itinerary

Only you know where it is you want your blog to go and what you want it to become. Be open to adventure and other people’s ideas, but choose your own way to get there. If it’s a path that feels right, take it. If it’s a mistake, try another, tweak it, or change course. In blogging, you are your own tour guide and you call the shots, decide how fast or slow to move forward and in what direction. No one else has that power. That’s what’s so great about writing your very own blog. You decide everything. That is freedom.

Pack Lightly

Journey with a light heart. Don’t take yourself or your blog so seriously. You don’t have to be the best. Walk with easy steps, with some friends to accompany you on your journey, without being overwhelmed by anything. Let it be light. That is success.

Take Your Time

There is a time for everything and only you can feel when it’s right to take certain steps, whether it’s monetizing or renaming, starting a second blog or creating a course – do it fast or do it slow, but do it at your pace, in your own time. That is productivity.

Enjoy the Ride

Sit back once in a while and read through your archives and comments. Let go posting at a frenzied pace and bask in what you’ve already created. Learn from what you’ve done, look ahead at what you could do next, but take moments to just look, learn and love your blog. That is gratitude.

Now go. Eat, pray, blog and let the sun shine upon your journey!

Katie Tallo is a Contributing Writer for Write to Done, one of the Managing Editors for The Daily Brainstorm and a director, motivator, runner, vegan and mother. She writes a blog called Momentum Gathering where she seeks to inspire simple, joyful life change.

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Join the A-List Blogger Club this week and receive a BONUS VIDEO: “How to Grow a Killer Blog – 5 Secrets Top Bloggers Don’t Share”. Click on the image below to find out why over 700 members rave about the A-List Blogger Club created by Leo Babauta and Mary Jaksch.

7 Mindfulness Tips to Energize Your Writing

from Write to Done by Mary Jaksch

A guest post by Alexander De Foe

Many people don’t realize that their greatest resources for writing, creativity, and motivation lie within them already. By practicing Zen techniques of mindfulness and “no-mind” meditation you can actually inspire your inner artist into action without doing much conscious work at all.

That’s right, almost paradoxically, a state of “no-mind” can produce excellent results in your life in terms of creativity and productivity.

It seems like a paradox, because in our world we’re often told to think things through, and that hard work requires lots of conscious effort. How about inspiration and true artistic expression? How are these factors synonymous with conscious effort? In fact, I’ve found that simply being still and present in the moment can result in some of the greatest inspirations for writing.

Do you ever find yourself using the below “mental excuses” when planning a new article or project? In this post, we’ll look at how the Mind can bring up all sorts of excuses that limit and hold us back, and how to practice Mindfulness to re-center and re-energize your creativity.

1. Analysis paralysis

During the process of writing do you notice asking yourself questions like “is that the best sentence to open with?” “is there a better way to phrase this paragraph?” “have I written this well enough?” The mind can be a great critic and push you in the right direction, especially when carving out superfluous elements in your writing while sharpening pertinent points. However over-doing it can result in the tendency of over-relying on your mind and undervaluing your heart in the writing process.

Mindfulness Practice 1 - Let your mind calm down for a moment by taking a long deep breath. Once it stops mentally butting in and critiquing your work, listen to your heart by getting a ‘feel’ for what you are writing, rather than merely analyzing the content.

2. If…

Some writers find themselves spending more time on thinking rather than writing! “Hmm, If I had more time, I could…” “If I had more knowledge on the subject I could…” “If I had a better computer I could…” If’s are often the mind’s way of expressing uncertainty, and can be a major roadblock for you in learning to trust yourself and your capabilities.

Mindfulness Practice 2 - Recognize that “If’s” have their purpose, but just ask yourself if you could let go of the particular “if” for just this moment. By doing so, you begin to let go of the thought of “if” and embrace the present moment. By being mindful and present, mentally-imposed limitations can be distinguished from true limitations much more easily.

3. The need for perfection

I used to know someone who would edit his work almost to the point of compulsion, revising draft after draft after draft until every word was perfectly placed in his essay. The need for perfection arises from mental standards, it’s often your mind’s way of saying “this is how things should be for your work to be legitimate, interesting and successful.” Once again, I’d like to stress the point that many writers have been taught to write from their heads, not their hearts, and the latter is where I believe all truly inspired writing originates.

Mindfulness Practice 3 - Instead of demanding of yourself that your work meet a certain standard, ask yourself “what would I like to write if I could write anything in the world?” Become mindful of where the energy in your mind and body flows to and trust in this experience to connect with your inner voice.

“A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.” -W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938

4. Being good enough

Letting your opinion of yourself shape the quality of your writing is something we all do but few of us realize. If someone ever told you that “you are a bad writer” or that your work wasn’t up to scratch, you may have held on to that false belief and carried it with you unconsciously, and now it may come out in elements of your work.

Personally, in this regard meditation has been the best tool I have ever come across for writing, rather than conducting psychotherapy or self-analysis I simply take myself out of the picture when writing and let the writing partake in it’s own creation. To those new to Zen, this may seem almost insane. “How can I take the ‘ego’ or ’self’ out of the writing process?” some may wonder. However simply sitting in a quite meditation for 20 minutes or so can often allow you to write naturally and seamlessly with little “editing” from your mind at all.

5. Motivation and rationalization (“I’ll do it tomorrow”)

One of the major issues with being successful at writing, business, life, as a matter of fact anything, is putting your energy into doing what you plan to do, rather than putting your energy into planning what you plan to do. I think we’ve all fallen into the trap at least once. It’s the one where we spend 3 consecutive days convincing ourselves that the article, or essay, or project, can be put off until tomorrow. In fact we spend more time on this convincing process than we would have spent on writing!

Become mindful that you are withdrawing into yourself and ruminating, rather than expressing yourself externally. Notice when you begin thinking about a task rather than doing it and ask yourself “would I rather internalize and think right now to no end or would I rather be producing something real right now?” Use mindfulness to catch yourself and transform rumination into action on-the-spot.

6. Distractions

Distractions are interesting, because they can cause us to question the value we assign writing. How do you mentally regard your blog? How about your business? The value of your writing? A professional writer who gets paid by the word probably regards his work as being of a higher value than someone who writes recklessly with little consistency and tact. How does your writing style speak to how you value the process of writing?

Becoming mindful of the value you assign your writing involves setting aside time every day to write and treating it as almost a “sacred space.” It is your time to be fully mindful and present while writing, and as you become more immersed and write consciously, you’ll find yourself setting more appropriate boundaries to filter against external (and internal!) distractions.

“Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.”

7. Other mental chatter

Like with anything worthwhile, I recommend writers give themselves fully to their writing. Immerse yourself in the process and be totally mindful of every moment. For me, writing is a Zen-like state, without a doubt, and I believe that only in this state can the true magic of inspiration happen. It’s not when we think tirelessly and dwell on the best way to write something that inspired writing really flows. Quite the opposite.

Quick tips for mindful writing:

• Remember to bring yourself back to the present moment when you find yourself over-thinking about what you are writing.
• Bring your heart into your writing, don’t just write from the mind.
• Instead of aiming to write the perfect article, aim to write the most honest, useful, or even “fun” article.
• Find your source of inspiration and motivation in your dreams, not in your expectations of yourself.
• Pick up on yourself thinking about doing something when you could really be using that time for†doing that same task.
• Notice how you rationalize self-limiting excuses, and then let them go, take your excuses out of your writing process.
• Be fully present during writing, treat it like a Zen meditation state where your focus is immersed and unbroken.

Learning Mindfulness isn’t just useful for creative writing, it can be a great way of allowing the energy of your inner-heart to permeate all of your daily life experiences. I believe most of us have been †taught to be “living in our minds” to keep up with the world we live in. Too many have lost that connection to their inner wisdom and presence, a source of inspiration that was always there, just waiting to be heard.

Alexander De Foe is a Coach and licensed Counsellor from Melbourne, Australia. His e-book 8 Reflections on Following Your True Life Path is available for free download at his website.

Saints and sinners

For all their talk of Italy, few of the pre-Raphaelites went there. Instead, says Rosemary Hill, it was literature – and their own tangled love lives – that inspired the brotherhood's richest works

Detail from John Ruskin's St Ursula. COURTESY OF THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM

"Shakespeare never went to Venice, Homer never went to Troy, Dante never went to Hell." The relationship between artists and their source material can be oblique to the point of non-existence, and the seven founder members who in 1848 declared themselves to be the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood knew little about Raphael and less at first hand about Italy, which none of them had seen. It was in London, among the soot-stained terraces of Bloomsbury, that they met to further their passionate resolve to transform British art. They wanted "to have genuine ideas to express", as one of them, William Michael Rossetti, put it later, and they were "to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them".

Like many rebels, they were clearer about what they were against – the Royal Academy, the older generation and the "slosh" school of painting – than what they were for. Since Raphael was considered the pinnacle of classical art, they would depose him; they would prefer his supposedly primitive predecessors. It was William Holman Hunt who suggested the term "pre-Raphaelite", thus setting in train more than a 150 years of critical debate and art-historical hair splitting. To their admirers and detractors alike, the pre-Raphaelites would remain essentially English. Their work had more to do with the questions that troubled Victorian London in an age of revolutions abroad and unrest at home, and with their own, often turbulent private lives, than with the real Italy.

It was idea of Italy in poetry, romance and national prejudice that echoed through the paintings, determining how they were seen, criticised and praised. Among the first to take issue with the name and its implications was Charles Dickens, who had fun in the journal Household Words complaining about "this terrible Police" as he called them in 1850 "that is to disperse all Post Raphael offenders". What next, he wondered: pre-Newtonian science perhaps, or pre-Chaucerian verse? The target of his sarcasm was a work that had nothing apparently to do with Raphael or Italy. It was a painting by John Everett Millais of the young Christ in his father's workshop. It was the realism that offended Dickens and many others, with Mary shown as a simple peasant woman, "horrible", he thought, "in her ugliness". To his friend Daniel Maclise, however, Dickens confided the underlying reason for his hostility. "If such things were allowed to sweep on," he wrote, "three fourths of this Nation would be under the feet of priests, in ten years." To him, as to many other Englishmen, pre-Renaissance Italy meant the threat of Roman Catholicism. On Guy Fawkes Night that year, the newly appointed Cardinal Wiseman was burned in effigy.

What Italy really meant to Hunt, Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the three most important members of the original brotherhood, was certainly a sense of the forbidden, whether Anglo-Catholic, as in Millais's case, or romantic. For Rossetti, whose father was an Italian political refugee, there was a personal identification with a tantalisingly half-known personal history. But most of all, their Italy was an imaginative space in which to develop their art – a space that had become briefly unfashionable with the artistic avant-garde. While tourists and collectors still went south, the artistically minded among the rising generation espoused the Gothic revival and the north, avoiding Italy as the home of classicism.

The person who made Italy fashionable for the contrarian young was the critic John Ruskin, who was taken there by his parents. Later, as he began to explore it for himself in the early 1840s, he encountered the so-called "primitives" and began to alter his own style of drawing accordingly, making detailed studies that were not picturesque but truthfully "ugly", as he put it, in their recording of the facts. It was the second volume of his Modern Painters in which he extolled the brilliance of Fra Angelico, Tintoretto and others who "crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice", that lit the trail of enthusiasm that became the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Ruskin's descriptions of the art he admired urged imitation, but not of a literal sort. He extolled "moral as well as material truth"; the "imagination associative", he told his enthusiastic young readers in Gower Street, "was the grandest mechanical power that the human intelligence possesses".

No critic has ever exercised more influence than Ruskin did over high Victorian England. Not only did the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood spring largely from the vision held out in Modern Painters, but his account of Italian architecture, especially the use of coloured brick and stone inspired the hundreds of Victorian Venetian buildings that spread across the country after 1850. As a vigorous Protestant himself, Ruskin intervened to rescue his protégés from the opprobrium of Dickens. The year after the attack in Household Words he wrote to the Times to reassure the nation that, despite their "unfortunate though not inaccurate name", these young men were not Romanists; they were in search simply of artistic integrity and "stern facts" rather than the "fair pictures" which had taken over art after the time of Raphael. They would paint either directly from nature, "what they see", he promised, or "what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent".

This second alternative was less of a manifesto than a carte blanche, and despite the pre-Raphaelites' enduring reputation for painting directly from nature, many of their subjects were highly mediated, the details taken from literature and invention as much as observation. Millais's first exhibition picture as a pre-Raphaelite was Isabella. Based on a story in Boccaccio as retold by Keats, who hadn't been to Italy either, it is set in an interior that looked as much like Pugin's House of Lords, opened the same year that Isabella was shown, as 14th-century Italy. It was Keats and Browning who continued to inspire the first pre-Raphaelites. None of them ever got to know Italy well, and Rossetti never went at all.

In spite of which, as Ruskin followed Modern Painters with The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 and The Stones of Venice in 1850, Italianate balconies and polychrome churches started to appear all over England. The Victorians began to enjoy the idea of themselves as latter-day Venetians, independent merchants at the centre of a great trading empire. Yet as William Butterfield, architect of All Saints church Margaret Street in London, put it, "I am . . . persuaded that an Architect gets but little by travel. I am only glad that I had made up my own mind about a hundred things in art before seeing Italy." In Butterfield's densely decorated and dimly lit churches, as in Millais's and Rossetti's paintings, where scenery and figures are flattened to the point of pattern, everything external is excluded that might dilute the power of imagination. What after all might be "the actual facts" of the moment when Dante is spurned by Beatrice? There can only be an emotional truth conveyed by tension between hieratic figures on whose exchange of glances no glimmer of outside reality intrudes.

Among the wider pre-Raphaelite circle some did make the real Italian landscape their subject. But on the whole they were less successful. Ruskin's critical arguments, if followed too literally, could lead to disappointment, as even John Brett, arguably the best of them, was to find. A follower of Ruskin, he took his advice about painting from nature and spent five months working in and near the Val d'Aosta. The resulting picture was accepted at the Royal Academy only to be described by Ruskin as showing no more than "what a Piedmontese valley is like in July" and being in consequence just "Mirror's work, not man's". Sensing perhaps the unfairness of this, Ruskin at least had the decency to buy the picture himself.

Beyond the inner circle of the brotherhood new and younger admirers of pre-Raphaelitism began to emerge. This second generation was more willing to travel, though they went in search of the author of Modern Painters as much as Tintoretto. Ruskin actually paid for the young Edward Burne-Jones to visit Italy in the autumn of 1859. Travelling with his fellow artist Val Prinsep, he piously followed in the master's footsteps: "Ruskin in hand, we sought out every cornice, design or monument praised by him." Though he came to regard Italy as a second home, Burne-Jones was not much more open to its direct influence than Rossetti.

Gradually, and somewhat to Ruskin's irritation, Burne-Jones developed ideas of his own, daring to admire Michelangelo and rediscovering Botticelli. In introducing Ruskin to the work of Carpaccio, however, he repaid the debt of influence. Ruskin was captivated by the paintings of the Legend of St Ursula, especially the scene showing Ursula visited by an angel in a dream, and he made a detailed copy of it. Yet as so often in the pre-Raphaelites' engagement with the Italian, the resolve to depict what was there – to educate and reform national taste – was also a way of treating what lay beneath: currents of troubled emotion and frustrated desire. Ruskin's St Ursula is yet another rich and airless interior, occupied by another of the doomed, semi-conscious young women who haunt these pictures.

Over the decades their imaginary Italy had become the landscape in which the tangled reality of the artists' love lives was played out. By the 1870s, the freshness of the early dream had been tarnished by bitter experience. In Ruskin's increasingly disordered imagination Ursula became identified with, Rose La Touche, with whom he had been obsessively in love from her teens until her death at the age of 27. Copying the picture tipped him into one the psychotic episodes that blighted his later years. He had already separated from his wife Effie, who obtained an annulment on grounds of non-consummation, and was now married to her husband's early disciple Millais.

For Rossetti, the adultery of Paolo and Francesca, the tragic lovers whom he had depicted in 1855, had parallels with his feelings for William Morris's wife Jane, and he was haunted by another ghost, that of Lizzie Siddal, his model, later his wife, who committed suicide two years after they married. Rossetti buried his poems in her grave, only to exhume her and them later, and in her last incarnation, in his work as Beata Beatrix, a vision of Dante's mistress at the point of death, there is an air of exhumation too. Rossetti reworked the image over decades and came to see it, as Ruskin saw Ursula's dream, as a visionary moment, "a spiritual transfiguration", imbued with morbid eroticism.

Such complicated passions were reflected in a stronger palette. The more highly-coloured and voluptuous influence of the renaissance replaced that of the primitives, and for such insoluble situations there was no narrative answer. Scenes from Boccaccio and Dante gave way to static, monumental figures whose threat, or promise, only hint at what comes next. In Holman Hunt's Il Dolce Far Niente, a painting begun with one model with whom he was obsessively in love and finished as a portrait of Fanny Waugh, whom he married, the subject arches languorously towards the viewer. Meanwhile across the Channel, impressionism was transforming landscape art with new ideas of painting from nature, but the pre-Raphaelites remained untouched, involved as they had always been in a domestic English dream.

The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until December. www.ashmolean.org

Critical eye: book reviews roundup

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking | To the End of the Land by David Grossman | A Journey by Tony Blair

"Stephen Hawking has written a short, occasionally facetious, but generally reliable and informative history of classical and quantum mechanics. That is all. That he has adverted to it as an answer to the ultimate question of life is both annoying and inaccurate, but no doubt commercially sensible." An irritated Alexander Waugh in the Spectator went on to say about The Grand Design: "With a little less chutzpah he might also have realised that things of which we cannot see the bottom are not necessarily profound." Roger Penrose in the Financial Times believed the abstruse subject matter to be "made accessible to general readers via apposite analogies" but proceeded to throw complicated doubt on Hawking's "strange-sounding philosophical standpoint of theory-dependent realism". According to John Cornwell in the Daily Telegraph, "Stephen Hawking's reputation as an oracle perhaps has to do with the iconography of his predicament: the unfettered brain ranging across time and space . . . The Grand Design is a speculative book about an exceedingly arcane area of theoretical physics. So what's all this about God?"

"He has aimed as high as it is possible to do in a novel which deals with the great questions of love, intimacy, war, memory and fear of personal and national annihilation – and has overwhelmingly achieved everything." Linda Grant in the Independent was in awe of David Grossman's new novel To the End of the Land, which "will have to be read and re-read to begin to scratch the surface of its ambitions to scrape raw the human heart". The observations of Ora, the protagonist, wrote Justin Cartwright in the Financial Times, "are often moving and sharp, but can also be repetitive and banal . . . Ora herself sums up the problem with the whole book: 'You don't have to pour out a live broadcast of your whole stream of consciousness, right?'" For Theo Tait in the Sunday Times, the novel "is also not only sentimental – often in the best sense of that word – but at times positively gaudy: the Yom Kippur war sections definitely tip over into melodrama . . . Nevertheless, this is a powerful and memorable novel, which movingly evokes the strains of war and peace in one household".

"Bright and breezy in tone, this must rank as the most informal memoir ever produced by an ex-prime minister," Anthony Hilton in the Scotsman noted of Tony Blair's A Journey. "But its various demotic touches – 'you know something?', 'don't get me wrong', 'anyway, you get the point' – should not be allowed to mislead. In terms of full disclosure this is just about as unrewarding as Harold Wilson's far more ponderous account of his first two administrations." Peter Stothard in the Times Literary Supplement judged the book "striking for Blair's powerful sense of himself and his central significance, a confidence comfortingly undimmed by those parts of the past three years spent making money from motivational speeches". According to Roy Hattersley in the New Statesman, "the moral certainty that bursts out of every page makes it more than the usual attempt to justify the unjustifiable . . . The messianic tone is confirmed and intensified by the occasional admission of guilt." What's more, "the public comments on what should remain private matters are written in the style of cheap romantic fiction, and it is so embarrassing to read them that their inclusion in the book raises grave questions about the author's judgment."

'You may now turn over your papers'

Mary Midgley (main picture) prepares to take the exam, with (from top) Will Self, Mary Beard and Geoff Dyer. Photographs: Sarah Lee; Eamonn McCabe; Karen Robinson; Rex

Mary Beard classicist

Would it have been better had some surviving works of ancient authors been lost?

Classical studies are driven by the ambiguities of survival. It is not a question of what we have versus what we do not have (the surviving books of Dio's History of Rome measured against the lost books of Tacitus' – no doubt infinitely sharper – history of the last days of Nero). Classics, as a subject, engages in the curiosities, problems and discontents of survival. It builds on the puzzling, changing identifications of works that are transmitted via the scholarly hands of the monkish middle ages, or those dug up from the sands of Egypt. It makes us face how little we know about what the "survival" (or "loss") of literature means.

Sometimes it's clear enough. Diogenes, the second-rate, second-century AD epicurean philosopher, ensured his own survival by having his thoughts inscribed on the wall of his home city of Oenoanda in what is now Turkey. There was little chance of destroying that. But usually "survival" is a trickier question. Take the short essay "Constitution of Athens", now attributed to the anonymous "Old Oligarch". Is this a work of the Athenian renegade politician Xenophon (with whose works it has been transmitted in medieval manuscripts)? Or is it a weird rightwing tract by a not very bright anti-democrat of about the same period – that is, the late fifth century BC? (Moses Finley always used to say that the modern pseudonym "Old Oligarch" was the problem here: it made him sound like an engaging elderly pub-philosopher, when in fact he was the closest the ancient word came to a fascist – with the exception of Plato.)

Or think, rather differently, of the archaic Greek poetess Sappho. A few of her poems survive, brilliant enough to define the history of love poetry for the next two and a half millennia ("Phainetai moi . . ." as the best one goes in Greek, copied by the Roman poet Catullus in "Ille mi par esse . . ."). But maybe Sappho's reputation has been helped by what we no longer have. Most of her output was, we fear, interminable marriage hymns for the young ladies in her entourage. Lost, and well lost, perhaps.

To think more widely (and not to forget that the origin of Christianity was in the Roman empire), what difference has it made that the four canonical gospels have been canonised as such – so effectively consigning the variants to the scrap heap? The recently published Gospel of Judas gives a hint of a very different tradition, and one in which – as never happens in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – Jesus actually laughs (with all the theological complexity that that involves – does God laugh?). Survival, or not, has theological implications and a theological history.

But the key example is that holy grail of classical scholarship – a holy grail because no one can agree whether it is lost or not – the second book of Aristotle's Poetics (written in the mid fourth century BC). The first book of the Poetics deals with Aristotle's theory of tragedy (the famous discussion of pity, fear and catharsis). The second book, or so we glean from other references in Aristotle, brought the reader back to comedy and to that tricky problem of laughter. The usual scholarly line here is to lament that this work did not make it through the middle ages. Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose ("spaghetti structuralism" according to Slavoj Žižek, but fun all the same) dramatised the disappearance of the last surviving copy: literally eaten as a subversive tract by a gloomy "agelastic" monk, before his whole monastery goes up in flames. And recently such leading scholars as Quentin Skinner have mourned its disappearance: if only we had Aristotle's essay on comedy, writes Skinner, we would understand ancient laughter.

But has it disappeared? And what counts as disappearing? According to Richard Janko, valiantly reviving a (nearly lost) 19th-century theory, the weird little treatise "On Comedy" in a 10th-century manuscript (Tractatus Coislinianus, now in Paris, once on Mount Athos) is actually a summary of this lost work.

So is it or isn't it? Scholarship has not gone with Janko. The essay in the Tractatus is a very mediocre little tract, and most likely – so the orthodox view goes – a jejune compendium of Aristotelian thought by a none-too-bright Byzantine monk. It includes, for example, some very plodding ideas of what makes an audience laugh ("silly dancing", is one prompt to laughter). But could we see it differently? According to Michael Silk (no admirer of the intellectual power of lost Aristotle) we might actually think that, in all its mediocrity, this mediocre work was a reasonable summary of some very mediocre Aristotle – altogether not worth saving. Let's not lament its loss.

Who knows? But this should remind us of the perils of survival (as the question asks us to reflect). Sometimes the best may not survive (and classical nostalgia always suspects that we have inherited some dross while losing some gems). But maybe (and this would be a simplified version of Silk's position on the second book of the Poetics) what we have lost was second-rate all along. Perhaps the history of the transmission of classical texts has been a pretty efficient sorting mechanism: the survival of the fittest.

In a way it was summed up towards the beginning of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. The play's "hero", AE Housman, Cambridge professor and celebrity classicist, is going down to Hades from the Evelyn Nursing Home in Cambridge. He is delighted to interrogate Charon, the boatman taking him across the Styx, wanting to find out more about what happened in Aeschylus' lost play, Myrmidons. Charon looks as if he can deliver. But the joke is that he only tells Housman the lines that Housman knows already, preserved in later quotations and no surprise at all.

The allure of survival turned out to be the survival of what Housman already knew. It complicates the idea of choice and loss.

Geoff Dyer writer

Why are face transplants more controversial than liver transplants?

To get to the heart of this question it is worth examining the moment, in a sketch from the 1970s, when Tommy Cooper takes a seat on a train and looks up at the person opposite. We see, immediately, that it is Adolf Hitler. Cooper is a little uncertain – he knows it's someone famous but is not sure who. "Hang on a moment, I never forget a face . . ." Then, after a pause: "That is a face, isn't it?"

This is funny because we think that the problem is that he doesn't recognise Hitler's face, but in fact he's is not even sure it is a face at all. Because he's not sure it's a face, however, does not mean that it could be, say, a liver. He means it's a rather sad excuse for a face. But the question – "That is a face, isn't it?" – contains a deeper question, the one recognised by Martin Heidegger who was a member of the Nazi party, the party started by Hitler to achieve world domination. The question is not what is a face (or liver) but what is "is" ("Was ist das 'ist'?").

In his different, less phenomenological way, Cooper insists that we do not take things at face value. One's initial response to the question is that it's obvious why liver transplants are not controversial. It is widely accepted now, in a culture of binge-drinking, that the liver as biologically conceived is not up to the demands of modern living. In the era of recreational drug use and happy hours and alcopops, the liver just can't cope. It is not an organ that one has any sentimental attachment to. One could not, for example, imagine a bumper sticker with "I ❤ my liver". The liver is just a dumping ground for toxins. Even by the standards of offal it's a horrible little organ. I can still remember, at school, being served liver with those veins in it. I've never eaten it since.

But then – and this is where the Cooper joke forces us to confront things we take for granted – consider how much more disgusting it would have been if we had been served a human face. Or a chimpanzee's face. But where to stop? Quite often we are served fish with the head on, and when we say "head" we really mean "face". The cheeks are widely considered the sweetest part of a fish. It is also worth bearing in mind that, after a certain number of years in the trade, all fishmongers begin to look rather amphibious. There is, in other words, a concealed assumption in the question: that we are talking about the transplant of a human rather than animal face on to a human being. This is considered completely beyond the pale, even though infantry soldiers are popularly referred to as "dog faces".

Of course the real problem is that the face is bound up with personal identity. In John Woo's film Face/Off John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swap faces, effectively becoming each other. If they had just swapped livers it wouldn't have made much difference to either of them; it would have resulted in a completely pointless film that would no doubt have flopped at the box office. George Orwell understood the way that one's face is tied up with one's identity when he said that by the age of 40 everyone has the face they deserve. Martin Amis updated this: everyone gets the face they can afford. This gets to the heart of the matter. Face transplants are still at an early stage. They are experimental and extremely expensive: what you see is what you get; or, more exactly, what you got is what you see. All of this will no doubt be solved as the technology improves and the kinks are ironed out. As that happens, demand will increase and prices will come down, and we will all be able to walk around looking like whoever we want.

Mary Midgley moral philosopher

"There was a time when people only wanted to sense the moon, but now they want to see it" (Goethe). Discuss.

This is just one more fascinating clue to the way in which the Enlightenment has shrunk and tidied up our European life-world. As the ethologists have told us, every species has its distinctive world, its Umwelt, the peculiar space in which it feels that it lives. A pigeon's world is quite a different one from that of the peregrine that eats it. Neither of them could make any sense of the other. And because we humans vary so much in our cultures, we too live in a number of different life-worlds, which are constantly changing.

What Goethe was talking about was, no doubt, the explosive effect of Galileo's telescope on the European world-picture. Seen through that telescope, Jupiter suddenly had moons, and what had seemed to be the slightly uneven silver disc of our own moon turned out to be as rough, as pitted and as messy as the surface of the earth itself. Notoriously, this drastically affected cosmology and religion, both of which had taken for granted a secure and perfect heavenly realm, in which the moon was included. But Goethe, I think, was talking about another imaginative effect which has not had so much attention.

What did he mean by sensing the moon? We don't have his German word, but I take it he was distinguishing between taking in something directly as a whole and being able to sort out its different elements. David Copperfield sensed that Miss Murdstone didn't much like little boys, and he didn't really need a fuller analysis to tell him he was right. After Galileo, European inquirers were able to give the moon that detailed analysis, and they have eventually provided it with a pretty full street guide, filling in the Mare Imbrium and the Mare Tranquillitatis and all the rest of it. This is surely a splendid achievement. But is this process of increasing detail – of continually sharpening up the focus – enough? Does it need a wider background?

When people just sensed the moon, they were admiring that silver disc in the context of the heavens as a whole. They saw it reigning among the stars, being lost among shifting clouds and emerging from them, rising and setting over the earth. That variable heaven was for them a symbol of majesty, of the vaster background that gave a sense to their lives. As Kant put it in the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Today, it is not possible for many human beings to see that starry heaven at all because of the light pollution that covers our towns. Details of the moon, and the other heavenly bodies, are, however, brought to us in books or on television. If we wish, we can know infinitely more about them than our most learned ancestors could ever have dreamed of. Indeed, the Enlightenment has done a magnificent job of increasing our knowledge. The further job – which its original prophets glimpsed very clearly – of putting that knowledge in its wider context hasn't been done so well. It is not a job for science but for wisdom. It needs more work.

Will Self writer

Is there something inherently coarsening about sport?

Montaigne said, "Mistrust a man who takes games too seriously; it means he doesn't take life seriously enough." Yet this remark, coming as it does from an essayist who elsewhere in his multifarious oeuvre confesses to great enjoyment of both parlour games and the chase, may strike us as an admonition aimed at the author himself. It seems to indicate that Montaigne saw his own sensibility as poised on a knife-edge between being submerged in the ephemeral trivialities of contingent competition, and the lasting importance of life properly engaged with.

We are all familiar in our own lives with the spectacle of the sports fanatic, or the compulsive games player, whose engagement with the wider world is mediated through the lens of their pursuit. In British culture it seems sometimes to be the casethat discussion of football has the character of an ulterior male language, running beneath the main course of communication in such a way as to suborn its function.

To hear men in pubs – or on trains, in offices, indeed anywhere at all – speak of this goal or that team selection is instantly to apprehend that what they discuss is not football per se, but rather life in all its conflict and variety; and that the proximate dispute about refereeing decisions may stand only as a proxy for misgivings about anything from the presence of British ground forces in Afghanistan to the wisdom of cutting government spending so far and so fast.

Men – and some women – watch football, dispute and debate football, and even occasionally kick a ball around, because it offers them a small-scale model of life, not necessarily because it distracts them from life altogether. Claude Lévi-Strauss observed in The Savage Mind that the virtue of a small-scale model is that it sacrifices the sensible in favour of the intelligible. Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history – but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence. Within the compass of football or rugby pitch; on the baize of a roulette or poker table; in a squash court and around a running track – all of these are confined arenas within which the application of normative constraints to the vagaries of individual character and the valences of individual aptitude can be assessed and, more importantly, projected. It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play – their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force – can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life.

Surely it is this aspect of sport which makes it quite so beguiling for those that follow it. I stress, this is not simply a retread of the grotesque notion that the first world war was won "on the playing fields of Eton". In what sense at all could that war be said to have been won at all? The compulsive application of sporting metaphor to the conduct of entrenched slaughter was just one of the figures within which can be discerned the extent to which mechanised warfare veered away from any social contract whatsoever. The famous "Christmas truce" of 1914, when British and German troops staged a football match in no man's land, was utterly eclipsed by subsequent episodes when advancing British troops dribbled footballs in front of them after going over the top, the aim being to kick the ball into the enemy's trenches.

Here, sport as a re-enactment – on a small scale – of the social contract is replaced by a lopsided metaphorical instantiation of sporting zeal. After all, what would it have been like for the British dribblers to have scored a goal, let alone "won" the one-sided match they were engaged in? It is in contexts such as these, where sport runs up against life situations that cannot be mediated by the same normative rules, that sport risks looking too facile and too juvenile to be anything but a coarsening influence on the lives and minds of people.

The "rumble in the jungle" between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; the kidnap and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the disasters at Ibrox stadium and Hillsborough – these are not, properly understood, sporting events at all: they are sociopolitical occurrences that have imploded into the small-scale models of life that sport offers. And it is when we see sports pundits, commentators and fans struggling to come to terms with such events that we feel most strongly the pathos of the sporting life, and the bewilderment of its habituees.

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it. If I were to recast Montaigne's aperçu it would be thus: "Mistrust a man who takes games too seriously; it means he may be incapable of taking life seriously enough." In static and small-scale societies – one thinks of the ancient Greek city states, or of contemporary traditional societies (if there are any such truly still existent) – there may be no necessary conflict between the seriousness of sport and the seriousness of life. Moreover, in as much as the former coarsens it may do so for a purpose: the ritualised forms of conflict employed by Native Americans such as the Cheyenne and the Sioux, prior to the fulfilment of Manifest Destiny, can be seen as just one example of the way sport and warfare merge seamlessly to provide a graduated response to the problem of collective male aggression. (And arguably, so-called football hooliganism in our society is another example of the same phenomenon; it's worth noting that in both arenas the mounting of raids and the taking of scalps is crucial.)

I say "arguably", because we do not live in a static or self-contained society, and it's almost impossible to view local and amateur sport as an analogue of the social process. On the contrary, if sport in our culture exists on a continuum, it is one that ascends from the local kick-around pitch to such mighty boondoggles as the 2012 Olympic Games, or the farrago that was the England football team's petulant failure at this year's World Cup. The extreme professionalisation of sport and its internationalisation exposes the fallacious character of how the small-scale model of sport might operate.

In lieu of young sports players discovering how to conduct themselves in constrained playing environments, so as to be able to take their place in similarly delimited social and economic contexts, we have the spectacle (if it's possible to imagine such a thing) of multi-millionaires refusing to train for their professional games unless they are allowed access to their computer games consoles. That this really did take place in South Africa confirms not merely an inability to take life seriously enough, or a coarsening of the individuals' concerned sensibilities, but a deep and painful kind of stultification.

I cleave to the Montaigne quote with which I began this answer, but lingering in the back of my mind was a series of observations made by the protagonist of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. In all his years of observing sportsmen and women train, this character – the sportswriter of the title – has come to the conclusion that sport, even if it attracts intelligent people, succeeds ultimately in dumbing them down by the sheer force of the repetitive physical activities they are engaged in all day every day. As it is in complex late capitalist society, so it is in complex late capitalist sport: intense specialisation equals mindless repetition.

In conclusion: sport may not inevitably coarsen, but in the particular form of society we have it undoubtedly stupefies. But then, since most of us are stupefied anyway, why not play up! And play the game!