Prison ships have forever been associated with the worst excesses of English injustice. On the eve of Waterloo, Napoleon stiffened the resolve of his troops by demanding: “Soldiers, let those among you who have been prisoners of the English describe to you the hulks, and detail the most frightful miseries which they endured!”
A search back through the archives of the Guardian and the Observer sees the phrase invariably used as a shorthand for draconian horrors. One advert from 1896 invited visitors to come and experience “Manchester’s latest and best sensation: a prison hulk 100 years old”, shown “as when full of prisoners” with “high class wax models”.
This weekend, to our national shame, the idea of a prison barge sails out of those archives and back into the news pages. The Bibby Stockholm, currently being refitted in Falmouth, is to moor at Portland, near Weymouth, to house 500 asylum seekers. Will future generations again be invited to look back and imagine the lives of the desperate people incarcerated offshore, and the wealthy democracy that put them there?
Oven ready
Culture wars come in many flavours. One of my new heroes is Alberto Grandi, a Marxist history professor at Parma university, who has, deliciously, been taking on Giorgia Meloni’s nationalist government over the politics of Italian food heritage. Meloni’s agriculture minister – and brother-in-law – Francesco Lollobrigida has proposed, preposterously, a task force to monitor whether Italian restaurants around the world are using “authentic” Italian ingredients and recipes. Grandi is the author of a book, Denominazione di origine inventata (Invented Designation of Origin), which refutes those ideas of culinary purity. In his hugely popular podcast, he caused most outrage with his insistence that the first authentic pizzeria opened not in Naples but in New York in 1911.
Reading about that argument reminded me of a family visit to that pizzeria, Lombardi’s near Greenwich Village. I had a hazy memory of going there some years previously, and although my wife and daughters and I were at the end of a sweltering August day of sightseeing, I did that annoying dad thing of insisting we all had to walk there for supper. It was much further than I advertised. We were gruffly seated at Lombardi’s next to a downstairs toilet. The pizzas – the world’s first! – were brittle and cold, not really a patch, I had to admit, on those we could get in Pizza Express at home. Which in retrospect proved another of Grandi’s points: nostalgia is rarely what it was.
Ten more years
In some ways I can measure my adult decades by Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists”. An enthusiastic knowledge of the first volume of 20 writers under 40 in 1983 – Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Martin Amis, Rose Tremain, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes – helped me to get a job at the then Cambridge-based magazine in 1988, and I was there to help edit the second volume – Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Helen Simpson, Jeanette Winterson – a decade later.
Reading the recently published fifth version of the list last week, I was struck by a couple of things. First, how disarmingly, disturbingly young the current crop of writers is – how did they get so very good so very quickly? Second, how, read back-to-back alongside that first volume, their collective voice has changed in those 40 years. There’s a little less comedy, a little more anxiety; a lot more inwardness, a lot less society. They seem to take less shared understanding for granted. Or perhaps each generation is best at talking to itself.
• Tim Adams is an Observer columnist
