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biography gavin weightman Roads to Glory Man of Iron: Thomas Telford and the Building of Britain By Julian Glover (Bloomsbury 416pp £25) In Man of Iron, his affectionate life of the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, Julian Glover seeks a guiding hand and spiritual companion to his own endeavours as a promoter of more efficient transport and cutter of red tape. Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, was a political adviser on the High Speed Two (HS2) project and reckons Telford ‘would have understood the dilemmas, insisted on innovation and elegant design and known how to work the parliamentary system’. Whereas HS2 is Glover’s great project, Telford’s was the new road to Holyhead and the bridge over the Menai Strait. Never the twain shall meet. For those readers who have not heard of Telford, or confuse him with an overspill 1960s town in Shropshire, it should be pointed out that he died in 1834 after a lifetime of almost unrelenting and uncomplaining toil. Born in abject poverty in 1757 in Eskdale on the England–Scotland border, Thomas lost his father, a shepherd, when he was still an infant. Evicted from their tied cottage, his mother took lodgings not far away. Thomas found a place in the local parish school, then left to work as an apprentice stonemason. Little by little he chipped out a trade and then a career, his skill and cheery disposition gaining him a following. He made lifelong friends in Eskdale, one of whom he wrote to all his life. A lady with a library lent him books. His was a classic tale of self-help straight out of Samuel Smiles, with much of the romance of a Dickens tale. But he had no intimate companions: no girlfriends and no wife. He was just a lone man on the road, intent on learning and applying his learning to more and greater projects. Alongside his constant sketching and designing, Telford wrote poetry. He was also meticulous in the attention he showed his ageing and semiliterate mother. He sent her money, which she accepted reluctantly, and would laboriously write out letters in capitals so that she could read them. When he left Eskdale, Telford went first to Edinburgh, where he worked as a mason on the New Town then being built. From there he headed to London on horseback, delivering a steed for one of his patrons. He met Robert Adam and worked on Somerset House; somehow he found employment in Portsmouth on the dockyards. As his reputation spread, he was called this way and that to build roads and bridges and to patch up churches. He never had a permanent residence during this most productive period in his life. As the demands on his time and expertise increased, he acted more and more as a consulting engineer, the day-to-day work delegated to others. One criticism of him, which Glover acknowledges, concerns his reluctance to give due credit to engineers working alongside him. This has made him appear more of a colossus than he really THE UNIVERSITYOFBUCKINGHAM UniversityoftheYearforTeachingQuality Master’s in Philosophy AND ITS USES TODAY PROFESSOR SIR ROGER SCRUTON FBA October 2017 – September 2018 A one-year, London-based programme of ten evening seminars and individual research by Professor Sir Roger Scruton, offering examples of contemporary thinking about the perennial questions, and including lectures by internationally acclaimed philosophers. Previous speakers have included: Professor Jane Heal FBA, St John’s College, University of Cambridge Professor Robert Grant, University of Glasgow Professor Sebastian Gardner, University College London Professor Simon Blackburn FBA, Trinity College, University of Cambridge Each seminar takes place in the congenial surroundings of a London club (in Pall Mall, SW1), and is followed by a dinner during which participants can engage in discussion with the speaker. The topics to be considered include consciousness, emotion, justice, art, God, culture and ‘faking it’, nature and the environment. Students pursue their research, under the guidance of their supervisors, on a philosophical topic of their choice. Examination is by a dissertation of around 20,000 words. Scholarships and bursaries are available. For further details contact: Maria Floyd, Admissions Officer T: 01280 827514 E: london-programmes@buckingham.ac.uk or visit: www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ma/ philosophy THE UNIVERSITY OF BUCKINGHAM LONDON PROGRAMMES Literary Review | march 2017 12
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biography was. Even so, his creativity was prodigious. Not everything Telford worked on ended in success. The Caledonian Canal, a huge project, was burdened by rising costs and structural problems, and even the great Holyhead road and bridge scheme was soon rendered obsolete with the arrival of steam trains and Robert Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge. Glover notes that Telford’s great work all belongs to the era before steam. With the advent of the railways his coach roads were no longer needed – at least, not until the arrival of the motorcar half a century after his death. Is this the reason he is not better known? Maybe. Nonetheless, Telford’s memory is preserved in a place he could never have anticipated it would be. When he died at the age of seventy-seven, he had no family to attend to his burial. However, such was his reputation among fellow civil engineers that there was a determination he should not be interred in some obscure corner of a churchyard. Shortly after his death members of the Institution of Civil Engineers wrote to the dean of Westminster to make a case that Telford was worthy of a burial spot in Westminster Abbey. Anxious about how this might be received, they found that they were in fact pushing at an open door: the dean assented on account of ‘the eminence of his character’. A place in the centre of the nave of the abbey was designated for the great engineer and there he was laid to rest at a solemn funeral ceremony. A plaque states simply: ‘1757 Thomas Telford 1834 President of the Institution of Civil Engineers’. He was the first civil engineer to be awarded this honour. Alongside him is buried Robert Stephenson. To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 20. john clay Say What You See The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing By Damion Searls (Simon & Schuster 405pp £20) In the early 20th century, the Swiss psy- chologist Hermann Rorschach devised a test for examining people’s personalities based on their responses to sets of inkblots. In the Rorschach test, ‘ten and only ten’ inkblot patterns are used, reproduced on cards precisely 9½ inches high and 6½ inches wide. The same image can be replicated on both sides. Subjects are invited to view each inkblot and describe what they see. Their responses to the images are assessed according to several criteria, including level of detail, perceived content (such as a dancing bear) and the impression or otherwise of motion. Born in 1884 near Zurich, Rorschach was a frequent doodler at school, taking after his father, who was a painter. As a result, he acquired the nickname ‘Klex’, derived from the German word for blot. He studied medicine at Zurich University, where he was lectured by Carl Jung and by Eugen Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic near Zurich, where both worked. This clinic housed over a thousand patients and had acquired an international reputation for its enlightened and innovative methods, particularly the ‘affective rapport’ technique recommended by Bleuler. Jung lectured on his word association tests, in which he used a stopwatch to measure the response time to a stimulus word. He had found these tests to be psychologically valuable, coining the term ‘complex’ as a result. Rorschach took note. Rorschach practised as a psychiatrist at Herisau, near St Gallen, and at the nearby Krombach psychiatric hospital. Here he tried to find ways to connect to his more difficult, often schizophrenic patients. He experimented with showing them his own drawings, forerunners of the later inkblots, and discovered how effective this visual approach was – the ‘power of seeing’, as Damion Searls puts it in the subtitle of his book. For instance, he showed them an inkblot that bore a strong resemblance to a bat, which they interpreted as ‘moving people’, giving him a clue to the pattern of their thought processes. He then moved on to constructing a code, or protocol, to interpret his patients’ reactions. Rorschach died in 1922, but his tests outlived him and caught on particularly well in the USA (where personality definition and, arguably, simplification have always been popular). Searls links this interest with the growth of anthropology in the 1930s. Ruth Benedict, one of this new discipline’s foremost proponents, viewed culture as ‘personality writ large’. Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics, first published in Switzerland in 1921, was translated into English and published in the USA in 1942. Its most intriguing use came in the Rorschach, or dancing bear? context of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945. As prominent Nazis waited in prison to be brought before the military tribunal and tried for ‘crimes against humanity’, the US authorities sought to make sure that they were mentally competent to stand trial. The prison psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, was asked to check this. As it happened, he was one of the authors of what was then the leading English-language manual for the Rorschach test. Kelley used Gustave Gilbert, the prison’s morale officer and a fluent German speaker, to help him administer the tests. Gilbert’s diary records their encounters with the twenty-four Nazi prisoners, who, stuck in their tiny cells for months on end, welcomed any engagement with other people. Several behaved like ‘bright march 2017 | Literary Review 13

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biography gavin weightman

Roads to Glory Man of Iron: Thomas Telford and the Building of Britain

By Julian Glover (Bloomsbury 416pp £25)

In Man of Iron, his affectionate life of the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, Julian Glover seeks a guiding hand and spiritual companion to his own endeavours as a promoter of more efficient transport and cutter of red tape. Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, was a political adviser on the High Speed Two (HS2) project and reckons Telford ‘would have understood the dilemmas, insisted on innovation and elegant design and known how to work the parliamentary system’. Whereas HS2 is Glover’s great project, Telford’s was the new road to Holyhead and the bridge over the Menai Strait. Never the twain shall meet.

For those readers who have not heard of Telford, or confuse him with an overspill 1960s town in Shropshire, it should be pointed out that he died in 1834 after a lifetime of almost unrelenting and uncomplaining toil. Born in abject poverty in 1757 in Eskdale on the England–Scotland border, Thomas lost his father, a shepherd, when he was still an infant. Evicted from their tied cottage, his mother took lodgings not far away. Thomas found a place in the local parish school, then left to work as an apprentice stonemason. Little by little he chipped out a trade and then a career, his skill and cheery disposition gaining him a following. He made lifelong friends in Eskdale, one of whom he wrote to all his life. A lady with a library lent him books. His was a classic tale of self-help straight out of Samuel Smiles, with much of the romance of a Dickens tale. But he had no intimate companions: no girlfriends and no wife. He was just a lone man on the road, intent on learning and applying his learning to more and greater projects.

Alongside his constant sketching and designing, Telford wrote poetry. He was also meticulous in the attention he showed his ageing and semiliterate mother. He sent her money, which she accepted reluctantly, and would laboriously write out letters in capitals so that she could read them.

When he left Eskdale, Telford went first to Edinburgh, where he worked as a mason on the New Town then being built. From there he headed to London on horseback, delivering a steed for one of his patrons. He met Robert Adam and worked on Somerset House; somehow he found employment in Portsmouth on the dockyards. As his reputation spread, he was called this way and that to build roads and bridges and to patch up churches. He never had a permanent residence during this most productive period in his life.

As the demands on his time and expertise increased, he acted more and more as a consulting engineer, the day-to-day work delegated to others. One criticism of him, which Glover acknowledges, concerns his reluctance to give due credit to engineers working alongside him. This has made him appear more of a colossus than he really

THE UNIVERSITYOFBUCKINGHAM

UniversityoftheYearforTeachingQuality

Master’s in Philosophy

AND ITS USES TODAY PROFESSOR SIR ROGER SCRUTON FBA

October 2017 – September 2018 A one-year, London-based programme of ten evening seminars and individual research by Professor Sir Roger Scruton, offering examples of contemporary thinking about the perennial questions, and including lectures by internationally acclaimed philosophers. Previous speakers have included: Professor Jane Heal FBA, St John’s College, University of Cambridge Professor Robert Grant, University of Glasgow Professor Sebastian Gardner, University College London Professor Simon Blackburn FBA, Trinity College, University of Cambridge Each seminar takes place in the congenial surroundings of a London club (in Pall Mall, SW1), and is followed by a dinner during which participants can engage in discussion with the speaker. The topics to be considered include consciousness, emotion, justice, art, God, culture and ‘faking it’, nature and the environment. Students pursue their research, under the guidance of their supervisors, on a philosophical topic of their choice. Examination is by a dissertation of around 20,000 words. Scholarships and bursaries are available. For further details contact: Maria Floyd, Admissions Officer T: 01280 827514 E: london-programmes@buckingham.ac.uk or visit: www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ma/ philosophy

THE UNIVERSITY OF BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES

Literary Review | march 2017 12

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