In a recent essay, see here and here, I argued that intimate life is not a refuge from evaluation but one of the places where evaluation becomes most concentrated. Desire is discriminatory: it does not attach itself to people in the abstract, nor can it be summoned as an act of will or justice. It wants this person rather than that one, under these conditions rather than those, for this kind of arrangement rather than another. The language of intimacy can veil this fact, but it does not abolish it.

Judgment, in the stricter sense, involves reflective assessment: comparison, articulation, justification, the attempt to say why this rather than that. Desire does not always operate so politely. It can arrive before reasons, or fail before reasons can be assembled: bodily, atmospheric, immediate and resistant to the will. One cannot argue oneself into wanting someone. Yet desire still selects, recoils, intensifies, cools and refuses. Judgment often comes afterwards, trying to articulate what desire has already done.

A woman doing the selecting is also being seen, often more closely than she imagines. A man may notice the confidence she means to project, but also the effort underneath it, which communicates self-consciousness rather than relaxed ease; the clothes that animate her or fail to; the warmth or calculation in her attention; the cultivated air of mystery which can simply imply emotional coldness; the way she eats, laughs, moves, listens, touches, stiffens or relaxes. He may notice the discrepancy between the woman she thinks has entered the room and the woman who has actually arrived.

The information can be carried by something very small. I once had lunch with a woman in an elegant cream jacket which looked excellent on her until a forkful of fish pie landed squarely on the lapel. She talked happily for another twenty minutes without noticing. The remarkable thing is how often these little embarrassments become endearing once attraction is established.

Some women rarely object to the clipboard when they are the ones declining. The female-directed cultures examined here are full of lists, diagnostics, red flags, rankings, warnings and post-date assessments. The discomfort begins when the clipboard changes hands. A woman may agree to a date and decide the conversation was flat; kiss a man and decide there was no chemistry; sleep with him and decide, without trauma or wrongdoing, that she does not want to do so again. A man may reach a comparable verdict. He need not announce it, defend it or obtain approval for it, because desire can take account of hundreds of details silently and give its answer. Silence is not evidence that nothing was noticed; it may mean only that she was not present for the discussion.

Research on speed dating and initial encounters confirms that attraction is not the mechanical application of a prior list. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel found that stated preferences only imperfectly predict whom people desire in person; physical appearance matters, but so do posture, voice, responsiveness and the distinctive impression generated between two particular people. Howard Friedman, Ronald Riggio and Daniel Casella found that dynamic emotional expressiveness contributed to initial likability independently of static physical attractiveness. A woman does not arrive as a photograph or a list of attributes. She arrives moving, speaking, attending and occupying space.

That should not be especially controversial. Yet it disturbs a certain reader because it removes a flattering protection. She may be accustomed to describing men minutely – their height, clothes, bodies, sexual competence, emotional limitations, manners, ambitions and failures – while imagining male desire as a comparatively simple appetite whose presence confirms her and whose withdrawal indicts him. What unsettles her is not judgment itself - she is thoroughly familiar with that – but discovering that men noticed too, and that some of what they noticed concerned her.

What follows is not an argument that men require permission to choose. It is an account of the neglected texture of male selection: the fine-grained observations through which attraction, curiosity and inclination towards commitment are strengthened or extinguished. Women are not merely selectors. They are also assessed, declined, compared and sometimes found wanting. A woman’s self-description – strong, successful, independent, discerning – does not determine how those qualities will be experienced by men. Sometimes the fact is simpler and less negotiable: he did not want more. But the essay is not simply about men’s right to refuse. It is about what men actually notice: the qualities through which attraction deepens or quietly disappears.

Where the narrative lives

I am not claiming that all women interpret romantic disappointment in this way, or that journalism, self-help and social media provide a census of female belief. My claim is narrower: a visible and influential strand of female-directed discourse treats male non-continuation as evidence of male defect, while treating female non-continuation as discernment, autonomy or self-knowledge. The court of desire is not abolished; it is merely arranged so that one party sits permanently on the bench. That asymmetry, not women as a class, is the object of this essay.

This is not the only female-directed discourse. Many women reject it entirely, and much sensible advice urges initiative, self-examination and realistic expectations. But the balancing of this has been done at length elsewhere, and endlessly doing it again here would reproduce the very asymmetry the essay is describing.

Such a narrative is pervasive in popular self-help. Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s He’s Just Not That Into You, Sherry Argov’s Why Men Love Bitches and Matthew Hussey’s coaching empire differ in style, but all organise female frustration around the problem of deciphering, attracting or managing men. Rarely does the genre ask, with comparable appetite, what the women themselves are offering, eliciting or failing to sustain.

Journalism supplies its own version, from Kate Bolick’s influential Atlantic essay ‘All the Single Ladies’ to the recurring articles on ‘where have all the good men gone?’, in which female dissatisfaction becomes evidence that the deficit lies principally on the male side. This may console some single women, but it offers less to those who do not wish to remain single, any more than do the annual anti-Valentine gatherings at which empowerment loses a little of its fluency as the evening proceeds, the tears begin to flow and the strategically placed boxes of tissues prove useful. The joke is not that a woman is unhappy. It is that the programme keeps pretending not to know its final item.

A prominent example is Jean Garnett’s ‘The Trouble With Wanting Men’, published in the New York Times Magazine in July 2025. Garnett deploys ‘heterofatalism’, derived from Asa Seresin’s ‘heteropessimism’, to describe straight women’s systematic pessimism about men. The essay moves from individual disappointment to general diagnosis, finally placing the rottenness of heterosexuality on men themselves. The concept promises analysis but often delivers something easier: personal romantic frustration converted into cultural indictment.

The piece is most revealing where it is least curious. It asks why men disappoint women; it rarely asks what men may have discovered when they had the chance to be disappointed too. Some men may not be confused at all. They find, as they come to know a woman, that sexual interest does not translate into a wish for continuation. Garnett’s account of a lover during her open marriage sharpens the point: when he did not want to commit, she wrote of how ‘maybe someday the child would mature’. A less flattering explanation is that he saw no reason to reorganise his life around a married woman, or simply that she had mistaken sexual interest for a claim on his future.

One response noted how closely heterofatalism can mirror incel logic. It is worth remembering that the term ‘incel’ originated with a woman describing her own situation, while another scholarly response to Seresin has discussed ‘femcels’ and ‘heteronihilism’. The disappointed man who turns rejection into a theory of female shallowness is told, usually rightly, to reconsider his expectations and stop blaming women. Female disappointment does not become social theory merely by acquiring a seminar vocabulary.

The Guardian’s September 2025 survey of single American women produced the same register at scale: men were low-effort, immature, inadequate, insufficiently serious, too slow to commit or not worth the trouble. Such accounts are presented as social criticism but often exclude the variable they cannot comfortably examine: the complainant’s own position, offer, expectations or habits. Male sexual attention is not proof of high relational value. Being wanted for an evening is not the same as being chosen for a life.

A Merlin Strategy poll reported in the New Statesman and The Independent found that only 35 per cent of British women under 25 held a positive view of men, while young women were markedly more likely to view men negatively than the reverse. A poll cannot diagnose an individual woman or settle whether any man should date her. It does, however, show the wider climate in which male deficiency has become an ordinary explanatory style. A negative view may follow real betrayal, humiliation or bad behaviour. The problem begins when injury becomes a doctrine and doctrine becomes a personality.

On social media the discourse is industrialised. Wired’s ‘The Real Relationship Hustlers of TikTok’ describes the commercial scale of online relationship advice; an ABC account of attachment-style dating advice and the Associated Press on popular misconceptions about attachment show how ‘avoidant’ and ‘anxious’ have entered everyday speech in simplified form. The broader diffusion of ‘therapy-speak’ – narcissist, toxic, gaslighting, trauma – is examined in ‘Is therapy-speak changing the way we talk about ourselves?’. The slogan ‘if he wanted to, he would’ performs the same translation: ambiguity, disappointment or non-continuation becomes a verdict on male seriousness. Even the language of emotional labour can become a universal solvent, dissolving specific questions about attraction, boredom, sex, timing or contribution into a general diagnosis of men.

The concepts are not always false. Some people are avoidant, manipulative, dishonest or emotionally unavailable. The revealing feature is the distribution of curiosity. ‘He is avoidant’ may mean that he wanted sex but not commitment; that he enjoyed her, but not enough; that he compared what she offered with what else was available and chose otherwise; or simply that he had enough information. Diagnosis protects the speaker from the humiliating openness of a verdict that cannot be appealed.

Some women are adept at laundering hurt into principle: dependent on male initiative while contemptuous of male need, wanting honesty but punishing it when it arrives, mistaking being desired for being valuable and being disappointed for being wronged. A product advertised with warnings about its principal customer base should not be surprised when that customer base declines the purchase. One can spend a year demonstrating that one is an exception. Or one can spend the year otherwise.

There will, of course, be a full account of the evening by lunchtime, delivered to an audience that has already decided what it means. Compassion is part of intimacy. Permanent appointment as archivist of another person’s grievances is not. Victorian furniture is a better hobby for those drawn to restoration projects.

Many women know all this already. They approach, risk, flirt, signal, fail, recover and try again. They have been rejected without converting rejection into a theory of male defect. The emotionally healthy person who has been disappointed usually remains interested in individuals. The bitter one has ceased to see individuals at all, only evidence for a case already decided.

Selection has two stages

The standard picture confuses two thresholds. The first concerns initial sexual interest. The second concerns whether an encounter, once it has occurred, generates enough desire for repetition, effort or commitment. Clearing the threshold for one night is compatible with failing the threshold for two.

The evolutionary basis for the standard narrative is narrower than its cultural expression suggests. Robert Trivers’s parental-investment theory proposed that the sex investing more heavily in offspring will tend to be more selective at the point of mating, since reproductive errors are costlier. David Buss’s study of 37 cultures found that women, on average, placed greater weight on financial prospects, ambition and industriousness, while men placed greater weight on attractiveness and youth. A later study across 45 countries broadly confirmed sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources, while also showing cultural variation and substantial overlap. These are distributions, not destinies. They do not tell us what happens when one particular person meets another.

Experimental work on casual-sex offers helps establish the first threshold: initial willingness for sex tells us very little about later investment. Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield’s field study, in which confederates approached strangers with offers ranging from a date to immediate sex, found men far more willing than women to accept the sexual invitation. Terri Conley complicated the picture by showing that women’s willingness rises when the proposer seems safe, attentive and sexually skilled and when stigma is reduced. Pregnancy risk, safety, reputation and expectations of satisfaction bear unevenly on women’s willingness to accept casual sex. David Schmitt and the International Sexuality Description Project nonetheless found sex differences in desire for sexual variety across 52 nations. The modest point is that willingness to entertain an initial sexual opportunity tells us little about the criteria governing repetition or commitment.

Desire does not encounter distributions. It encounters a person: a voice, a timing, a way of entering a room, a style of attention, a body animated or left strangely uninhabited. Some of the impressions that matter are not deliberate performances at all. Poise can become tension, and wit can become rehearsed cleverness. Friedman, Riggio and Casella’s work on nonverbal expressiveness found that emotional animation influenced initial likability independently of physical attractiveness. Research on open and contractive bodily displays shows that posture and spatial presence can affect romantic selection. Annett Schirmer and colleagues, comparing faces, voices, movement and scent, found both widely shared and strongly personal patterns of preference. Aggregate tendencies explain why thresholds differ; they do not decide what happens when someone comes into view.

At the second stage the question is no longer simply, ‘Would I?’ It becomes: ‘Would I again? Was this alive enough? Was she interesting enough? Did I feel drawn afterwards? Did the encounter generate excitement, warmth, curiosity, sexual charge and ease? Does returning feel inviting rather than merely possible?’

This is not always a formal audit. Often the body knows before the sentence forms. With one woman I had spoken to online, then met in person, presence, manner, voice, clothes, rhythm and humour all arrived together and produced an instinctive no. Desire can slacken, curiosity thin, warmth fail to gather, irritation arrive too early, repetition feel effortful rather than enticing. Explanation comes later, translating the movement into reasons. When the whole person is compelling, the whole person wins. What attraction absorbs less readily is vanity without self-knowledge, contempt disguised as standards, or the assumption that one may itemise another sex’s faults while remaining exempt from inspection oneself.

The same parental-investment logic used to explain female selectivity predicts that both sexes become choosier as the expected cost of a relationship rises. Kevin Woodward and Miriam Richards, writing on parental investment and minimum mate-choice criteria, argue that both males and females should become more selective where relationships are more likely to lead to children. Criteria also change with the imagined duration of the relationship, as Schmitt and colleagues found in work on short-term mating orientation, and as Pamela Regan showed in research on minimum mate-selection standards. A woman can be attractive enough for access but not compelling enough for investment. That is not contradiction. It is the ordinary movement from possibility to assessment.

The relevant information may not exist before the encounter. Profile, photograph, flirtation and fantasy offer one version of a person; presence, voice, touch, responsiveness and aftermath offer another. Desire changes once interaction provides new information. The later verdict does not retrospectively falsify the earlier desire. Martie Haselton and David Buss’s ‘Affective Shift Hypothesis’ offers limited but relevant evidence that first intercourse can alter subsequent emotional assessment. Sex does not merely fulfil prior desire. It generates information and may deepen, complicate or extinguish it.

That is why the phrase ‘he got what he wanted’ is often too crude. He can get what he wanted at stage one and discover that he does not want stage two. He can find her attractive beforehand but less sexually compelling afterwards; enjoy novelty without wanting repetition; like her well enough in prospect and then find there is not enough appetite, humour, warmth, responsiveness, curiosity or erotic charge to make him return. Sometimes the encounter answered a question, and the answer was no. The rejected person may spend months constructing explanations that bear little relation to the quiet impressions through which attraction actually strengthened or disappeared. There may never have been a decisive moment at all. Curiosity simply failed to gather enough force for return.

Demography can complicate this without cancelling it. Jon Birger’s Date-onomics argues that educated women may face shortages within the pools they treat as eligible: similar age, education and class; available, proximate and willing to commit. Local and class-specific imbalances can be real. But ‘the numbers’ can also become an elegant alibi for the narrower possibility that the men who satisfy a woman’s filters have other options and do not want her enough.

A degree may indicate intellectual seriousness, discipline and curiosity. It may also indicate successful institutional processing. ‘Graduate’ is a demographic category, not a guarantee of intelligence, culture, depth, erotic confidence or the ability to make another person happy. Sometimes the preference for a graduate man is less about his intelligence than the woman’s wish to see her own credential vindicated by his. The degree functions not only as a filter for him but as a mirror for her: a certificate that he can be shown to friends without explanation and absorbed into the social picture without altering it.

Birger describes the pool within which evaluation takes place. He does not abolish the evaluation. Once a man is inside the pool, the question remains whether he wants this particular woman enough to pursue, repeat, commit or build. A woman who regards men as fundamentally disappointing has an awkward recruitment problem here. Few men will be flattered to learn that the post is important although the applicant class is deplorable.

Initiation and outsourced risk

A recurring complaint among frustrated single women is that men do not approach, pursue, put in effort or drive the process forward. The complaint rests upon a historical assumption it rarely examines: that initiation is properly a male responsibility, while female passivity is natural, dignified or beside the point.

There is a real asymmetry here. Women often approach unfamiliar men with greater awareness of personal vulnerability, especially once an interaction moves beyond a public setting. That can reasonably make women more cautious about whom to trust, where to meet and how quickly to make desire visible. But safety does not explain every difference in who initiates. Physical precautions are one thing; the ordinary embarrassment of expressing interest and risking rejection is another. Some women are protecting themselves less from danger than from the blush.

The script is hardly marginal. From Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s The Rules, with its injunctions not to call or ask men out, through Behrendt and Tuccillo’s insistence that male interest proves itself by asking, to later advice to ‘let him lead’ and ‘if he wanted to, he would’, women are encouraged to treat male initiative as the test of seriousness. The result is to outsource much of the risk of exposure to men.

A woman who never messages first, asks anyone out, signals interest or makes herself legible, and then reports that she meets no one worth dating, has not established that men are deficient. She may have absorbed a script that tells her not to initiate. If men sat waiting to be approached, signalled nothing, made little effort to be visible or interesting and then complained that women had failed to discover them, the diagnosis would be immediate: passivity with a theory attached.

There is a familiar courtship tableau, in which a woman sits with one leg crossed over the other, drink in hand, watching the room with the air of someone conducting auditions for a role she has not advertised. The room may not know it is auditioning. In her own imagination she is the prize, the examiner, the woman who need only be noticed. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes she is merely a woman sitting still while the room quietly gets on with preferring other people.

The pose of being hard to impress depends upon there being applicants. Without them, selectivity can begin to look uncomfortably like stillness. A woman who refuses to make desire visible may understand this as dignity, mystery, standards or feminine power. She may also be making herself romantically illegible, then resenting men for failing to read the invisible text.

Approaching is socially costly and embarrassing. That is what makes it a risk. A woman who wants all the dignity of being pursued while men absorb all the exposure of pursuit is asking for equality everywhere except at the moment when someone has to blush first. Expectation is not yet a strategy.

He did not want more

A woman who is not called again after a sexual encounter may attribute the result to male avoidance, emotional unavailability, misogyny or the general degeneracy of modern men. Another explanation is available: he did not find the experience sufficiently satisfying to want more.

That judgment may concern sex, but not only sex. The encounter may reveal too little reciprocity, ease, appetite, warmth or curiosity to make return desirable. She may have expected male effort without bringing equivalent erotic energy herself. A person may be pleasant, willing and attractive in prospect, yet not produce the desire to return. Many people already understand this principle in one direction but hesitate to apply it in the other; dating was never a charitable foundation, and sex is not a certificate of continuing eligibility. Women have spent decades insisting, rightly, that sexual access to them is not owed; the same principle applies in reverse.

His earlier interest need not have been false. The encounter may simply have supplied information unavailable before. Women act on this routinely when they decide, after a kiss, a date, a night or a short affair, that a man is not worth repeating. A man may decide that the encounter was acceptable but not exceptional, that his desire is better directed elsewhere. Provided he has not lied about settled intentions or coerced consent, this is not exploitation. It is discernment.

Nor is a casual sexual encounter, or a relationship not imagined to lead to marriage, inherently wrong. The presumption that sex must serve as a step towards permanent partnership is a conservative framing shared, in practice, by traditional sexual ethics and some strands of contemporary feminist discourse. The latter may not speak of chastity, but it can smuggle back the assumption that sex without commitment is a moral problem when men want it and women are disappointed by it.

John Stuart Mill’s harm principle is a sufficient starting point for distinguishing disappointment from wrongdoing. Where there is no coercion or deliberate deception, people may hurt one another without wronging one another. Desire, evaluation and rejection routinely do so. A verdict does not become defective because it hurts, nor criteria illegitimate because they are unflattering.

Deception does matter. A man who genuinely believes during an encounter that it might lead further, and reaches a different conclusion the next day, has not deceived anyone. He has updated his assessment. What is wrong is misrepresenting a settled intention in order to obtain consent that might otherwise not be forthcoming. A man may imply tenderness or future seriousness to obtain sex; a woman may manufacture admiration or romantic intensity to obtain attachment, effort or reassurance. Either may later claim honest reassessment. Sometimes that is true; sometimes it conceals tactical inflation followed by retreat.

There are ordinary duties of tact, sexual responsibility and non-cruelty. Consent does not abolish all interpersonal obligations. But no one is owed commitment because sexual contact occurred, and disappointment at non-continuation is not proof that the non-continuing party is defective, exploitative or avoidant.

The harder point concerns parenthood. No one has a right to conscript another person into lifelong commitment merely because they urgently want that future. A man’s decision to bind himself to a woman and possible children is among the most consequential evaluative acts available to him. Fatherhood is not something to offer someone who has little admiration for fathers.

There is a real asymmetry in reproductive time. Fertility declines for both sexes, but earlier and more sharply for women. A woman in her mid- or late-thirties who wants biological children does not have infinite time in which to discover that a man is unsure or unwilling. That does not make his uncertainty an obligation. It makes honesty more urgent. He should not counterfeit certainty, drift, appease or let her build reproductive hopes around an assessment he has not made. Men should take responsibility for contraception themselves; reproductive responsibility is too consequential to outsource entirely to another person’s assurances. And a woman with a negative view of men in general has an awkward recruitment problem if she wants one as a husband and father.

The least cruel sentence may be the plain one: ‘I am not yet sure I want to commit to you in the way that having children together would require. That would mean lifelong obligations, not simply romance, sex or present affection. If you cannot live with that uncertainty, it would be better that we break up and you find someone else while there is still time.’

What is cruel is allowing a woman to mistake hesitation for promise, affection for readiness or sexual interest for paternal commitment. Her urgency is a serious fact. But it is not a deed of ownership.

When the clipboard changes hands

The woman in her mid-thirties or later who wants a committed partner and finds that the men she wants are unavailable, uninterested or insufficiently eager may reach for the explanation that ‘all the good men are taken’. Heterofatalism is a more literary version of the same move. But the phrase can also move attention away from the less consoling possibility that the men she wants do not want what she is offering enough to commit.

People often form expectations when they possess maximum leverage and discover later that those expectations work less well when their appeal, priorities and competitors have changed. Sexual attention can be an inflated currency. A woman may receive it for years and mistake it for evidence of high relational value, although male willingness to have sex is a weaker signal than willingness to invest, introduce her to friends, build around her or sacrifice for her. She was a discriminating chooser when the structure of the market favoured her; later she discovers that the men she wants have not resigned from choosing.

The same drama can occur in miniature on an ordinary night out. A small group of young women enters a bar, club, party or reception, and one receives little or no male attention while the others receive plenty. This can be painful, and anyone with imagination should be able to feel for her. There is a particular loneliness in discovering, not in theory but in real time, that the room is making distinctions. But the men in that room have done nothing wrong. Their eyes go where desire goes; their attention follows what attracts it; their choices are choices, not public services. She has encountered the evaluative field in which men have always lived: one may want to be noticed and yet not be chosen.

Popular culture gives women contradictory instructions: do not settle, lower your standards or doubt your worth; wait for the man who truly wants you. It also tells them not to wait too long, misread sexual attention as commitment or assume that the market will remain unchanged. Those instructions cannot all be obeyed without risk. A woman who spent her years of greatest leverage being highly selective may not have been vain or foolish. She may have followed one half of the script too successfully and encountered the other half later.

Painful comparison is not injustice because no one has a right to be desired by the people they desire, not because they want it, consider themselves attractive or have been told to know their worth. Desire is relational: a failed bid may reveal something about the other person’s tastes; it may also reveal something about what one failed to awaken. The difficulty begins when someone who imagined herself only part of the jury discovers that she too was being assessed.

The following is not an ethic of how people should speak to one another’s faces. Nor is it a defence of what I have called elsewhere the comprehensive audit: an unsolicited, totalising summing-up of another person’s body, character, sexuality, habits and worth in order to diminish them. That is judgment corrupted into domination. The present point is different. Private evaluative speech exists whether polite discourse admits it or not. It occurs in post-date debriefs, friendships and the small social tribunals in which people test their responses against those of others.

Sexual assessment does not necessarily float above bodies. David Buss’s cross-cultural work on stated mate preferences is only the most conspicuous evidence of this, while recent work on ‘the ick’ shows how sudden turn-offs are folded into contemporary dating language. People do not desire abstract moral persons temporarily attached to inconvenient flesh. They desire bodies as they move, smell, sound, dress, sit, eat, kiss, stiffen, relax, promise or disappoint.

The useful distinction is not between bodily judgment and no bodily judgment. There is no such world. Body-shaming is the punitive, gratuitous or public use of bodily judgment to wound or lower someone. One can object to that without pretending attraction has no bodily criteria.

A woman who laughs with friends about a man’s height, hairline, clothes, awkwardness, neediness or sexual uncertainty is not shocked by bodily judgment. She can call it humour, standards, girl talk or comic candour. It is private anthropology with better lighting. She cannot plausibly reach for the smelling salts when men conduct private assessments of women.

Private evaluation has a social literature of its own. Sarah Trinh and Sophia Choukas-Bradley’s study of young men’s reports of sexual communication with friends found recognisable gendered scripts; work on locker-room talk and on gender differences in gossip points, from different directions, to a wider economy of informal evaluation. Such speech can be crude or unfair. Its existence is not structurally transformed by the sex of the speaker.

Private evaluation is inevitable; private malice is optional. There is a difference between honestly telling a trusted friend that attraction never formed and turning another person’s vulnerability into entertainment or social capital. Privacy is not, by itself, a moral defence.

Much of the cruelty does not arrive as an insult. It appears as the fake compliment, the sympathetic little wince, the damning hesitation, the phrase that seems kind until one hears the room receive it. A man is ‘sweet’, ‘keen’, ‘not unattractive exactly’, ‘probably someone’s type’, ‘trying very hard’. A woman is ‘very put together’, ‘more impressive on paper’, ‘attractive in a managed way’, ‘less warm than she imagines’ or ‘beautiful, but somehow not inviting’.

Sometimes one can feel the verdict move through a room. The sentence need not be obscene or loudly cruel. It may be a faint compliment, a pause in the right place, a description so exact that the group understands at once what has been fixed. The ripple is not always laughter. It may be recognition: the shared awareness that something has been said which would embarrass the absent person if heard.

Nor is my experience that women are innocent of this register when the object is another woman. Some of the most cruelly exact social observations I have heard about women have come from women, through faint praise, mimicry, timing other means. What unsettles those invested in female exemption is not the method but the loss of monopoly: men can see the performance, register the discrepancy and return the compliment.

Status enters too. A partner is displayed, interpreted and read back as evidence. Men may be influenced by how the woman they are seeing appears to their friends. She may be desired in private and still fail, socially, to travel well – faintly diminished in company, attractive until the performance has to survive an audience. Women know that a man is partly assessed through the eyes of others, and research on the influence of family and friends on relationships confirms that intimate choices are never sealed inside the couple. They leak status, taste, confidence and imagination.

The vocabulary of diagnosis then offers self-protection. ‘Avoidant’, ‘narcissist’, ‘emotionally unavailable’ and ‘commitment-phobic’ can describe real patterns. They can also replace the simpler sentence: his attraction did not deepen. The diagnostic word promotes a private disappointment into an expert finding and leaves the disappointed party as both witness and clinician. There is no appeal from a verdict, but a diagnosis can be circulated.

Consumer language performs a related service. The terms are ugly, but intimate life already speaks of options, value, markets, standards, filters, upgrades, scarcity, high-value partners and wasted time. ‘Know your worth’ can become less a rejection of the market than a demand that the market recognise one’s preferred price. The slogan is not always an exit from valuation. Sometimes it is a complaint about the bid. The market metaphor describes competition, scarcity and comparison. It does not describe the lived texture of desire, which always exceeds exchange.

This language has a serious sociological pedigree. Eva Illouz’s Consuming the Romantic Utopia and Why Love Hurts examine choice, comparison, self-presentation and the institutional organisation of romantic suffering. Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Love locates intimacy between the desire for security and the consumer’s resistance to durable obligation. Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy corrects any simple lament that money and intimacy were once separate. Dating apps merely make the marketplace explicit.

Every person in an encounter is both assessing and being assessed, deciding what they want and discovering whether what they offer is wanted. The mortification lies not in being degraded into a product, but in discovering that one was never exempt from the traffic in value. The woman who imagined herself comparing offers discovers that she is also among the offers being compared.

A woman who does not want men who frighten her, bore her, repel her or fail to meet her erotic and emotional criteria is not thereby contemptuous of men. She is choosing, as she is entitled to choose. Contempt may have causes, including real injury, but it does not thereby become attractive. A private sting inflated into public doctrine is not an invitation for a man to prove himself as the exception. The man who wants warmth, humour, loyalty and the sense that his sex is not being endured as an unfortunate precondition of heterosexuality has no obligation to volunteer for correction.

The adult position is neither sentimental denial nor theatrical cruelty. Tact and privacy matter. Non-attraction is not a licence for gratuitous injury, but embarrassment is not refutation.

From both sides of the verdict

I am not describing this from untouched abstraction. I have rejected and been rejected, desired and not been desired back. My usual response to rejection or lack of desire is to draw a line and look elsewhere. I have pursued women, been pursued by women, seduced women and been seduced. None of this becomes pathological because one party receives a verdict he or she dislikes.

I have never liked the US-imported term ‘dating’, with its air of scheduled auditions and recreational bureaucracy. From my thirties onwards I took a different approach. After a very unhappy nine-year relationship, I wanted freedom: sexual encounters, flirtation, experiment, pleasure and companionship where it happened, without an immediate wish for domesticity or permanent commitment. For several years I acted accordingly. That was not fear of intimacy or contempt for the women involved. I did not yet want the life that serious commitment would require.

When I later began to think about a longer-term partner, attraction and sexual interest were not enough. I wanted someone with intellectual interests and passions; someone open enough to understand why my worlds, especially new music, mattered, as I would want to enter hers; someone who read, loved books, cinema, galleries, argument, politics and ideas; someone emotionally open enough for warmth, care and trust to develop without every difficulty becoming evasion, performance or accusation. In many meetings and some casual encounters this proved rarer than I expected.

After a short time there was often little conversation left: little curiosity about the world, little intellectual appetite or inwardness, and too much immersion within a small tribunal of friends whose dramas supplied both plot and verdict. This did not make such women bad people; it made them impossible for me to imagine as serious partners. Attraction could begin an encounter; it could not compensate for the absence of adult particularity or any sense that a shared life would enlarge rather than narrow the world.

I met my wife when she sent the most enticing response to an online advertisement, by which time I was ready to settle down. The enthusiasm was very high on both sides from the first meeting. We became engaged around nine months later, married the following year and have now been married for nearly seventeen years. The fact matters because it clarifies the nature of selection. I was not looking for a woman to pass a standardised test. I was looking for the person with whom the world became larger.

The actual encounter can decide things with a speed polite discourse rarely admits. Lauren Gazzard Kerr and colleagues’ research on first impressions in live romantic encounters, together with Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal’s ‘thin-slice’ work, shows that consequential impressions can arise from very brief observations. Speed does not guarantee accuracy. It does show that social perception begins before anyone has completed the approved questionnaire.

I remember meeting a woman after prior contact had made the encounter seem plausible. In person, the answer was almost immediate. Not because of one defect or anything she had done wrong, but because the total impression did not generate attraction. The presentation flattened rather than animated her; the movement had a slight awkwardness; the conversation did nothing to complicate the first impression. The combination of her bearing, voice, clothes, movements and humour registered as an instinctive no. It was not a moral judgment. It was desire failing to form.

First impressions can be wrong, and a second meeting can complicate the first. A romantic impression can be fallible without being illegitimate. Research following online contacts into first face-to-face meetings suggests that prior impressions are revised once embodied interaction supplies voice, movement, timing and presence. Sometimes the answer remains no. That no is not cruelty. It is information.

The particulars are often trivial-seeming and impossible to predict. A posture, a laugh, a smile that does not reach the face, clothes that flatten rather than animate, a fussy relation to food, a way of repeating approved opinions, or a painful rendition of dating-profile language – ‘GSOH’, ‘fun-loving’, ‘easy-going’ – can alter desire before anything dramatic has happened. I have known the scene altered by a woman repeatedly fumbling with tissues until the tissues seemed to have joined the date, or picking things out of good food in a way that communicated control rather than appetite.

Another woman was strikingly glamorous, and even when she began to speak in a rather undereducated way, the glamour did not entirely disappear. Another smiled after a chocolate dessert, unaware of the neat crescent of dark mousse across her front teeth – impossible not to see. One American woman seemed convinced that a peach floral dress and a heavy black leather jacket belonged to the same outfit. The two items never quite reached an agreement. A further woman had not mastered applying eye make-up without suggesting that she was auditioning as an extra in a German Expressionist film. These were all rather endearing.

Confidence may arrive as calculation, mystery as reserve, independence as indifference and empathy as performance. Attraction belongs not to intention but to reception, and is often tested not by perfection but by what happens after perfection has failed. The managed image always breaks eventually. The interesting question is whether the person who remains is more attractive or less.

Such moments are not comprehensive audits. They are glimpses of the ordinary body that no managed image can permanently exclude: the person who will lose her keys, snore, crouch over the toilet after too much tequila, say something foolish or look the worse for wear after an enthusiastic night. Everyone has moments when the polish disappears.

Close observation is not synonymous with criticism. People notice one another because they are interested. The woman who gets chocolate on her teeth, laughs too loudly, drops her keys, struggles with an umbrella or becomes adorably flustered has not necessarily become less attractive; quite the reverse, attraction often becomes more particular through these moments. The perfectly managed image is easy to admire but difficult to love. It is often during the little accidents of ordinary life that another person ceases to seem like an image requiring maintenance and begins to feel like someone whose company one actually wants.

It can be highly attractive when a woman says ‘Sorry, I know I’m being a really grumpy bitch, it’s just that time of the month’, or laughs when I walk in and mention what she had assumed she would be alone long enough to conceal. That ease usually travels with generosity towards the same things in others. What might be mortifying under hostile observation becomes intimate when attraction has not diminished. She has been seen unguarded and remains wanted.

The woman who tells you ‘I’m very empathetic’ three times in an hour, checks every mirror, speaks in therapy clichés, scans the room to see who is watching, or laughs half a second after everyone else to show she understood the joke is clearly working hard. The temptation to point these out can be compelling.

Beauty itself may leave desire strangely unamplified. The face, clothes and surface can all be in place, and still nothing travels: no animation, no charge, no sense that the surface opens onto a more compelling person. The effect is like a well-decorated but empty room. One may admire the arrangement without wanting to live there.

Some people move through the world as though their own sense of their attractiveness ought to bind everyone else. It does not. Other people will notice bad manners, vanity, affectation, a lack of curiosity or gracelessness under pressure, just as they notice beauty, wit and charm. What remains, for some women, is the manner that once worked: the same slight pause before answering, the same expectation that the room will rearrange itself. The manner has outlived the thing that made it charming, and nobody has been unkind enough to mention it.

Self-consciousness does not always diminish attraction. In the right conditions, it can intensify it. I have met women whom I might describe as gloriously uptight: buttoned up, controlled, almost too composed, but with a face that reddened easily and a body that betrayed what the manner tried to suppress. A blush, a pause, a sudden awareness of being seen more closely than intended can be more interesting than the performance. The body begins quietly to inform against her.

With one woman, I looked at her in a concentrated way while she was talking, with a small smile and without saying anything. She hesitated for the first time, faint colour appearing in her cheeks, and looked away before continuing. Whether she had merely become self-conscious or begun wondering exactly what I was seeing and what wicked thoughts I was harbouring, I could not tell. The ambiguity was the attraction. There was someone there to be reached: not a profile or posture, but a person whose control had briefly become permeable to feeling.

I have also had sexual encounters that were wanted at the time but generated no desire for continuation. No false promises were made and no relationship implied and withdrawn. Sometimes sex is pleasing, willing or intimate without creating the wish to repeat it. The missing thing is not necessarily beauty or willingness, but appetite, responsiveness, generosity, humour, bodily presence, curiosity and the sense that the woman is not merely permitting desire but entering the encounter with desire of her own.

This is not dislike; not wanting commitment with someone does not mean thinking her worthless, ugly or beneath concern. It may mean that the attraction is too narrow, affection too limited, sexual charge too dependent upon novelty, conversation too thin or the imagined future too effortful. Commitment requires a surplus.

I have been on the other side. There have been women with whom I slept who made clear, kindly enough, that they did not want it to become a relationship. Some clearly did not find further sexual contact with me appealing. No catastrophe followed. No one needed diagnosing. The arrangement was possible because neither party treated sex as an automatic claim on the other’s future.

The qualities which make repetition desirable are not, in the end, youth, a flat stomach or conventional beauty. They are aliveness, skill, humour and the joy of mutual excitement. These are available at any age and in almost any body. Speed-dating research on humour found that perceived funniness contributed to attractiveness, although laughter itself was no simple measure of compatibility.

The idea that a woman is ‘on the shelf’ after 35 is one I find ludicrous. For some women, youth did too much of the work. While they possessed the effortless appeal of a young body, they never had to discover what else made them compelling. Ageing then feels not simply like physical change but the disappearance of the quality on which confidence was built. When younger women arrive with the same advantage, the competition changes. But other women flower. Experience, sexual wisdom, curiosity, appetite, intelligence and a simple lust for pleasure count for much more.

Recently, while having Saturday-afternoon drinks with a friend, I noticed a couple in their forties at the next table, carrying instruments and probably returning from a gig. It was not a matter of staring across the room or constructing a fantasy from fragments; they were simply close enough that one could not help noticing. Nor was she making any attempt to conceal it. Her desire had the confidence of something unashamed of being visible. She was not conventionally spectacular: pale-skinned, brunette, wearing glasses, visibly her age rather than pretending otherwise. Almost everything about her communicated appetite. When he went to the bar, she checked her face in a small mirror and applied a little more lipstick. The gesture was not girlish, anxious or self-advertising. It had the calm practicality of a woman preparing to enjoy herself.

When he returned, her whole manner altered without becoming needy. She leaned forward, laughed with real pleasure and looked at him with open eyes that were not starry but frankly lustful. She was not admiring him in order to secure him. Wanting him excited her. What she communicated was not youth, perfection or polished self-display, but presence, humour and the unmistakable air of someone fully inhabited. Watching them leave, I had the immediate and ungallant thought that she was going to fuck his brains out. The vulgarity is part of the accuracy. It named not his conquest but hers: the difference between being desired and bringing desire.

One of the best kissers I have known was a woman in her late fifties, when I was in my thirties. She was not young, and that did not matter. She had passion, adventurousness, attentiveness and the capacity to be wonderfully cheeky in the middle of it. She wanted pleasure to pass both ways and had decided that kissing was worth doing seriously, as an art rather than a preliminary. The mastery was unmistakable because it came with pride: not vanity, but satisfaction in something genuinely developed and enjoyed.

This emphasis on responsiveness is not reducible to appearance. In three studies of initial heterosexual acquaintanceship, Gurit Birnbaum, Tsachi Ein-Dor, Harry Reis and Noam Segal found that men experienced responsive women as more sexually attractive, although the equivalent effect did not appear consistently in women’s responses to men. Responsiveness does not mean submissiveness or passive agreement. It means perceptible engagement: attention answered by attention, energy by energy.

The encounters that leave a mark are those in which both people enter the circuit: exciting and being excited, answering response with response, allowing each person’s desire to intensify the other’s. Her pleasure in my pleasure is as real, and as selfish in the best sense, as my pleasure in hers. Even the choreography of undressing matters: the rhythm, humour, confidence, hesitation, embarrassment or pleasure with which the social self gives way to the erotic one. Desire reads style as well as skin.

One cannot become good at something one half-disowns. Shame can produce furtiveness, mechanical urgency, apologetic need or brittle over-performance in men; in women it can produce sex as service, concession, bargaining chip or embarrassment. Either way, the current weakens. The person who likes sex without apologising for liking it makes the other attractive qualities possible.

None of this is a set of demands addressed only to women. A man who brings nothing to an encounter but availability, a decent job and the expectation of being found interesting is subject to precisely the analysis set out here. He too can be attractive enough for access and not compelling enough for investment. He too can mistake having been wanted once for having been chosen. The questions that run through this essay have a male form, and it is not a gentler one: is there appetite here, or only willingness; curiosity, or only attention to himself; the capacity to make another person’s life larger, or merely the wish to be admitted to it? Aliveness is not a female duty. A man who wants to be met with desire rather than mere consent has to bring something to be met.

There is also a false version of erotic yielding. In consensual asymmetry, the person taking the more receptive role is not necessarily doing less. Receptivity can be active: alert, playful, trusting, responsive and fully involved in the rhythm. The less interesting version uses receptivity to occupy the centre of attention while contributing little beyond availability. The other person is asked to generate the whole event. Receptivity without response is passivity; receptivity without generosity is not a gift, but a request to be made interesting by someone else’s desire.

Comparison is part of this. A man who has known women alive in themselves, sexually unashamed, funny, warm, curious and capable of mutual excitement notices quickly when these qualities are absent. This is possible only because some women are extraordinary. A woman who is alive in herself, likes sex without shame, and brings humour, responsiveness, courage and real presence sets a standard that cannot be met by mere prettiness, availability, credentials or self-belief. That aliveness is not an abstract essence lodged in her like a certificate. It becomes perceptible in encounter: in rhythm, appetite, wit, generosity, touch and the pleasure she takes in being there. It is also a form of attention. She looks, listens, notices, responds; she gives him some of the interest, concentration and erotic seriousness she would expect from him. She does not merely wait to be animated by male desire, as if his task were to make her vivid enough to want.

The most sustaining forms of desire are not reducible to youth, symmetry, thinness or conventional beauty. Nor are they secured by self-esteem. You cannot outsource them to the gym, the wardrobe, the credential, the friend group or the filter. You have to bring yourself. The women who know this already are rarely the problem; they are usually the ones made most impatient by those who demand the rewards of aliveness while bringing only the rhetoric of self-worth.

Desire is not fair, wise or always intelligible. It has its own obscure jurisdiction. But the question asked by this essay is not whether every verdict is correct. It is whether male desire is allowed to have one.

The woman enters the room with an account of herself already prepared. She may be strong, successful, independent, empathetic, discerning and very clear about what she deserves. None of those descriptions is binding on the man who meets her. He will encounter the voice, the manner, the appetite, the warmth, the effort, the pauses and the small accidents. He may be delighted. He may want her again. He may not. What he will not do is tell her which, and she will have no way of establishing it from the outside — any more than he could establish, from the colour rising in a woman’s face, what exactly she had begun to imagine.

Most of the verdict will remain unspoken. There need be no comprehensive audit, no cruel speech and no final scene. Perhaps there will only be a polite goodbye, a shorter message than expected, or silence. By the time she begins to explain what happened, the clipboard may already have passed through other hands. The explanations that survive are rarely identical with the perceptions that produced them.

As I was wandering up Green Lanes, a young mother with a baby in a pram walked past me at what, to any reasonable observer, would have seemed an entirely ordinary pace. To me, however, and relative to my own speed, it was like being overtaken by an enthusiastic Ferrari driver. I let her pass, naturally, but did not speed up.

This is nothing new. Ever since I was young, family, friends, colleagues and others have commented, sometimes with amazement, on how slowly I seem able to walk - in a way that would take significant effort for them. At school, one friend watched from a window as I appeared to take almost ten minutes to cross the yard. Another said that the health benefits of walking probably do not apply at the speed I walk. Others cannot understand my apparent lack of any need to get anywhere. My wife Lindsay calls my way of walking ‘Pace pace’.

This is not, particularly, the result of conscious choice. I can walk more quickly if I need to, and do so when I have to be somewhere. I also like cycling, and then of course travel much faster. When traversing the extraordinary distances between the café areas past security and the gate at any of the large London airports, I do usually recognise the need to walk rather faster. But in general walking, for me, is about the act itself: all there is to see, observe, hear, sense and smell on the journey, and the space it gives one to think. It is not primarily a functional activity whose main purpose is arrival. Despite all the many comments, some of them not always generous, I have not stopped walking this way, and I do not intend to.

I wandered on into Clissold Park, which is a prime location for watching the North London middle classes at leisure. Lindsay once witnessed a particularly fine Clissold Park scene. A younger man and an older man were both there with dogs. The younger man’s dog, female and a little larger, stood there quite passively, while the older man’s male dog mounted her and began humping away with considerable enthusiasm. The younger man was in hysterics. The older man, meanwhile, was trying to restore order by saying, with increasing desperation, ‘Gatsby, Gatsby, stop it, Gatsby!’ There are moments when North London appears to be acting like a parody of itself, and all one has to do is be moving slowly enough to register it.

I sauntered towards the café in the park, where I noticed they were selling ‘kids’ pasta and pesto’. This also gave me pause. I remember, in the 1970s sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the character of Tom being thought very eccentric because he ‘made his children eat garlic bread’. Now, I gather, pasta has been a default food for children for almost two decades, and my wife’s bestie brought up her kids on pesto and hummus. I could almost believe in progress - certainly compared with such unspeakable fare of yesteryear as baked beans, Marmite or spaghetti hoops, which some otherwise functioning adults continue to consume even into middle age.

Around me, I saw one woman whose hair was bushing out so magnificently that I wondered whether she had been watching too much of the second series based on Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. The industrial quantities of hairspray required apparently used to terrify science teachers in the 1980s when the girls they taught were in the vicinity of Bunsen burners. A man in a dark jacket and sunglasses sat on the steps, typing into his phone with such intensity that he might have been composing the Great British Novel, or at least a very long WhatsApp message. Otherwise, on a Friday afternoon, there were lots of mothers with very young children, equipped with what appeared to be infinite reserves of tolerance. Who knows what others may have made of me, typing some of this article itself into my phone.

But I don’t only come to a park to watch people. Sometimes I simply love looking at the trees: this silver-green willow, for example, with its hanging branches, its leaves blowing and rustling, its stems swaying in the wind. Parks are never as quiet as people imagine. There is always a soft orchestra of children shouting, dogs barking, bikes speeding past, café cutlery, fragments of adult negotiation (often much more banal than dramas would have us believe), and, if the wind is right, the leaves doing something much subtler than most of us deserve.

And then there are the lakes - though in at least one case this may be a case of over-promoting a large pond. I have always been drawn to water, and love sitting near it to look and think. Riverside cafés, or those overlooking great lakes or the sea, are particular favourites.

I was trying to clear my mind before getting back into work mode: sorting out expenses claims, marking dissertations, working on plans for multiple edited volumes and chasing up others with publishers, practising new repertoire for a recital in Dublin in July, working on my articles on Boulez and Baden-Baden, managed affirmation, and representations of Clydeside. Those can all wait until tomorrow.

The irritation caused by a slow walker is not really about walking. It is about breaking the tacit contract of the pavement, in which everyone is expected to move at a speed sufficiently purposeful not to trouble anyone else or at least not to stand out. The slow walker is not necessarily blocking the path, but they are still guilty of some minor offence against collective tempo. They do not quite look as if they have accepted these conditions.

When I first moved to London in 1993 - itself the fulfilment of a dream I had had since childhood - I lived in Battersea for around 18 months. I did not have much money, so I walked long distances across the city. I would often walk to Bond Street and back to go to concerts at the British Music Information Centre, or simply to look through the scores there. Sometimes I would walk all the way to Islington to meet a friend who worked there for a drink after he finished.

The Tube map, whilst very practically useful and a masterpiece of design, tells a huge lie about London. It turns the city into nodes and coloured lines, suppressing distances, gradients, smells, traffic, congestion, shopfronts, churches, estates, mews, railway arches, river bends, dead zones, underpasses and the peculiar psychological transitions between one district and another. Walking restored all that. It made London continuous again: not just Northern Line to Piccadilly Line to Victoria Line, but Battersea becoming Chelsea, Chelsea becoming Kensington, the Thames curving away, a different type of shop or accent announcing that one had crossed some invisible boundary.

Walking along the south side of the Thames, I remember vividly the billboards: one with moody pictures of Robbie Coltrane, advertising, in advance, his appearance in what was then the new series Cracker, the role which would make him seem, to many of us, a genuinely serious dramatic actor. Before Nine Elms and Vauxhall were done up, with the later arrival of the US Embassy and all that has followed, I remember wandering through those areas and thinking of the climactic car chases in The Sweeney which had been filmed around there.

I felt I came to know Chelsea and Kensington very well by walking slowly through them: the streets, the people, the shops, the traces of what King’s Road was in the 1960s and 1970s, the difference from Battersea, and the differences between the two areas themselves. Sometimes I would end up at the Institut français for part of a Godard season, where there was always the chance of running into some artist friend or other. Likewise, sitting in the ICA café, I would see lots of people who appeared to have little idea what the place was for, but knew it was a good location with which to be associated.

Looking back, London was not simply a map of useful destinations, but a set of atmospheres, memories, cultural associations and promises, class signals and private routes. Battersea to Bond Street; the Thames to Vauxhall; Kensington to the Institut français; the ICA as café, pose and institution all at once. Walking slowly made the city available as a sequence of impressions rather than a problem in transport. When I have been to car-dominated US cities, such as Los Angeles or Buffalo, something has always seemed badly missing where walking is so rarely a natural way of getting to know a place.

There are grander traditions I could invoke here. The French gave us the flâneur: the urban stroller, the idle observer, the connoisseur of streets, crowds, shop windows, surfaces and passing human oddities. Baudelaire made him a glamorous figure; Walter Benjamin made him theoretically indispensable. I am not sure either had in mind a man being overtaken by a pram on Green Lanes, but one takes one’s affinities where one can find them.

Only later did I find a name for some of this in psychogeography: the idea that cities are not just arrangements of roads, parks, buildings and transport links, but fields of mood, memory, class, history and strange invitation. The Situationists made the dérive - the urban drift - into something like a practice, and later London writers and film-makers such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller turned walking into a way of reading the city’s buried histories, absurdities and pathologies. I would not claim anything so systematic for my own meanderings. Still, there is something in the idea that a city changes according to the speed at which one moves through it.

I first saw Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994) when it was shown on Channel 4 soon after its cinematic release. It captivated me completely. Almost for the first time, I saw on screen something that captured - through the style of filming and the narration - the melancholy and slightly estranged feeling I associated so strongly with London, but turned into a kind of visual poetry. That atmosphere is there from the very outset, and is in no sense diminished by the extensive political commentary in the earlier part of the film.

In time I came to connect Keiller’s cinematic essay with T.S. Eliot’s ‘Under the brown fog of a winter dawn / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’ (for which Eliot, in turn, drew upon Dante’s Inferno). Later still, I would turn against the kind of misanthropy and associated snobbery that Keiller’s film seemed to embody, made more palpable in his subsequent film Robinson in Space (1997). But at the time I was taken aback that a film could be made like that: one which seemed to give concrete form to much of what I felt about London and living there.

In a quite different way, Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland (1999) also conveyed something similar: the experience of being surrounded by more people than one could otherwise imagine, yet sometimes feeling utterly alone. Gina McKee is extraordinary in it, even with her shocking Minnie Mouse hairstyle briefly fashionable at the time. A scene where she has a mini-breakdown in a bus in which lots of others appear to be having fun gave representation to something which many have felt living in the capital. Michael Nyman’s score, written before the film was shot and intended, as he once told me, to convey aspiration, takes on a bitter irony in the context of the bleak lives of the three sisters portrayed. Reflections on these films feed into parts of a sociological module on Exploring London which I now teach.

Slow walking is not always about looking, hearing, observing or feeling atmosphere, however. It can equally be a time to think without distraction. Some ideas only seem to assemble themselves when the body is moving but the mind is not being directly solicited by a screen, a deadline, a message, an email or another person’s urgent requirement.

The ideas which came together in my 2002 composition …quasi una fantasmagoria op. 120 no. 2…, for speaking clarinettist and speaking pianist, were formed during a series of slow walks. The piece grew initially out of my observing a range of stock visual mannerisms employed by performers for particular effects. In the piece, the clarinettist reads out these mannerisms in a blank, uncomprehending voice rather than enacting them, while the pianist plays deliberately contrived material, like fragments of tortuous technical exercises, with books under their elbows, while speaking of the joys of suffering pain for their art. Once the basic idea had settled in my mind - how to make an artistic work foregrounding the contrived nature of commodified emotive effects - I wrote the piece very quickly.

The same is true of some of what I think are among my more original writings: on Coldness and Cruelty as Performance in Deleuze’s Proust, on the historiography of minimal music (here and here), on ‘Is Classical Colonial?’, on ethnomusicology (indexed here), on ‘Fascination’ (here and here), more recently on ‘The Art of Judgment’ (here and here), and various others. Of course all of these needed checking of sources, drafting, revision and the usual forms of scholarly labour. But the basic hypothesis, the angle, the plan - those often fixed themselves during walks. Once that had happened, writing became much quicker.

Not all such thoughts are positive or creative, though they may still be necessary. I remember long walks during which thinking through things again and again forced me to the conclusion that an earlier long-term relationship would never become what I had hoped it might be. During the miserable period of lockdown, when I endlessly traversed the various areas around our Highbury home, I similarly came to realise that what I had hoped to achieve in the department I then headed was not going to be possible, for various reasons. Both chains of thought were bleak and saddening, but they were nonetheless valuable. Walking does not always console. Sometimes it removes the consolations one has been relying upon.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think of all this partly as a question of tempo. Despite playing a lot of highly complex, dynamic and discursive music, I am equally drawn to music which is very static, sometimes oscillating around just a few harmonies, not really with any strong sense of direction: Erik Satie, Federico Mompou, Morton Feldman, Walter Zimmermann, Howard Skempton, and much in other genres too, including ‘Fascination’. I am wary of readings which too quickly impose all-encompassing ideologies of social meaning or gender on artistic work in temporal media which is not obviously “goal-oriented”. Here I simply want to say that such music haunts me, and I return to it often.

I remember first getting to know Feldman’s piano works Triadic Memories (1981) as a student, through Roger Woodward’s recording, and I came to play it during this time. The programme note quoted Feldman on walking through the streets of Berlin where all the buildings look the same even though they aren’t. I loved this metaphor. It directly evoked the sense in the music of going over the same types of material repeatedly, in marginally different ways, and relishing that experience rather than demanding a more obvious destination. This was, and remains, rather like slow walking for me. So are some of the films of Wim Wenders or the novels of Peter Handke.

Some music reveals very little if pushed too fast. The notes may all be there, but the inner life has gone. Streets can be like that too. Move through them too quickly and they become merely useful. Slow down, and their counterpoint begins to emerge.

So perhaps ‘Pace pace’ is not merely an eccentric gait, still less a failure of efficiency. It is one of the ways I have come to know places, especially London. Not by moving through them as quickly as possible, not by submitting entirely to the timetable, the Tube map, the appointment or the errand, but by letting details become intrusive: a dog called Gatsby, pesto for children, a willow’s leaves, a billboard for Cracker, a memory of The Sweeney, the ICA as cultural aspiration and café, a large pond promoted to a lake.

On the walk home, however, all this reflective dignity was put under pressure. An elderly gentleman was pushing a bicycle before mounting it, and, as he did so, farted very loudly and without the slightest compunction. That seemed, for once, a good reason to speed up.

The judgment from Mrs Justice Lieven has now been issued in the Judicial Review case AC-2025-LON-001462 between R (University of Sussex) v Office for Students (OfS), with The Free Speech Union intervening on paper. It upholds various of the grounds used by Sussex, and as such is a serious defeat for the OfS, but it is not a vindication of what happened at Sussex, nor a reason to abandon stronger statutory protections for academic freedom.

The OfS had made public a decision on 26 March 2025 involving a fine of £585,000 against Sussex, regarding their 2018 Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement (TNBEPS) (modelled on a statement issued by Advance HE) which it said did not uphold the public interest governance principles on freedom of speech and academic freedom as set out in the OfS’s Regulatory Framework (RF), and so a breach of their condition E1. Furthermore, the OfS found that Sussex failed to have adequate and effective management and governance arrangements in place such as would ensure they operated in accordance with the delegation arrangements set out in their governing documents, which breached condition E2. There were further conclusions by which some of the university’s other policies did not comply with Section 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, relating to freedom of speech, and further concerns relating to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Section 19 of the Equality Act 2010, and the Public Sector Equality Duty.

The decision followed an investigation which began on 22 October 2021, in the wake of the heated campaign against Professor Kathleen Stock on grounds of her gender-critical views. This led to her resignation on 28 October, thus after the investigation had been initiated. Nonetheless, the investigation and judgment were not a fact-finding inquiry into Stock.

Sussex’s grounds for challenging the decision, as ultimately argued and reorganised, including the following:

1. The TNBEPS was not a ‘governing document’ in the relevant sense, such as made it applicable for investigation under E1;

2. The OfS were overstepping their brief by investigating matters of internal university law;

3. The OfS misunderstood ‘freedom of speech within the law’, as institutions need to impose restrictions on lawful speech to maintain academic standards, prevent bullying or harassment and run an institution;

4. The OfS misinterpreted the policy and disciplinary framework, as TNBEPS could not have lawfully been used to discipline staff, as other governing documents protected academic speech;

5. The OfS did not take into account the fact that by the time of the decision, Sussex had amended TNBEPS, but this was not considered, while the claim that the policy had a ‘significant and severe’ chilling effect was based too much on Stock’s own experience rather than wider evidence;

6. Sussex alleged apparent bias and predetermination, relying in part on Ahmed’s previous public support for Stock and his later role in the investigation, as well as heavy reliance on the part of the OfS on witness evidence from her.

The judgment upheld grounds 1, parts of 3, 4, and parts of 5 and 6. Ground 2 was thrown out, as was the objection in 5E of the effect of TNBEPS, and also claims the OfS did not take account of anti-competitive effects, and that they acted unlawfully by not providing Stock’s second witness statement before the final decision. The rulings on 1 and parts of 3 in essence call into question OfS RF E1 and its definitions.

Ground 3D is more awkward for free-speech advocates than Ground 1, because the court did not reject the importance of lawful speech; it held that the OfS had short-circuited the analysis by treating any policy capable of restricting lawful speech as problematic without asking whether a restriction might be legally justified and proportionate. The OfS’s later RA24 framework, and the new duties in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (HEFSA), give it a better route, but they do not make all restrictions on lawful speech automatically unlawful. The findings on 4, when other policies protected academics’ freedom of speech, are harder to argue with. The court’s acceptance of 5A is more contestable. A regulator should not be required to ignore late remedial amendments, but nor should institutions be able to neutralise enforcement simply by revising policies once an investigation is nearing its conclusion.

Regarding Ground 1, The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 indicates in Section 14 (1):

For the purposes of section 13(1)(b), “a public interest governance condition” in relation to a provider means a condition requiring the provider’s governing documents to be consistent with the principles in the list published under this section, so far as applicable to the provider.

OfS condition E1 indicates that the “provider’s governing documents must uphold the public interest governance principles [PIGPs] that are applicable to the provider”, while E2(i) says that the “provider must have in place adequate and effective management and governance arrangements to: i. operate in accordance with its governing documents…”.

The difficulty for the OfS was that HERA’s public-interest governance condition was drafted around ‘governing documents’, not the full range of policies, codes and statements through which universities now shape academic life. That distinction may look formalistic, but the court held that it was a statutory limit on the regulator’s E1 powers. RF para 424 defines these as follows:

424. ‘governing documents’ means the documents adopted, or that should have been adopted by the provider, that describe any of the provider’s objectives or values, its powers, who has a role in decision making within the provider, how the provider takes decisions about how to exercise its functions, or how it monitors their exercise. This test will be broadly rather than narrowly applied. Where a document in part deals with any such matters, and in part with other matters, the whole of the document is a ‘governing document’.

425. Depending on the legal form of the provider its ‘governing documents’ may include a Royal Charter, Statutes and Ordinances, articles of association, or Instruments of Government and/or a trust deed or deeds. They are also likely to include documents such as schemes of delegation, terms of reference of committees to which significant functions have been delegated, the provider’s policies on matters such as management of conflicts of interest, support for freedom of speech or academic freedom, and/or member/shareholder agreements where these may influence the operation of the provider.”

The ruling recognises the lack of a definition in HERA, but Lieven did not accept the OfS’s definitions on various grounds including historical background, settled understanding in charity law, some government documents and some proposed amendments in the parliamentary history of the passing of the bill, alleged unworkability, and a reading of another part of HERA. Effectively this means that policy documents which say something about values or conduct, rather than those that constitute, govern or structure the institution’s legal and governance arrangements, are not valid grounds for the OfS to use condition E1, and so they are likely to have to revise the RF. The danger is that universities may now be tempted to place ideologically loaded or speech-restrictive commitments in ordinary policy documents, rather than constitutional instruments, and then say they fall outside the E1 requirements.

Nonetheless, these wider documents still do not lie outside of all OfS scrutiny in light of subsequent legislation. HEFSA, which was not yet active for the purposes of the Sussex investigation, does not enable the OfS to retrieve the old E1 definitions. But it does provide other routes, through the insertion of new Parts A1, A2 and A3 into HERA, enabling the OfS to look at providers’ actual policies, procedures and decision. Furthermore, their Regulatory Advice 24 sets out a three-step framework for measures and decisions affecting speech: 1. Is the speech within the law?; 2. Are there reasonably practicable steps to secure it?; 3. Are any restrictions prescribed by law an proportionate under Article 10 principles? This applies to ‘any measure or decision that might affect speech or types of speech’. Para 221 of the judgment expresses agreement with this process.

Regarding Ground 6, the judgment did find bias and predetermination relating to Ground 6, but it is important to be clear about what it says about Ahmed. He joined the OfS as Free Speech/Academic Freedom Director in August 2023 and only joined the investigation team only on 15 October 2024. He had previously, in September 2023, recorded a possible conflict of interest in light of his earlier defence of Stock, but the court found that the investigation was driven not by him but by the then OfS chief executive Susan Lapworth.

Lapworth was the OfS’s Director of Regulation from 2018, and appointed as the second Chief Executive in September 2022. She initiated the process on 7 October 2021, after becoming aware of the campaign against Stock, first e-mailing the then Vice-Chancellor of Sussex, Adam Tickell, to ask of the university’s actions or forthcoming actions to protect freedom of speech and academic freedom, and also prepared documents including one entitled ‘prioritisation of a free speech case’. The OfS Board informed the Department for Education that they would prioritise the case on 21 October 2021, and the investigation was formerly opened by Lapworth on 22 October. Upon becoming interim chief executive in February 2022, she stepped back from full day-to-day conduct, but retained close oversight of the process. The judge described her involvement as ‘intense and overarching’ and said ‘the entire process was shaped by her’. She has recently stepped down from her executive position.

The University of Sussex Compliance and Enforcement Committee (USCEC) was established by Lapworth on 6 July 2023. The Provisional Decision of USCEC was made on 1 March 2024, followed by final decisions in January and February 2025 on breaches of E1 and E2(i), and breaches, penalty and wider regulatory concerns. The final decisions date from 14 February 2025.

Ahmed had, as noted in paras 420-422 of the ruling, expressed strong support for Stock and her position, and been very critical of her opponents. But it recognises this was almost inevitable in anyone who was deemed suitable for his role. Para 423 founds ‘nothing in their personal relationship [between Ahmed and Stock] that would give rise to any finding of apparent bias’. As Ahmed only came into the investigation at a later stage, para 426 finds ‘no vitiating apparent bias in respect of Dr Ahmed’s personal role in the decision-making’. The ruling said (para 425) that ‘the die had already been well cast’ at the time of the Provisional Decision, which was before Ahmed joined the team, and he was not the formal decision-maker. The court’s bias finding should not therefore be caricatured as ‘Ahmed once defended Stock, therefore the OfS was biased.’ The judgment is more damaging to the OfS, but not necessarily to Ahmed, than that. It treats Ahmed’s role as part of a wider picture in which the regulator, and especially the process shaped by Lapworth, had effectively closed its mind before the final decision.

The OfS has issued a statement expressing their disappointment with the ruling, and intention to consider next steps, but noting that a dozen institutions have amended their policies following the investigation. I very much hope that they will appeal this judgment, following an investigation which was genuinely motivated by a need to protect the rights of academics facing those trying to limit their freedom of speech and academic freedom relating to contested issues. Without continuing action on this, which made HEFSA vital, there will be little to prevent the sort of mobbing action which drove Stock out of academia.

On 20 April 2026 the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, announced the implementation of the complaints scheme, from 1 September 2026, to make HEFSA truly enforceable, as was urged by over 400 academics. A statement from the DfE thankfully indicates their recognition that ‘it is vital the regulator has the powers to hold providers to account’, going on to say this is why they are introducing the complaints scheme.

The mandatory OfS conditions of registration are to come into force from 1 April 2027, and the government says that from this the new conditions will allow the OfS to fine universities for breaches of their HEFSA duties, with fines of £500,000 or 2% of income, whichever is higher, and deregistration in the most serious cases. The Sussex/OfS judgment is from a pre-HEFSA period, and I believe that with the complaints scheme and new conditions of registration in place, the OfS will have a clearer statutory route for investigating and sanctioning policies and practices that restrict lawful speech.

Sussex’s Vice-Chancellor, Sasha Roseneil, has used the verdict to attack the reputation of the OfS, and said it ‘raises important and urgent questions for the government as it plans to grant ever more powers to the regulator’, and she seeks a meeting with Phillipson on this subject. But the university’s legal victory is not a moral exoneration. The judgment was not a finding that all was well at Sussex, nor that the mobbing treatment of Stock was compatible with a healthy culture of academic freedom.

It was a finding that, under the pre-HEFSA framework, the OfS used the wrong legal tools, interpreted some of them wrongly, and conducted its process unlawfully. The lesson should be better regulation, not weaker protection.

I was very sad to hear the news of the death of novelist and literary scholar David Lodge (1935-2025). I first read his novel Nice Work (1988) in 1989, just after I had graduated. I loved it then and have read it several times since, followed soon afterwards by the other two novels in his campus trilogy (Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975) and Small World: An Academic Romance (1984)) then How Far Can You Go? (1980), The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), and as they came out Paradise News (1991), Therapy (1995), Home Truths (1999) and Thinks … (2001). The campus novels served in part as part of my guide to the workings of academic politics and culture, and inspired me to read more of the literature discussed therein, in particular the medieval romance after Small World. His three-volume memoir/autobiography – Quite a Good Time to be Born: A Memoir, 1935-75 (2015); Writer’s Luck: A Memoir: 1976-1991 (2018); and Varying Degrees of Success: A Memoir (1992-2020) (2020) – was also a very engaging read, though I also think it will take an independent biographer (as with Adam Sisman on John le Carré) to establish for sure the veracity of Lodge’s own claims that all the extra-mural sexual activities depicted in his novels had no biographical basis.

I also read a range of his literary essays and monographs, my favourite of which is The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature (1977), which employs Roman Jakobson’s classic opposition between metaphor and metonymy as a means of structuring literary history. Lodge continued to write criticism after voluntarily leaving academia in 1987, aged 52, having taught continuously at the University of Birmingham from 1967, the year he finished his PhD, and being made Professor of English Literature in 1976, at the age of 41. He himself said that he was aiming his post-academia criticism at a wider general audience, but I would say all of his critical work demonstrates an admirable clarity and elegance of style (clearly related to the fact he was also an accomplished novelist), almost never engaging in jargon for the sake of mystification or academic capital. There was certainly plenty of engagement with a range of sophisticated theories – structuralism, post-structuralism, Russian formalism and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and later neuroscience and theories of consciousness and communication – though almost never the Frankfurt School or other Germanic schools of literary and cultural theory. Lodge was a true lover of and insightful writer in particular into James Joyce, who he thought one of the greatest writers of all, and also admired Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, but had no time for those, including William Burroughs and B.S. Johnson, who employed chance-based techniques in literature. He made use of a range of ‘experimental’ techniques in his own novels, notably shifts in style or genre (a little in the manner of Italo Calvino) in each chapter of The British Museum and Changing Places, and in others occasionally breaking the literary equivalent of the fourth wall to foreground the actual act of writing. But these devices were more occasional or decorative than part of a more fundamental aesthetic, and for the most part his work belongs essentially in a twentieth-century British realist tradition.

Lodge and Nice Work

It happens that just last week, before departing on holiday (I have been writing this blog post from various resorts in Nevada and California) I was re-watching the 1989 BBC dramatisation (by Lodge himself) of Nice Work, still my favourite of his novels and the third part of the campus trilogy. This can be viewed here, here, here and here (if anyone at all reading this has some video of the 1988 Granada TV adaptation of Small World, about which Lodge was sceptical, but which I have never seen and would love to, please do let me know). Warren Clarke plays the gruff, sharp but vulnerable engineer and manager, of J. Pringle & Sons, Vic Wilcox, aged 46, married with three children (this part played a major role in propelling Clarke’s own career forward, having previously mostly had supporting bit parts, but later taking leading roles, most memorably in Dalziel and Pascoe (1996-2007)), while Haydn Gwynne plays that of young and precariously-employed feminist English literature lecturer Robyn Penrose, aged 32-33 (before Gwynne became even more familiar playing Alex Pates in the first two series of Drop the Dead Donkey (1990-1991) and then from 1999 Joanne Graham in Peak Practice).

Warren Clarke and Haydn Gwynne in BBC dramatisation of Nice Work

The novel introduced both Vic and Robyn for the first time, while characters in Changing Places and Small World Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp have only bit parts. The novel and series involve a scheme whereby (in line with Industry Year 1986) an academic is required to ‘shadow’ someone working in industry, in light of a decree by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Rummidge (where Robyn is a junior lecturer on a temporary contract), indicating ‘a widespread feeling in the country that universities are “ivory tower” institutions, whose staff are ignorant of the realities of the modern commercial world.’ This brings Penrose and Wilcox, both reluctant and dubious about the value of the scheme, into regular contact, highlighting the clashes of their very different worlds and associated values, also an ill-judged sexual encounter during a trip to Germany. Later Vic elects to undertake the scheme in reverse, and shadows Robyn at her work.

Robyn’s job has come about since Swallow, previously Head of the English Department at Rummidge (which Lodge himself described in 2011 as ‘a comic caricature of Birmingham’, where the university scenes in the series were filmed, though its description of an institution never ‘of more than middling size and reputation’, also being overtaken by ‘new’ universities, in Changing Places, is at odds with the high prestige of Birmingham and its English Department), has been elected Dean of the Arts Faculty for three years. She is covering his undergraduate teaching, but dealing with her fears of being out of work when her contract expires, as it seems impossible that it will be made permanent in light of cuts to higher education during the era. At the same, she is mentally negotiating her on-and-off relationship with Charles, who she has known since student days at the University of Sussex (having chosen there rather than applying to Oxbridge, because the ‘new’ university offered a lot of the more radical new developments in literary studies). Both went to Cambridge as postgraduates, at a time when semiotics, structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and more were in the air, and Robyn threw herself 200% into these (Charles was rather more circumspect). Her specific subject areas are Victorian literature and feminist literary criticism, while Charles works on romantic poetics of the sublime. He finished his PhD in time, and was able to find a permanent position at the University of Suffolk (portrayed as a new ‘plateglass’ institution – no such institution existed at the time of writing, though a later initiative from the Universities of East Anglia and Essex, working together with some local colleges in Suffolk, the largest county then without a university, led to the establishment of such a place in 2007). Robyn wanted to stay at Cambridge, and remained there doing some undergraduate supervision, also helped by an allowance from her father, himself an academic holding a personal Chair in an unnamed university on the south coast of England. Then there was a major controversy at Cambridge in 1981, which Lodge describes without giving names, but refers to the denial of tenure to then 32-year old English lecturer Colin McCabe (also involved in film studies and the journal Screen), who had studied at the École normale superieure in Paris, attending classes of Barthes, Althusser, Derrida and others, and was viewed as a Young Turk of structuralism in opposition to more traditionally-inclined professors at the university. McCabe moved to the University of Strathclyde (a much more technologically-focused institution) and later held senior positions at a range of institutions in the UK and US. In the novel, Robyn was very outspoken during this controversy, which made the national press, but this led to her feeling a ‘marked woman’ after the traditionalists were victorious. With no jobs going, institutions in the process of persuading existing staff to take early retirement and freezing vacancies, Robyn was unemployed for around a year before getting the job at Rummidge.

Colin McCabe

As for Vic, born in Rummidge, he attended ‘Rummidge College of Advanced Technology’, and worked his way up from an apprenticeship through various engineering then middle management jobs, becoming a managing director at age 40. His adherence to Thatcherism is qualified, inclined to believe that allowing the pound to rise on the back of North Sea oil made British companies highly vulnerable to foreign competition, as a result of which he has seen one-thirds of engineering companies in the West Midlands close down. Nonetheless, he believes Thatcher was right to tackle overmanning and restrictive practices, even if she may have gone too far. He worries however for the fate of his own firm, and also about the possibility that industrial action might make it unprofitable, so that the larger enterprise of which it is part may sell it off (a fear which proves well-founded by the end). His own marriage seems loveless and sexless, and Vic clearly yearns for something more in his life.

The Nice Work adaptation has endured well, I believe. Inevitably some of the detail of the book, and the particular type of narrative perspective, had to be lost or changed for TV, and the direction by Christopher Menaul is not very visually imaginative or stimulating (though one memorable scene features the most smoke-filled room I have ever seen depicted). But it is tightly scripted and has both excellent dialogue and compelling performances from the two exceptional leads. The questions which occupy me now, though, after over two decades over working in academia myself, are: what of the view of academia portrayed by Lodge still seems true and relevant today, and what has changed?

Lodge’s Campus Novels and the Changing Situation of UK Higher Education

Though Lodge will probably forever be associated with the campus novel (and to my mind his novels of this type are considerably more accomplished than those of his close friend Malcolm Bradbury), only four of his fourteen novels really count as such: the three of the campus trilogy and Thinks … The world of the literary student features in The British Museum (painfully familiar for those who us who have spent many days, weeks, months, in libraries as part of our research) and How Far Can You Go? and that of a retired academic in Deaf Sentence (2008), but the world of campus life (or, in Small World, conference life) do not play a central part in any of these. Of the campus trilogy, the last, Nice Work, is set in 1986, and includes references to the Westland affair, the American bombing of Libya, and Industry Year 1986. In 1986 (the year I went to university, though in the autumn, so the academic year after the events of the book), students paid no fees to go to university and still received means-tested grants for subsistence, while around 14-15% of young people participated in higher education. 1986 was also the first year of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE, later the Research Excellence Framework (REF)) which is alluded to only very briefly in the novel. The events depicted predate the ending of academic tenure in the UK in 1988, and even more significantly the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, allowing a range of polytechnics and other colleges to attain university status, the founding of the Russell Group in 1994, the introduction of student maintenance loans, and later fees.

By the time of Thinks …, fees were still just £1000 per year, which figure would increase to £3000 in 2003, then £9000 in 2012, while participation rates had more than doubled, to over 30%. All of this affected the relationship between student and institution/academics, and arguably was designed to do so, at least at the time of the trebling of fees in 2012 at the hands of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government. Other changes which postdate any of Lodge’s novels include further expansion of student numbers and the removal of caps on these in 2015, many developments in the RAE/REF, new provisions to encourage the growth of private ‘alternative education providers’ in the later 2010s, the implementation of Brexit in 2020, meaning European Union students now had to pay larger fees like all others from abroad, and the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020-2021, which forced many academics to learn rapidly about online and hybrid learning. All of this has contributed to a significantly changed higher educational landscape, and makes me yearn for a latter-day Lodge to write an equivalent type of novel set today.

A few aspects of Thinks … do reflect some changes. The novel is set in the University of Gloucester, a fictional institution. The real-life University of Gloucestershire, a post-1992 institution, was established out of the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education in 2001, the date of publication of the novel. The fictional institution is clearly a ‘new’ university from the 1960s: ‘Jasper Richmond, the Head of English and Dean of Humanities, explained to me that the original plan, conceived in the utopian sixties, envisaged a huge campus like an American state university, accommodating thirty thousand students.’ Other ‘new’ universities created in the 1960s include those in East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Sussex, Warwick and York, of which the latter two are now members of the Russell Group.

The central character of Helen Reed in Thinks… is a recently bereaved ‘writer-in-residence’, reflecting the increased presence of active artistic practitioners in universities (though Helen is only there for one semester), a process which increased further after reforms to submission guidelines to RAE 2001, enabling creative practice outputs to be submitted with no requirement for any verbal commentary beyond an optional 300-word statement (for some thoughts on the problems of practitioners coming to usurp scholars, see this article by Eva Moreda Rodriguez and myself).

Vic Wilcox and the Colleges of Advanced Technology

In the 2011 introduction to the campus trilogy, Lodge describes Vic as ‘polytechnic-educated’. But this is not strictly accurate in terms of how his education is described. As mentioned earlier, he attended ‘Rummidge College of Advanced Technology’. This is a clear allusion to Birmingham College of Advanced Technology, the first institution of its type, created in 1956, becoming Aston University in 1966. Lodge appears to have imagined that the Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) were essentially the same as polytechnics. But this was not the case. The CATs were 10 institutions in England and Wales (Birmingham, Salford, Bradford, Northampton CAT (London), Chelsea, Battersea, Welsh, Loughborough, Bristol, Brunel) that were created from 1956 onwards, as a result of a range of reports beginning with the Percy Report of 1945. They were a response to a perceived lack of qualified individuals to serve as senior and/or advanced figures in science and technology to work for government and the highest ranks of industry, and would be a relatively elite layer of such training on top of existing technical colleges (which often educated mostly part-time students, many not to graduate level). Whilst most of the CATs had grown out of existing technical colleges and polytechnics, by this stage they became different types of institutions. Industrialists had said that many universities produced graduates with knowledge which was too academic, theoretical and remote from industrial needs, and the CATs could offer an alternative.

There were problems. The CATs were not able to offer full degrees but instead a Dip. Tech. qualification. Furthermore, their awards were controlled by a National Council for Technological Awards. The Robbins Report of 1962-63 recommended that they become full universities with independent degree-awarding powers, which they all did in the late 1960s (Chelsea CAT was ultimately incorporated into King’s College, London, and the Welsh CAT into Cardiff University). The mantle of technical education was then transferred to the polytechnics, the number of which expanded very significantly from 1965.

Rummidge/Birmingham CAT served Vic well, though in reality, with a diploma from there, he should have been able to enter industry at a considerably more senior level than a mere apprentice. But the contrast between Vic and Robyn’s type of tertiary education should not be viewed necessarily as one of intellectual level or even rigour, but rather of simple type. The ending of the CATs experiments was a mixed blessing, and some return to this model could have positive implications for the state of higher education today, as I shall return to in the final section of this essay.

Salford Royal College of Advanced Technology, 1966

In Search of Robyn Penrose

Robyn Penrose would disdain the idea of seeking some essence of her self, as made clear by Lodge when introducing the character:

According to Robyn (or, more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking on these matters), there is no such thing as the ‘self ’ on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded – that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person’s identity; there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses – the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc. And by the same token, there is no such thing as an author, that is to say, one who originates a work of fiction ab nihilo. Every text is a product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions to and citations of other texts; and, in the famous words of Jacques Derrida (famous to people like Robyn, anyway), ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our ‘selves’ in language. Not ‘you are what you eat’ but ‘you are what you speak’ or, rather ‘you are what speaks you’, is the axiomatic basis of Robyn’s philosophy, which she would call, if required to give it a name, ‘semiotic materialism’. It might seem a bit bleak, a bit inhuman (‘antihumanist, yes; inhuman, no,’ she would interject), somewhat deterministic (‘not at all; the truly determined subject is he who is not aware of the discursive formations that determine him. Or her,’ she would add scrupulously, being among other things a feminist), but in practice this doesn’t seem to affect her behaviour very noticeably – she seems to have ordinary human feelings, ambitions, desires, to suffer anxieties, frustrations, fears, like anyone else in this imperfect world, and to have a natural inclination to try and make it a better place. I shall therefore take the liberty of treating her as a character…

This passage caught the attention of philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, who reproduced part of it in his Consciousness Explained (1991) as an alternative way of framing the sorts of ideas he was exploring from other angles, saying that Lodge ‘articulates the discomfort, the anxiety, that I have been feeling for years. There’s a queasiness that people feel as they see the march of science into the brain and the mind, a fear that we’ll be swallowed up and turned into robots.’ For his part, this led Lodge into a new interest in consciousness studies and neuroscience which culminated in Thinks… and his collection of essays Consciousness and the Novel (2002).

Daniel Dennett

Nonetheless, Robyn does seem to turn back to more familiar notions of selfhood when she thinks about her shadowing role as ‘the shadow of the self who on the other six days a week was busy with women’s studies and the Victorian novel and poststructuralist literary theory – less substantial, more elusive, but just as real’. Nonetheless she remains dismissive of the concept of ‘love’, which she calls ‘a bourgeois fallacy’, and during their sexual encounter says to Vic that:

The discourse of romantic love pretends that your finger and my clitoris are extensions of two unique individual selves who need each other and only each other and cannot be happy without each other for ever and ever.

But one who is less enamoured of Robyn’s ideas on selfhood is the bereaved Helen Reed in Thinks …, who encounters Robyn, now Professor and Head of Communications and Cultural Studies at a fictional ‘Walsall University’, giving a guest lecture at the School of English at the University of Gloucester:

The ‘Subject’ in Robyn Penrose’s lecture title turned out to be a kind of multiple pun, meaning the subject as experiencing individual, the subject of a sentence, the subject of a political state, and the subject of English Literature in the university curriculum. As far as I could follow it the general argument was that the Subject in all these senses is a Bad Thing, that there is some kind of equivalence between the privileging of the ego in classical psychoanalysis, the fetishization of formal correctness in traditional grammar, the exploitation and oppression of subject races by colonialism, and the idea of a literary canon: they are all repressive and tyrannical and phallocentric and have to be deconstructed . . . It was quite a dazzling discourse in its way, juggling all these conceptual balls in the air, especially when delivered by a tall, handsome, youngish woman in a smart black velvet trouser suit, her flaming red hair swept up at the back with a silver comb, and long silver earrings swinging and glinting as she swept the audience with her confident gaze. But it depressed me that the awed-looking young people in the audience were being given such a dry and barren message. Where was the pleasure of reading in all this? Where was personal discovery, self-development? But the argument didn’t allow for the self, the very idea of the self is a miss-reading or ‘mister-reading’ (or myster-reading?) of subjectivity, apparently. The individual is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed continuously by the stream of semiosis into which she is thrown by the acquisition of language (I think I got that right, I was taking notes). The metaphor of the stream reminded me of the poor Austrian woman flung into the canal by the louts who had just raped her, and I thought it wouldn’t be much consolation to her to know that this was in some obscure and indirect way the fault of compulsory Shakespeare in English Literature syllabuses …

Helen proceeds to discern the connections between what Robyn is saying and the ideas on cognition from Head of Computer Science Ralph Messenger at the university, with whom she becomes drawn into an affair.

There are many ways in which I think the fictional Robyn does have a self, but not an especially individual one. Other in academia will have encountered a range of people holding various of her views and convictions, not many of which are that individual or distinctive. Nor is the following description from Helen about how Robyn sees her ‘mission statement to upgrade their [Walsall University’s] quality assessment in research and teaching’ (the RAE is also mentioned in the context of Gloucester) likely to be unfamiliar to many who will have seen comparable progressions in academia (also unwittingly observing some of what she has learned from Vic):

She deployed this management jargon with the same smooth competence as she had displayed in literary theory. I got the impression that she cracks the whip over a recalcitrant and resentful staff of mostly older men, spurring them on to achieve higher and higher productivity, like an old-fashioned factory boss. But she seemed more interested in discussing infant ailments and gender stereotyping in nursery schools with Annabelle Riverdale, who was sitting opposite her at dinner. There are curious contradictions between her literary theory and her professional practice and between both and her personal life. But she probably regards consistency of character as an exploded concept.

(Perhaps she simply wants to have her cake and eat it?)

There are also ways in which Robyn’s character embodies values which would have been common for an academic like her in the mid-1980s, but which would be out of step with later ideologies. In Nice Work, she makes unequivocally clear her thoughts on polytechnics, when Vic suggests it might be better to save money if more students went to their local college, and that a whole polytechnic could be built for the price of some of the student accommodation at Rummidge:

‘Oh, but polytechnics are such ghastly places,’ said Robyn. ‘I was interviewed for a job at one once. It seemed more like an overgrown comprehensive school than a university.’
[Vic] ‘Cheap, though.’
[Robyn] ‘Cheap and nasty.’

But 15 or so years after Nice Work, at the end of which she was able to stay on at the University of Rummidge (due to a process of reallocation of resources known as ‘virement’), Robyn has moved to Walsall. Today there is a Walsall Campus at the University of Wolverhampton, which gained university status in 1992 (having been Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1988 and for a long time before that Wolverhampton and Staffordshire College of Technology), one of the first wave of polytechnics to do so. Walsall University is said to have been created out of an old polytechnic, so is what those inside academia would now call a ‘post-92 university’. Furthermore, Penrose ‘was appointed there just a couple of years ago’ with the ‘mission statement’ mentioned above. This is a common pattern by which mid-career academics from longer-established institutions, with decent research records, are lured with major professorships to lend prestige to post-92 institutions often with little prior research.

So Robyn is now working for the type of institution that she used to detest, but her job there is to try and make it less like what it would have been at the time of Nice Work. This was an important part of the legacy of the 1992 Act, but has proved more and more problematic as time has gone on. In 1994, the Russell Group of research-intensive universities was formed, creating a new hierarchy to replace the old one of universities and polytechnics, and in a way which became more, rather than less elitist, as the Russell Group only encompassed a sub-section of the old universities (currently 24 institutions), leaving others, which I generally call ‘mid-ranking’, in a type of no-man’s-land between the RG and the post-92s. More traditional, long-established disciplines, such as English Literature, History or the scholarly study of Music, have struggled to survive in the post-92s, generally operating with lower tariffs, and so attracting a different type of student, many of whom are much less inclined towards critical thinking and rigorous approaches. Other factors, including the removal of caps on numbers in 2015 (essentially deregulating the number of students different institutions and departments can admit), and also a move in secondary education towards ‘teach to the test’, which encourages rote learning rather than critical engagement, have exacerbated this divide.

Cultural Studies is strongly associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964, especially when the directorship was taken up by Stuart Hall in 1969, and then through the 1980s after Hall had left for the Open University. By the early 1990s, Hall and others, including Anthony Easthope, were suggesting that this might supersede literary studies. Today there are only a very small number of ‘pure’ cultural studies degrees, but a range combining it with media, communications, or sometimes reframed as ‘Cultural and Creative Industries’. Interestingly, a greater percentage of Russell Group institutions offer these types of degrees than institutions elsewhere in the sector. Russell Group institutions are less bound by vocational demands than others, and these are not necessarily vocational subjects.

There is almost nothing otherwise in Lodge’s campus novels alluding to the development of cultural studies. despite it having a centre in his own university. The closest, albeit oblique, might be Morris Zapp’s statement ‘But every decoding is another encoding‘ in a lecture recounted in Small World, in order to explain why his project to write about Jane Austen’s novels from every possible critical angle is ultimately fruitless. The terms encoding/decoding became fundamentally important in cultural studies after their use by Hall, first in an essay on television in 1973, then fleshed out much more in 1980 (thus a year after the events of Small Work are set). For this reason, the connection with cultural studies here is weak.

As for Communications Studies, this field, linked to study of journalism and media, can be said to have been established in the UK with the founding by James Halloran of the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester in 1966. A Centre for Television Research was established by Jay G. Blumer at the University of Leeds in 1966, and the Glasgow Media Group by Greg Philo in 1974, while a BA in Media Studies, the first of its type. began at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1975. Today there are numerous undergraduate courses whose titles combine ‘Communications’ with Journalism, Media, Advertising, etc., but only a small few (at UCL, Edinburgh Napier and Hertfordshire) in which it is the sole subject. A similar situation applies at postgraduate level.

Robyn Penrose’s work certainly skirts the boundaries of cultural studies as it existed in the 1980s. This is mostly through her work on semiotics, relating as much to the work of Colin McCabe and Stephen Heath as the Birmingham School. There is a notorious passage in the novel in which she interprets an advert for Silk Cut cigarettes using Freudian terminology, whilst we learn that both she and Charles read the sections on fashion and furniture in the Sunday newspapers, ‘for nothing semiotic is alien to the modern academic critic’. Later Charles believes that his career shift from academia to finance involves ‘simply exchanging one semiotic system for another, the literary for the numerical, a game with high philosophical stakes for a game with high monetary stakes’.

Silk Cut advert, 1980s

But there is little to suggest that Robyn has any stake in the dethroning of high culture, as was certainly a major concern for the Birmingham School and others, culminating in denunciatory work on high culture by John Fiske and Andrew Ross at the end of the 1980s. On the contrary, she stands as a strong defender of ‘difficult’ literature (albeit with some scepticism towards existing canon formations, which appears to have become a more central concern of hers by the time of Thinks …) in contrast to Vic and those around him. In his 2011 introduction to the trilogy, Lodge himself notes that his own experience shadowing a local industry ‘brought home to me a truth that academics and literary intellectuals tend to ignore: that high culture depends ultimately on the wealth created by trade’, and Robyn is certainly no exception to this, at least earlier on in the novel. She is distinctly unimpressed by hearing that Vic’s rival Norman Cole reads Coleen McCullough’s The Thornbirds or Frederic Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol (her disdain might today be interpreted as hegemony, an expression of class and other privilege, and so on), and feels she has achieved something when Vic has started reading literature of the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Tennyson and others.

But the contrast with Vic is starkest with respect to music. Lodge tells us:

Vic’s taste in music is narrow but keen. He favours female vocalists, slow tempos, lush arrangements of tuneful melodies in the jazz-soul idiom. Carly Simon, Dusty Springfield, Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Randy Crawford and, more recently, Sade and Jennifer Rush. The subtle inflexions of these voices, honeyed or slightly hoarse, moaning and whispering of women’s love, its joys and disappointments, soothe his nerves and relax his limbs.

That five out of the eight names above are black women is not insignificant. Robyn, on the other hand, prefers to listen to Mozart and other classical music on BBC Radio 3, and speaks with some implied disdain when she asks Vic ‘But you prefer Randy Crawford?’, who she describes as ‘bland’ and ‘sentimental’. She also seems pleased when, towards the end of the novel, Vic indicates that he now prefers Tennyson to the lyrics of Jennifer Rush. Rush is the one of the above singers who features most prominently in the novel, perhaps a strategy on Lodge’s part to avoid foregrounding a possible racial issue, but certainly he appears to like Crawford just as much. More widely, while Robyn certainly shows concern for the plight of black and Asian workers at Pringle’s, there is little indication of any engagement with black or Asian (or African-American) culture or any interest in doing so on her part.

Robyn is undoubtedly vested heavily in post-structuralism, but not necessarily in post-modernism. Whilst the latter term appears several terms in reference to conference papers in Small World, there are only two references to it in Nice Work. One is to ‘the modernist and postmodernist deconstruction of the classic novel in the twentieth century’ (linked to the ‘terminal crisis of capitalism’), which says little distinct about this concept, the other as something possibly related to ‘late capitalism’ (a term which grew amongst Marxist and socialist thinkers from the 1920s onwards). To some extent the low usage of this term has to do with the time of her fictional portrayal and its understanding by Lodge himself. He had used it in The Modes of Modern Writing to indicate a body of literary work which:

continues the modernist critique of traditional mimetic art, and shares the modernist commitment to innovation, but pursues these aims by methods of its own. It tries to go beyond modernism, or around it, or underneath it, and is often as critical of modernism as it is of antimodernism.

Writers categorised as such by Lodge include Beckett, John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan, John Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Jorge Luis Borges. This categorisation (which tends towards a periodisation of modernism as pre-1945, and postmodernism as post-1945) was certainly in keeping with the concept as it was understood in various writings in English at that time, including essays of Leslie Fiedler and then in books such as Christopher Butler’s After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde (1980) and as late as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars (1999). But it is a much milder definition than that which came in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir/The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979, English translation 1984) and some of the essays in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (1983), which were amongst the writings which developed a more radical opposition between modernism and postmodernism, and opened the doors to certain forms of relativism in the process. Postmodernism came into its own in literary and cultural studies in the later 1980s and early 1990s, and in some of its manifestations combined the ideas of the ‘death of the author’ and ‘pleasure of the text’ associated with 1970s writings of Roland Barthes with drastic epistemological scepticism out of the work of Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.

For all Robyn’s rejection of ideas of the autonomous self, and authorship, this type of work, not to mention the use of highly experimental forms of presentation, is unlike that of hers presented in Nice Work. She does not eschew rational argumentation, continues to use conventional sentences and grammar, and does not appear to show much interest in free ‘play’ (even if some of her Derridean inclinations might have led in such a direction). Also, she does not engage with ‘camp’ culture (there is one brief allusion to Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, but just within a list of novels she is revising before teaching), while her view of sex is resolutely vanilla (notwithstanding her like for non-penetrative action and non-missionary positions). As such, it is hard to imagine her endorsing Barthes’ view of a text as ‘that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father‘, let alone the at least part-celebratory cultivation of the simulacrum and hyperreality in Baudrillard, or the 1990s idea of a certain gay ‘performative’ culture acting in mocking contempt of the types of metanarratives provided by Marxism and the like.

I mention the ‘camp’ performative element, because it is for this reason I find it hard to imagine Robyn embracing a wholly performative view of gender and denial of the biological (she can deny the self, but that is not the same is denying biology). Her essentially second-wave feminism remains hyperaware of male violence and predation (as witnessed by her fury at Vic’s marketing director Brian Everthorpe’s proposal for a calendar for Pringle’s featuring semi-naked women, or the presence of similar images around the premises, and for that matter her association of the central locking system in Vic’s car with the requirements of a rapist), and whilst she might have paid some lip service to the performative concepts put forward in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), full acceptance of the idea that trans women are the same as biological ones (in Nice Work Robyn says that humans are ‘language and biology’), and thus acceptance of such trans women into women’s changing rooms, refuges, prisons and more, would certainly be a step too far.

For this reason I think Robyn would eventually have fallen foul of a new generation of academics emerging in the 2000s and 2010s, might have been labelled a TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) and despised for that reason, also been portrayed as an antiquated defender of elitist high culture (Vic’s tastes in music would have been more in line with those of this generation than Robyn’s), with classic literature remorselessly attacked by those drawn to the #DisruptTexts movement (endorsed by no less than Penguin Books). She might have struggled with the growth of Critical Race Theory and the gradual elimination of most white writers from the curriculum (including the white women writers she favours). Literary study as she knows it, and in which her expertise lies, would likely have largely disappeared from Walsall University, in order to accommodate students who have no interest in reading books from beginning to end, or even whole chapters (rather than bullet-point lists of what they ‘need to know’). Her analyses of cigarette adverts and the like would have had some currency in her new department, but would hardly have been enough to sustain her own interest. The reality of academia voided of high culture and most of the vestiges of the humanities would come home to her, though perhaps not the fact that she would be looking at the views of the younger generations rather as older academics had once looked at hers. So I imagine her either taking early retirement (perhaps encouraged to do so) – bearing in mind she would have reached the age of 65 by 2018-19 anyhow – or possibly moving almost exclusively into management.

Robyn as Teacher

Student Marion Russell tells Robyn ‘You’re the best teacher in the Department, everybody says so.’ Come the time of mandatory student evaluations, Robyn would surely do well. But I am less convinced by the quality of her teaching, notwithstanding its popularity. Lodge provides the text of part of one of her lectures on the Industrial Novel. Some of this is basically factual and contextual, linking the rise of this genre of novel to the huge social and economic changes effected by the Industrial Revolution (described in a very ideologically loaded manner). But her readings of the novels – Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Dickens’ Hard Times are more of a condensed version of her research than any type of communication of plural perspectives to students. She provides no critical questions for students to consider. This is preaching rather than teaching.

In many ways this approach to lecturing is an exploitation of Robyn’s hierarchical position relative to the students, even more so then than it would be today, as the students of her time paid no fees and received grants, while institutions did not need to fight so much to attract them. She, as a research-experienced academic with a monograph to her name, presents her fully-formed arguments to the students, but not those of others except where they concur with her own. In theory, students are open to disagree with and challenge her, but few at this stage would have anything like the same confidence and intellectual fluency to meet her on her own terms.

Having seen more than a few academics who lecture in a similar manner, some of which have been popular, I would suggest that the appeal of such teaching comes about precisely because it avoids presenting serious critical questions to the students, answers to which are by no means necessarily obvious. It becomes possible essentially to parrot or at least paraphrase Robyn’s own views in an essay, oblivious to alternatives, and without providing critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of those views (something I have found is much more common in my adopted discipline of sociology than in many of the arts and humanities). Not only the most able students but also the weaker ones are taught what to think, rather than how to think.

At one point Lodge comments:

What Robyn likes to do is to deconstruct the texts, to probe the gaps and absences in them, to uncover what they are not saying, to expose their ideological bad faith, to cut a cross-section through the twisted strands of their semiotic codes and literary conventions. What the students want her to do is to give them some basic facts that will enable them to read the novels as simple straightforward reflections of ‘reality’, and to write simple, straightforward, exam-passing essays about them.

What results from such teaching can be taken as ‘basic facts’ by students. Even as approaches/methods to interpreting other texts, they can be followed in an almost automated manner, free from any sense of responsibility for methodological choices. This is what I believe is a common outcome of ‘activist’ teaching, but even of the application of the Humboldtian model of higher education to an expanded student cohort, whereby academics are employed primarily on the basis of their research, teaching is centred around that research, and students can then go on to do research themselves.

But there will never be anything like enough jobs in academia for the number of graduates they produce, unless only a tiny number go to university. The majority will go on to work in other fields. When I was a student, it was common to think that simply having a degree, almost regardless of the subject, was enough to demonstrate the intellectual achievement to be able to enter all sorts of fields of high-level employment. But now that far more go to university, it is at the very least debatable that a degree is anything like the type of guarantee it once was (one reason why the specific institution one attended may matter more and more, for those doing degrees with no obvious direct career outcome, a situation which benefits the Russell Group).

It does not seem to have even occurred to Robyn that her job might be something other than disseminating her own research, Humboldtian-style. But the problems with this are seen by Charles, who in his letter to Robyn announcing his decision to leave academia to become a merchant banker, says:

Poststructuralist theory is a very intriguing philosophical game for very clever players. But the irony of teaching it to young people who have read almost nothing except their GCE set texts and Adrian Mole, who know almost nothing about the Bible or classical mythology, who cannot recognize an ill-formed sentence, or recite poetry with any sense of rhythm – the irony of teaching them about the arbitrariness of the signifier in week three of their first year becomes in the end too painful to bear …

(It is worth noting that this represents a shift in Charles’s view from earlier in the book, when in response to Robyn’s worry that 99.9% of the population ‘don’t give a monkey’s’ about ‘whether Derrida’s critique of metaphysics lets idealism in by the back door, or whether Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is phallogocentric, or whether Foucault’s theory of the episteme is reconcilable with dialectical materialism’, says to her ‘You can’t explain poststructuralism to someone who hasn’t even discovered traditional humanism’ and ‘the idea of a centre is precisely what poststructuralism calls into question. Grant people like Wilcox, or Swallow for that matter, the idea of a centre, and they will lay claim to it, justifying everything they do by reference to it. Show that it’s an illusion, a fallacy, and their position collapses. We live in a de-centred universe.’)

Robyn, Charles, the 1980s and the 2020s in UK Higher Education

Charles serves as a foil to Robyn arguably to a greater extent than Vic, because Charles’s outlook may be more threatening to her. He shares many of her values, but without the same level of fervour and absolutism, and with a more jaded or measured (depending from which angle one views it) perspective on higher education. Early in Nice Work we read:

He had seen the writing on the wall: after the oil crisis of 1973 there wasn’t going to be enough money to keep all the universities enthusiastically created or expanded in the booming sixties in the style to which they had become accustomed. Not many people perceived this quite so soon.

This may have informed his sensible decision to take a job at a mid-ranking university when it was going, before the advent of cuts, while Robyn’s ideals and wish to be at Cambridge makes her the victim of events.

Robyn clearly has no knowledge or experience of contemporary industry, despite being an expert in the industrial novel (she gets out of this issue by saying her expertise is ‘not in a realist sort of way’). She dismisses the Victorian novelists’ ‘attempts to reconcile the conflicting class interests of their time’, but as Lodge points out, as a result of the Shadow Scheme, her experiences mirror some of their heroines, while both she and Vic come to understand some more about the relationship between their two worlds. Some of Robyn’s doubts relate to the traditionalist assumptions which sustain her earlier positions (and which postmodernists and others would abhor):

There must, she reflected, be millions of literate, intelligent people like Victor Wilcox walking about England who had never read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, though it was difficult to imagine such a state of cultural deprivation. What difference did it make, never to have shivered with Jane Eyre at Lowood school, or throbbed in the arms of Heathcliff with Cathy? Then it occurred to Robyn that this was a suspiciously humanist train of thought and that the very word classic was an instrument of bourgeois hegemony.

Furthermore, having previously given little thought to the financial sustainability of higher education, unlike Charles, she returns to the question put to her repeatedly by Vic: who pays for it all? Vic leads from this to suggesting that arts degrees might be a waste of money because they do not provide graduates with the skills required for the contemporary economy. Robyn recognises the arguments she is forced to rely upon, such as ‘the importance of maintaining cultural tradition, and improving students’ communicative skills’, are ones in which she no longer really believes.

We learn that Robyn was quite religious when younger, and this sort of fervour appears to have been sublimated into her highly idealistic view of universities:

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn’t have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria. The trouble is, ordinary people don’t understand what they’re about, and the universities don’t really bother to explain themselves to the community. We have an Open Day once a year. Every day ought to be an open day. The campus is like a graveyard at weekends, and in the vacations. It ought to be swarming with local people doing part-time courses – using the library, using the laboratories, going to lectures, going to concerts, using the Sports Centre – everything.’

There is much to be said for this vision, but it would require considerably more hours of work from staff, who would need to be paid for it. To offer it for free would only be possible with considerably increased government funding.

At various points during his memoir Writer’s Luck, Lodge refers to the various rounds of cuts to higher education which occurred during the 1980s as part of wider trimming of public expenditure by the Thatcher government:

‘Sadomonetarism’, as it was sometimes called by its critics, meant high interest rates, designed to make British industry more competitive by eliminating inefficient businesses, and drastic cuts in public spending. The effect of the first measure was a steep rise in unemployment at all levels from the shop floor to management (in the West Midlands it reached 17 per cent) and one effect of the second was a substantial reduction in the funding of British universities, leading to the freezing of new appointments at many, including Birmingham. Our students were graduating without any confidence that they would find a job, and the prospects for the brightest ones to pursue an academic career were especially bleak. These developments shaped my thoughts about a new novel. It would be about work – what their work meant to people in different walks of life and how it defined their identity.

As tutorials and seminars got bigger, and other resources were cut, this led Lodge to elect to take early retirement. Such retirement could then only be voluntary; after the ending of tenure in 1988 it became possible for institutions to implement compulsory redundancies, as is happening regularly at present.

Some of Lodge’s wider thoughts appear to be laid out in Charles’s letter to Robyn on leaving academia:

You and I, Robyn, grew up in a period when the state was smart: state schools, state universities, state-subsidized arts, state welfare, state medicine – these were things progressive, energetic people believed in. It isn’t like that any more. The Left pays lip-service to those things, but without convincing anybody, including themselves. The people who work in state institutions are depressed, demoralized, fatalistic. Witness the extraordinary meekness with which the academic establishment has accepted the cuts (has there been a single high-level resignation, as distinct from early retirements?). It’s no use blaming Thatcher, as if she was some kind of witch who has enchanted the nation. She is riding the Zeitgeist.

Contrary to the stereotype of the ex-public-school stockbroker, it doesn’t matter what your social background is in the City these days, as long as you’re good at your job. Money is a great leveller, upwards. As to our universities, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are élitist where they should be egalitarian and egalitarian where they should be élitist. We admit only a tiny proportion of the age group as students and give them a very labour-intensive education (élitist), but we pretend that all universities and all university teachers are equal and must therefore have the same funding and a common payscale, with automatic tenure (egalitarian). This worked all right as long as the country was prepared to go on pumping more and more money into the system, but as soon as the money supply was reduced, universities could only balance their books by persuading people to retire early, often the very people they can least afford to lose. For those who remain the prospects are bleak: bigger classes, heavier work loads, scant chances of promotion or of moving to a new job.

After 1992 and with the expansion of higher education after 1997, more jobs became available, including in some of the arts and humanities, as a range of former polytechnics sought to prove themselves on a par with established universities. But subsequent developments including increased fees (accompanied by cuts in government money), the removal of caps on numbers, a decreasing role for various arts and humanities subjects in secondary education, then the freezing of fees from 2017 to 2024, leading the majority of institutions to be incurring significant financial losses in real time, have made this sort of vision now look somewhat antiquated. At the time of writing, programmes and departments are being closed, and staff being made redundant (much easier than in the mid-1980s, when there was still tenure) all over the sector. The sense of crisis encountered back then is at least as vivid today, and the initial optimism which accompanied tertiary expansion seems more and more distant by the day.

The question of the range of options for students, an issue in the 1980s as it is today, is also raised in a staff meeting towards the end of the novel. Philip Swallow, Lodge’s alter-ego in Changing Places and Small World, notes to Robyn’s dismay the impossibility of bringing about meaningful curricular changes, since no-one will support anything which will marginalise their own area, and thus possibly make them redundant. Therefore the curricula are overflowing with elective options for students, a highly inefficient situation in terms of resources and marking, as well as academics being spread too thinly. Again, these issues reflect the problems of the Humboldtian model. Academics who are prepared to teach ‘outside the box’ of their own expertise will make their own positions more secure, and the priority should be which teaching serves the needs of the students best, rather than simply what the academics want to teach. One colleague, Rupert Sutcliffe, suggests that it may have been better when there was a single syllabus with a survey course ‘from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf’. In light of Charles’s comments cited earlier about the absurdity of teaching some highly advanced approaches to students with hardly any foundations, I do believe this makes sense, and it reminds me of refreshing words from one sociology colleague who spoke disparagingly of a ‘Netflix’ or ‘Lidl’ approach to university education.

The issues raised in Nice Work, and their amplified form today, may not be insoluble. The current costs of teaching might be able to be reduced through less wasteful courses with fewer over-specialised modules, more pooling of skills and methods teaching between different departments and disciplines, as well continued development of the skills for online and hybrid delivery learned during lockdown. The balance between teaching and research may need some recalibrating, while the move towards a ‘publish or perish’ culture (fuelled by the RAE/REF) such as had existed for a long time in the US, as Lodge notes in the 2011 introduction to the trilogy, has indeed resulted in a situation in which, as he said in a 2015 interview, ‘Much academic publication is done merely to maintain the author’s position in the profession, and not out of a desire to communicate something’. A move away from the ‘boarding school’ model of universities, so that more students stay at home and commute, would considerably alleviate accumulated debt for money, though for this to be practical requires some consistency of provision across different regions.

None of this would likely appeal to the Robyn Penroses of this world, but the highly entitled (and hugely elitist) view of education she espouses reflects a time when a tiny number went to university, extrapolated across an expanding sector with at most only partial success. But also, not all of what I suggest above would be appropriate for universities which are indeed first and foremost research institutions. The number of these which can be sustained may not be so high, and alternative models of education than those simply pursuing knowledge for its own sake should be taken seriously, rather than trying to pretend some equivalence across the sector such as was implied by the 1992 Act. The model provided by the CATs, ideal for the likes of Vic, should be revisited, with the limitations of those institutions addressed, and the expansion of their remit beyond science and technology. There are many reasons why other disciplines, including some traditional subjects, can be valuable both to students who go onto other types of work, and their employers, either in terms of direct or transferrable skills. But academics need to make the case plausibly for this to prospective and current students, parents, teachers, and the wider public.

Vic Wilcox was fond of saying there was no such thing as a free lunch. There is no such thing as a free degree either. The costs to students could be reduced with either greatly increased government expenditure (which would in turn almost certainly require increases in taxes, or sweeping cuts elsewhere) or a new culture of major endowments such as exists in the US. The former option is unlikely to be on the political agenda in the UK for a long time, while the latter could only ever be a long-term project. In the meantime, academics need to play their part in preserving a sector and jobs. In the pre-1992 landscape, the initial petulant attitudes of Robyn Penrose (certainly possessed of a self, and capable of choices) provided no solutions, though this may have changed by the time she moved to Walsall University. Such attitudes are still prevalent today, and this is one of the reasons Lodge’s novels remain so engaging for many involved with academia, over and beyond their wider comic and narrative appeal to a much wider constituency.

But a last word from Lodge, from an interview in 2004, which I have often quoted and pondered when trying to navigate university politics:

The high ideals of the university as an institution – the pursuit of knowledge and truth … are set against the actual behaviour and motivations of the people who work in them, who are only human and subject to the same ignoble desires and selfish ambitions as anybody else. The contrast is perhaps more ironic, more marked, than it would be in any other professional milieu.

I wrote at the beginning of the previous piece about ‘negative emotions’, including cruelty, revenge, humiliation, contempt and jealousy, and ‘how the existence of such emotions is acknowledged, rather than wished away, and how they might find expressive outlet without causing harm, is something often explored more fruitfully in art and culture, with their greater openness to the irrational’. That is a position worth holding. But honest acknowledgment cuts both ways. The same rigour that refuses to sentimentalise jealousy away should also refuse to aestheticise it into something merely beautiful and self-aware. The song may be both of those things at once: genuinely moving and genuinely problematic in its relational logic. The analysis earns the first conclusion rather more fully than the second. I want to consider here whether the limits of sympathetic identification with the narrator involve not merely an analytical gap but an ethical one, and draw upon wider work I have been undertaking on emotional abuse in relationships, which will be the subject of a subsequent Substack article.

Nothing in what follows requires retracting the musical analysis of the earlier essay; musically, too, it still stands, though its implications look different from this angle. The same ceaseless oscillation between harmonic poise and inner tension, the 3+2 beat patterns, the restricted tessitura, Thorn’s measured scansion and her refusal of overt vocal inflation all still matter. But they can now be heard not simply as signs of jealousy’s refinement or forms of emotional seriousness, but as part of the song’s aesthetic softening of possessive pressure: the means by which it is made to sound civilised, intimate and harder to hear for what it is.

The sources revisited

The literary and philosophical genealogy assembled in the original analysis was deployed largely in order to contextualise the narrator’s inner experience. Read differently, several of those same sources offer something considerably less sympathetic.

René Girard’s account of metaphysical desire was used to illuminate triangular jealousy: the predecessor as mediator who heightens the beloved’s value simply by having preceded the narrator. But Girard’s analysis does not limit itself to illumination. Metaphysical desire instrumentalises the beloved, who becomes the site on which the struggle with the mediator is conducted, rather than a person desired in his own particularity and freedom. That is already a form of possession.

Marcel Proust’s Marcel, invoked through Gilles Deleuze, is the supreme literary instance not only of jealous love but also jealous control. Throughout La Prisonnière, jealousy becomes surveillance, confinement, interpretation without end. Deleuze’s ‘delirium of signs’ can sound glamorous in a literary context; in terms of a relationship it is hypervigilance. The narrator of ‘Fascination’ does not physically imprison her beloved, but may be a softer, emotional analogue of confinement. She is attuned, with the song’s own stated precision, to where the beloved goes, what places remind him of, what names arise in speech. The difference from Marcel is one of degree, not kind.

Roland Barthes, whose A Lover’s Discourse was used to illuminate the fourfold suffering of jealousy, is harder on possession than the original analysis fully allowed. The jealous lover seeks to possess not only the present beloved but the beloved’s past — to occupy retroactively the whole of the other’s erotic history. ‘I mustn’t wish your life began the day we met’ is not the overcoming of that wish but its suppression. The wish remains, and the suppression requires ongoing effort that is fully visible to him.

Melanie Klein’s ‘good object’, invoked in the original piece to explain the song’s tenderness, need not soften the darker reading. In Klein’s earlier ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935), love is bound up with anxiety, guilt, aggression and the fantasy of incorporation: one fears losing the loved object, but also cannot quite bear its separateness. Tenderness and possessiveness are not opposites here. The beloved may be cherished precisely in ways that make his freedom hard to tolerate. On this reading, the narrator’s gentleness does not cancel the wish to control; it is one of the forms that wish can take.

Simone de Beauvoir’s Françoise in L’Invitée was cited as a contrasting case — jealousy that escalates to the wish to manage, contain, possess and ultimately annihilate. The contrast was intended to illustrate the narrator’s restraint. But it is a contrast of degree and terminus rather than of underlying logic. De Beauvoir’s broader account in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) of idolatrous love as bad faith (‘her bad faith erects barriers between her and the one she worships’) fits the song’s emotional logic more precisely than the original analysis acknowledged. Françoise’s jealousy of Xavière begins in precisely the register ‘Fascination’ inhabits: sovereignty felt to be threatened by the free existence of another – in the case of the song, not present now, but who simply came before. What distinguishes Françoise is that she acts on the wish that the other had never existed. The narrator of ‘Fascination’ forbids herself that wish - but gives it to us in the act of forbidding it. This may represent not the absence of sovereign possessiveness, but its softened, late-modern form: the urge to contain another’s freedom by way of tenderness, vulnerability and moral pressure rather than overt domination.

The Beloved

Let us be exact about what the narrator is asking the beloved to do. Even if the song is to be heard primarily as an interior monologue, there is plenty to suggest that she has made various demands framed as requests before, and if this is something sung to him, these become stronger.

He is being asked to provide reassurance about pain he did not cause. His former relationship preceded the narrator, involved no betrayal of her, and ended before she arrived. It is nonetheless the source of her ongoing distress, and he is its designated manager. He is asked to prove something definitionally unprovable: not that he is faithful, not that he loves her, but that she has achieved equanimity. The proof she requires is of her own emotional state, and she requires it from him.

What makes this recognisable as potential relational pathology rather than temporary difficulty is its structural character: the proof cannot be supplied, the wound cannot be closed, the demand therefore remains permanently open. The song itself discloses this. She asks again not because the asking worked but because it did not. In the UK guidance on controlling or coercive behaviour, what matters is not one isolated incident but an intentional pattern over time, often cumulative, often made up of acts that might seem innocuous when taken singly. CPS guidance frames the offence similarly, in terms of repeated or continuous behaviour with serious effect. That does not mean a three-minute song licenses a diagnosis. It does mean that the relevant lens is pattern, not isolated sentiment.

And the song strongly implies recurrence. ‘Doubt is over now’ suggests an earlier cycle of doubt. ‘See how I’ve changed’ implies prior conflict, apology, attempted reform. ‘You talk and tell me’ sounds like an already familiar exchange rather than a first disclosure. Most explicit of all is ‘once again’. Once again: not for the first time, but as part of a pattern. This is an established script both parties already know. If he offers reassurance, he reinforces a structure that cannot satisfy; if he withholds it, he looks cold in the face of admitted pain; if he speaks naturally of his past, he wounds her; if he self-censors, he edits his own history for her comfort. From his side, the field of action has been quietly enclosed - not by prohibition, but by the reliable consequence of distress. The line about places reminding him of when he was there before, and the narrator’s vigilant awareness of this, suggests an attentiveness that extends beyond speech into space, association and memory. Simmel’s distinction between envy and jealousy already pointed in this direction: jealousy turns not chiefly upon the desired object, but upon the rival possessor. Once jealousy is understood in this possessive way, one can see how it may trespass upon the beloved’s autonomy. He is no longer left simply to own his own history.

Naming as Self-Justification

There is a pattern in the abuse literature that the original analysis did not reckon with fully: self-aware acknowledgement of harmful behaviour can function not as the beginning of its cessation but as a mechanism of its continuation. A recent systematic review of denial, minimisation, justifying and blaming in intimate partner abuse (here, like too often, restricting itself to male-to-female abuse, but equally applicable to the reverse) found that such distorted accounts are common and can operate not only as self-protection but as facilitators of abuse and as tools used instrumentally to achieve goals.

That is not identical to what happens in ‘Fascination’, but it is close enough to matter. The narrator knows she is jealous, that reassurance will not hold, that she has no right to past details, and that she mustn’t wish his life began the day we met. She knows all these things, and yet she asks again. Her self-knowledge may be genuine, but it also alters the field of his possible responses. She has already named what is happening, and named it more beautifully than he could. His protest risks becoming redundant, even cruel.

Similarly Lundy Bancroft, in Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (2002) (which should really be Controlling People), draws a distinction between acknowledgment and accountability. Acknowledgment is the naming of what one is doing - ‘I know I’m being jealous’, ‘I know this isn’t fair’, ‘my courage fails’. Accountability is the cessation of the behaviour and the repair of its effects. Bancroft observes that controlling individuals frequently demonstrate the former while avoiding the latter, and that the acknowledgment functions as impression management - evidence of the controller’s self-awareness and reasonableness that makes the behaviour harder to challenge. If she already knows it is unreasonable, how can he object? Her self-knowledge pre-empts his grievance.

There is also the line ‘If you were in my shoes and scared I would do the same’. This can be read as an expression of mutual empathy and self-awareness – but equally as an enlistment device. It drafts him into ratifying the burden she places on him, while the hypothetical aspect of the formulation – suggesting that he is not in her shoes, or has not been so – is a projection of her feelings onto him.

Romance as emotional blackmail

There is a further dimension, and it may be the most double-edged of all: the song’s extraordinary intimacy.

‘Fascination’ is a love song in the fullest sense. It is vulnerable, tender, self-exposing. The narrator shows him her inner life with a candour that is genuinely moving - the courage that fails, the irrational wish, the gap between performed composure and private collapse. This visibility is an act of intimacy, and intimacy of this quality may draw the beloved closer. It makes him feel trusted, needed, uniquely admitted to her private world.

But the intimacy and the control are not easily separable. What she is drawing him toward, through the beauty and vulnerability of the disclosure, is the same relational structure that could give him equal reason to step back. The exposure of her inner life is both genuinely moving and a mechanism to bind him more tightly to the situation that constrains him. He is invited to feel the weight of her pain, the seriousness of her love, the depth of her need. These are powerful solicitations. They make withdrawal feel like abandonment and resistance feel like betrayal. This is why the phrase emotional blackmail is not wholly misplaced, even if it remains morally uncomfortable. The intimacy becomes a way of making refusal costly.

Susan Forward, in Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation and Guilt to Manipulate You (1997), identifies a dynamic in which the expression of genuine distress - fear, hurt, vulnerability - functions to obligate the other person to remain and comply, regardless of whether this is the conscious intent of the person expressing it. Forward is careful to distinguish between manipulation and the sincere expression of difficult feelings that nonetheless obligate the other person; the distinction matters morally, but not functionally. What ‘Fascination’ offers the beloved is intimacy so complete and so beautiful that refusing its terms becomes almost unthinkable.

The song therefore operates simultaneously on two levels. As an aesthetic object, it is, through its very performance, an act of love. As relational act it draws the beloved closer in order to perpetuate the conditions that make closeness painful for him. The vulnerability, the tenderness, and the binding effect are all real. The intimacy becomes the means of retaining the other inside the scene - and what sounds like naked emotional honesty may also be a way of making refusal morally costly.

The former lover

The former lover exists in the song only as wound and trace: not as a person with her own history, feelings or claim on what occurred, but as a problem generated by the narrator’s pain. That is not open attack, but it is a kind of erasure. And the jealous attention directed at effacing her may achieve the opposite. Monitoring, requests for reassurance, and heightened vigilance towards associated topics and places can keep the rival more alive than indifference would. Worse, if the beloved is ground down by the impossibility of his position, the predecessor — who makes no demands and is simply gone — may acquire a retrospective ease. Not because she was a better partner but because her absence is free of the difficulty that the narrator’s presence involves. The jealousy risks generating, through its own logic, precisely the comparison it fears.

Comparison with ‘Every Breath You Take’

At this point there is some overlap between ‘Fascination’ and Sting/The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ (1983). The overlap is not literal. Thorn is not singing a song of present-tense surveillance in the blunt idiom of ‘Can’t you see you belong to me?’ But there is a family resemblance in formal misdirection. Sting himself described ‘Every Breath You Take’ as ‘a nasty little song’ about ‘jealousy and surveillance and ownership’, and has expressed repeated surprise that many listeners took it for a love song. One possible reason for this is that its musical surface – the clean guitar figure, the polished production – created an atmosphere of lyrical tenderness which offset the underlying possessive logic.

‘Fascination’ performs a related trick in a different register. It is tender, poised, intimate, even affectionate on the surface; but beneath that surface lies a wish to occupy not only the beloved’s present but his memory, history and inward life. If Sting’s song is the overtly proprietorial version, Thorn’s is its quieter, more shame-soaked and plausibly deniable cousin, no less possessive for being more beautiful about it.

Female-Coded Control

The more controversial question is whether the possessive pressure in ‘Fascination’ can be read as female-coded – and it can, if that term is used with precision. It does not mean that women are uniquely given to manipulation, nor that coercive control is chiefly a female phenomenon. It means, more exactly, that the conduct is legible in registers culturally coded as feminine: vulnerability, self-questioning, shame, appeals for reassurance rather than commands, indirect moral pressure rather than direct prohibition, emotional need presented as intimacy, and self-implication presented as honesty. The song does not say ‘you belong to me’, but in effect: ’help me bear what I cannot bear’. That is precisely why it sounds romantic rather than coercive. The pressure is administered through care-claims - and it is harder to see and harder to name and harder to resist precisely because those claims are genuine.

This matters because the form of control the song embodies maps onto a pattern in the literature on non-physical intimate partner violence that remains poorly understood and is still actively resisted in parts of the scholarly and advocacy world. The broader literature remains strongly gendered. Key texts including Evan Stark’s Coercive Control (2007, rev. 2023), Michael Johnson’s A Typology of Domestic Violence (2008), and Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992) all share a primary orientation toward male-on-female control, and the institutional architecture built on them has treated as settled what should remain empirically open: who exercises coercive control, and against whom. In a 2007 commentary, Murray Straus went so far as to identify seven methods by which, in his view, evidence complicating the male-perpetrator/female-victim model had been concealed or distorted, among them selective citation, suppression of contrary data, and intimidation of researchers. As Jamie Abrams has shown, the movement’s gendered framing also served strategic institutional purposes: preserving domestic violence’s iconic status as a women’s issue and protecting the funding and infrastructure built around that model. The men left illegible by that settlement are still paying for it. Why does this bear on a song? Because ‘Fascination’ performs exactly the kind of control least likely to be caught by a framework configured around physical violence and overt intimidation — and because the cultural conditions that make such control invisible in the song are the same conditions that make it invisible in life.

The evidence on prevalence is considerably less settled than the dominant framing implies. John Archer’s meta-analysis found broad sex symmetry in many acts of partner aggression. His findings were not simply debated, but repeatedly contested and minimised by researchers working within gendered accounts of IPV. Elizabeth Bates’s work notes that while a considerable body of IPV research documents bidirectional violence across multiple samples, intervention frameworks still tend to read perpetration and victimisation through a one-way gendered lens. The Australian Institute of Family Studies review of research on coercive control acknowledges both the debate over the gendered framing and the difficulty of establishing precise prevalence. If even physical aggression rates are this contested, the underestimation of female-perpetrated psychological and coercive conduct - which leaves no visible marks and is harder to document — is likely to be more severe still. A 2024 mixed-methods study found substantial stigma around male victims, who were judged more harshly and sceptically and doubted whether services would respond effectively. A NatCen report on female perpetrators records stakeholder accounts of male victims being misidentified as perpetrators and met with ridicule. In another article, Bates found that a common response to male victims disclosing abuse - including from police - was laughter. A 2021 study found that men who sought help and found it withheld faced documented outcomes including PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation; one participant described being reduced to ‘the least a person could be, contemplating suicide on several occasions’.

A point of moral clarity is necessary here, because it tends to be evaded by those most invested in the gendered framing. Whatever the aggregate statistics show, every individual case must be treated seriously on its own terms. To diminish a particular man’s experience of coercive control on the grounds that it represents a statistical minority, or that the policy apparatus was built for a different population, is not methodological caution. It is a decision that his suffering falls in the wrong category to count. What scholars, practitioners or policy-makers have constructed across decades is a tiered system of suffering: suffering that counts, because it fits the model, and suffering that does not, because it complicates it. Scholars who continue to defend that hierarchy against contrary evidence are not neutral scientists awaiting better data. They are the architects of a harm they have declined to count.

The relevance to ‘Fascination’ is direct. One 2020 study found that non-physical intimate partner violence was generally judged less abusive than physical violence, and that stronger endorsement of romantic jealousy was associated with perceiving non-physical abuse as less serious. The song actively solicits both responses: its beauty encourages a romantic reading, and its self-aware narrator pre-empts the identification of her behaviour as abusive. A 2021 study on relational aggression in young adults suggests that indirect, relationship-centred forms of emotional aggression may in some settings be more often self-reported by women and more often reported as suffered by men. This is, structurally, the song: he is the one being acted upon; she is the one acting, in the register of need. Some behaviours that would be immediately legible as controlling if performed by a man - persistent reassurance-seeking, vigilant attentiveness to a partner’s speech and associations, the deployment of one’s own distress as a constraint on the partner’s freedom - become invisible when performed within the conventions of feminine emotional expression. They look like love. The cultural coding of female composure-under-pain as virtue is precisely what allows the controlling logic to operate undetected, in the song and outside it.

The Relationship

Whether ‘Fascination’ describes a controlling relationship in any strong clinical sense cannot be determined from three verses and a bridge. What it does describe, with extraordinary precision, is the emotional logic from which a hard-to-identify controlling dynamic can arise: one that presents as vulnerability, operates through genuine distress, forecloses the partner’s responses through reliable consequence rather than explicit prohibition, immunises itself against challenge through self-awareness, and binds the partner more tightly through the beauty of its intimacy.

That is what makes the song so unsettling upon repeated hearing. It renders jealousy beautifully, but may render just as artfully the kind of possessive conduct that beauty can soften, romance can excuse, and gendered expectations can help conceal. The song is genuinely moving. It is also, from another angle, an account of someone being quietly enclosed — by a demand that will not resolve, by a pattern that has already recurred, by a self-awareness that names the problem without ceasing to enact it, and by a romance so persuasive that refusing its terms feels like refusing love itself. An analysis that arrives at the first conclusion without seriously entertaining the second has heard the music but not quite listened to what it is doing.

Jealousy, as a consuming emotion but perhaps also one inherent to love, passion and desire, is the subject of ‘Fascination’, the penultimate track on Everything But The Girl’s debut album Eden (1984). It is a song not of present betrayal but of a predecessor: of the lover who came before, whose traces persist in memory, place and speech.

An earlier demonstration version was included on an expanded 2024 reissue of Thorn’s solo album A Distant Shore (1982):

This is, in that sense, absolutely Thorn’s song. It existed in her own version prior to EBTG’s formation, and can therefore largely be considered a solo composition later absorbed into the duo’s repertoire. More generally, the division of labour in EBTG tended towards Thorn doing most of the vocals and her collaborator and partner Ben Watt taking on most of the guitar work, as Thorn notes in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen (2013). It is not clear who plays guitar on the Eden recording, but that matters less than the song’s evident origin in Thorn’s own earlier demo.

I loved the early work of EBTG from when it was new, but this track always held a particular appeal. While some of the repeated bossa nova patterns and rather tame appropriations of 1950s and early-1960s jazz elsewhere on the album, so characteristic of sophisti-pop, can lose some of their appeal over time, this song does not. It has both intimacy and dark passion, and uses economical means to convey complex and deep feelings. Above all, its understanding of jealousy is unusually exact. What it captures is not melodrama but inward strain: the effort to remain civil, composed and generous while pain keeps working beneath that composure - a response to jealousy that, as we shall see, is far from the only one available, even within the work of Thorn’s own collaborator.

The song and its workings

The song is deceptively simple. It is organised largely around two oscillating guitar harmonies, rather than any strongly directional harmonic progression. In this sense it stands within a long tradition of jazz and popular music, with the most prominent classical predecessor being Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies. The meter is in five, and the 3+2 rhythm, a syncopation across three beats followed by two straight beats, is identical to that in Dave Brubeck’s Take Five (1959), though where Brubeck shifts harmony between the 3- and 2-group, in ‘Fascination’ a single harmony is sustained across the whole bar before being repeated; the irregular pulse of 5 is balanced by a resolution into duple units at a higher level. In the Eden version (Fig. 1), the first chord is Cmaj⁹ (no5), the second, not easily conveyed through traditional chord symbols, but made up of F3-B3-D4-E4, a heavily modified subdominant harmony with considerably more inner tension than the previous chord. It could conceivably by an extension a G¹³ chord without the root (far-from-uncommon as a jazz harmony), but when Thorn enters and most phrases there begin with A3, that overrides such a hearing. The ceaseless oscillation between these two harmonies – one relatively settled, the other taut with unresolved strain – becomes a direct musical analogue for the song’s emotional subject: the alternation between performed composure and the jealousy quietly eating the singer from within.

The song is constructed out of three verses, between the second and third of which there is a bridge, including a saxophone solo (another almost manneristic cliché of sophisti-pop, in this case mostly a free riff on some of the melodic motives). In the second and subsequent verse the second chord changes to F3-G3-B3-E4, which in a rather contorted notation is Fmaj^9(#11) (no3,no5) but is more simply an F root with an E minor triad in 6-3 position. This formation softens the stark F3-B3 tritone of the earlier chord, and so conveys a somewhat greater degree of warmth. The addition of extra repetitions, through a second guitar track, adds momentum and textural expansion to the music and a consequent sense of increased anticipation and trepidation.

Fig. 1. ‘Fascination’ (version on Eden), basic harmonies.

The chord sequence changes more fundamentally for the vocal section of the bridge, now alternating Em⁷ (no5) with the root doubled an octave above and F3-G3-C4-E4, which can be conceived as Fmaj⁹ (no3), or simply an F root with a C major triad in 6-4 position. The sax solo is accompanied by a return to the original pair of oscillating chords. The sax continues playing through verse 3 to the end, and at the end of that verse (on the first ‘mind’) the music shifts back to the chords of the bridge, finally settling on the second of these.

The earlier demo version (Fig. 2) is a little different. In D-flat rather than C (possibly using a capo), it demonstrates the genesis of the chordal pairing in the later version. The opening harmony is D-flatmaj⁹ (no5) again, but the third degree is here an octave higher, so that the upper trichord is identical in alternating bars, just the root shifts. The fifth enters like an extra line within Verse 1, anticipating the quaver patterns in Verse 2.

Fig. 2. ‘Fascination’ (demo version included on expanded release of A Distant Shore), basic harmonies.

The full lyrics can be read here. Thorn sings about the pain of knowledge of a lover’s past and the impossibility of erasing memory (‘I won’t try to stop you when you speak of the past’, ‘There must be so much I know that you cannot forget’), combined with the desire to know more even when such knowledge will hurt (‘Fascination makes us ask for more than we’d like to know’). The song oscillates between this almost morbid appetite for knowledge and its denial (‘Reassure me when my heart’s not bold enough to bear her name’, ‘And though I may ask there’s no need for past details’) and between outward performance of composure and inward collapse (‘Doubt is over now and I can join in when you laugh’, suggesting self-persuasion more than report, ‘For though I may laugh, alone my courage fails’, ‘See how I’ve changed now my head’s so clear / Still there are some things that I don’t want to hear’). The jealousy becomes a wish to occupy the lover’s mental and physical space, while recognising this can never fully happen (‘Places we go remind you of when you were here before / So you talk and tell me you don’t think about it anymore’). The bridge section expresses the greatest urgency (‘See how I’ve changed’) but then resolves back to the initial chords with the poignant admission ‘And I mustn’t wish your life began the day we met’: the irrational but human fantasy of becoming retroactively central to the beloved’s whole existence. The final repetition, ‘to prove that I don’t mind’, is quietly devastating because it asks for the impossible. What she seeks is not proof that the past is harmless, but proof from the beloved of her own composure: proof that she can be the generous, mature, unjealous self she wishes to be. The repetition is almost ritualistic: she asks again not because reassurance works but because it does not.

The musical scansion of the text (Fig. 3), and its relation to relative tension and release, are used for intense expressive effect. There is very little of the soul-infused style in which a singer continually displaces notes from strong beats. Thorn is far more direct and measured, and her restraint suggests an ability to convey vulnerability without ornamenting it. The tension arises less from overt vocal display than from the complexity and inner contradiction of the feelings themselves.

Verse 1

I won’t try to stop you when you speak of— the past
Doubt is o-ver now and I can join in when you laugh
Fas-ci-na-tion makes us ask for more than— we like to know
I nee-dn’t ex-plain, I think you— know

Verse 2

Re-as-sure me when my heart’s not bold e-nough to bear her name
If you were in my shoes—and scared I would do the same
And though I may ask there’s— no need for past de-tails
For though I may laugh, alone my cou-rage fails
Did you— know?

Bridge

See how I’ve changed now— my head’s so clea-r-
Still there are some things that I— don’t want to hear
There must be so much I— know that you can-not for-get
I must-n’t wish your life be-gan- the day we— met

Verse 3

Pla-ces- we go re-mind you when you were here be-fore
So you talk and tell me you don’t think- a-bout it any-more
There is some-thing I know— ha-sn’t quite been left be-hind
So I’ll ask you once a-gain to prove that I don’t mind—
To prove that I don’t mind—

Fig. 3. Musical scansion of ‘Fascination’. Within a 3+2 regular rhythm, those syllables marked bold are on the strong downbeat, so beginning of the set of 3 beats, those in italics on the medium-strong fourth beat, so beginning of the set of 2 beats.

In several lines (‘you speak of— the past’, ‘more than— we like to know’, ‘things that I— don’t want to hear’, etc.), Thorn elongates a pronoun, preposition or conjunction, or the word ‘know’ itself, delaying what is hard to speak. The hesitation before ‘met’ at the end of the bridge creates a momentary haze, as if she wants this to mark a firm ‘beginning’ while knowing that it cannot do so in the face of what came before. A few lines, while not avoiding strong or medium-strong beats entirely, evade several of them, creating a heightened sense of ambiguity and uncertainty, especially at the end of each verse (‘I think you know’, ‘Did you know?’). In the three verses, the second half of each line generally coincides with the harmony of greater tension, sharpening the pain in ‘you speak of the past’, ‘I can join in when you laugh’, and especially ‘when you were here before’, perhaps the emotional peak of the song. In the bridge, by contrast, it is the first chord that carries the greater tension, lending clarity of intent to ‘my head’s so clear’ and ‘I don’t want to hear’, and resignation to ‘you cannot forget’.

The basic melody for all three verses is mostly restricted to a tessitura of G3-E4. It is made up of variants on two antecedent/consequent phrases, indicated as (a) and (b) in Fig. 4a, sometimes staggered with the wider metrical units. The first is 7 beats, reducing to 6 in the last line, beginning with an oscillating resolution of the leading note, then from the second line introducing the missing fifth degree, so that the oscillation between this and the leading note is more significant; the second 10 beats at first, then 12 from the third line, as it settles into a resolution (as the singer eases and gains confidence), expressing yearning through an ascending contour over the more dissonant harmony, in which context some of the strong beats (A3, C4) on one hand fill out a more conventional Fmaj⁷ chord, but also acting as neighbour notes onto the pitches of the accompaniment, in the process creating another level of tension.

Fig. 4a. Melodic fragments of Verse 1.

Verse 2 essentially consists of continuing variants, the change being most striking when Thorn affirms that she would do the same if the roles were reversed. But from the second line the ascending lines are more restricted, never extending above D4, a pattern which continues in Verse 3 (though the Bridge has gone higher), until the final word ‘mind’, closing the song with the renewed yearning and uncertainty after an earlier increasing sense of resignation.

The bridge introduces a new antecedent fragment (c), essentially a repeated note preceded by an anacrusis of the same pitch an octave lower. The repetition, now on the more dissonant harmony, adds an emphatic quality. Then the consequent (d) is essentially a variant of (b) using a reduced tessitura. Then a hybrid of (c) and (a) in the second line leads to a return to (a) in the third, and further variants in the fourth.

Fig. 4b. Melodic fragments of Bridge.

Fig. 5, from the beginning of verse 2, shows various indicative properties of the song. The verse begins on the Cmaj9 harmony with clear strong and medium-strong emphases for the definite wish for reassurance, then the increased tension as Thorn nonetheless sings outright, with similar rhythms, about the pain of simply hearing the name of the former lover. When trying to offer mutuality in the next line, the elongation of ‘shoes and scared’ and displacement of a clear downbeat with the harmonic shift expresses the doubts about projecting her feelings onto the other. Thorn gives special vocal emphasis to the ‘I’ followed by ‘would do the same’, but ‘same’ comes marginally before the downbeat, causing the firmness of intent to dissipate slightly during the course of the phrase.

Fig. 5. ‘Fascination’, beginning of second verse.

Jealousy in context

Jealousy, which originates in the Greek word zēlos, meaning ‘zeal’ or ‘fervent pursuit’, has an immense literary history. But ‘Fascination’ belongs less to the world of melodramatic jealousy than to that of inward, self-scrutinising, almost ashamed attachment. It is not Othello, The Winter’s Tale or The Kreutzer Sonata, where jealousy moves rapidly towards violence and catastrophe; not the harsh destruction of Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel L’Invitée/She Came to Stay (1943), in which Françoise’s jealousy takes the form of sovereignty threatened by the freedom of another, leading to the wish to manage, contain, possess and ultimately annihilate. The song belongs instead to a lineage in which jealousy is sustained by imagination, by signs and memory, by the painful knowledge that the beloved has had experiences one can never fully master or enter, and in which the lover is drawn repeatedly to what causes pain. The song does not call itself ‘Jealousy’ but ‘Fascination’ - and this substitution is exact. It names what Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony (see below), called the Medusan pull: the face that should repel but instead compels, the compulsive half-pleasured quality of jealous curiosity rather than its painful surface. Thorn’s title carries that same logic into the register of everyday erotic life.

Georg Simmel, in ‘The Sociology of Conflict’ (1904), offers a particularly sharp distinction between envy and jealousy which helps clarify the emotional structure of ‘Fascination’. While envy, for Simmel, is directed chiefly towards the desirable object itself; jealousy turns upon the rival possessor, and presupposes some sense of claim - legal, moral, emotional, or simply felt - upon the person whose love or recognition is at stake. He writes that ‘the susceptibility of the envious turns rather upon the thing to be possessed, that of the jealous upon the possessor.’ What gives jealousy its particular bitterness is that the rival seizes precisely the point of union between self and beloved, so that antagonism arises not outside the relationship but at its very centre. This is highly pertinent to ‘Fascination’: Thorn is not simply envying a predecessor, but suffering from the thought that another woman has already occupied the place of intimacy, memory and recognition to which she herself lays claim; and since love cannot be commanded, the song turns instead to the external signs of reassurance, proof and persistence.

Jealousy permeates much of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1909-27), as a painful mode of interpretation and projection which turns uncertainty into ever new scenes. Throughout La Prisonnière, the narrator Marcel is overwhelmed by jealous feelings for Albertine and the knowledge of other erotic opportunities available to her in Paris, leading to forms of surveillance and attempts to imprison her in his apartment. Yet the more he seeks mastery, the more she recedes into opacity, so that he can feel closeness and pleasure only when she is asleep. Even after her death, in Albertine disparue, he remains desperate to possess her further in his mind, while knowing that he can never understand the nature of her lesbian desires and encounters from the inside. Earlier, in Du côté de chez Swann, jealousy is once again linked to imagination and the will to possess: Swann laments the years spent pining over a woman, Odette, he wanted to be something she was not. Gilles Deleuze, in his Marcel Proust et les signes/Proust and Signs (1964, rev. 1972, 1976), radicalises this account by describing jealousy as a ‘delirium of signs’. The jealous lover reads gestures, words, silences, objects and places as clues to ‘possible worlds’ harboured within the beloved, worlds which can be intuited and elaborated but never fully entered. In my essay ‘Coldness and Cruelty as Performance in Deleuze’s Proust’ (published in Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust, edited Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping (2009)), I relate this to a form of supposed domination by which a submissive deploys signs – bodily, verbal, and sometimes involving objects, location, smells - to stimulate the imagination of a dominant, extending and intensifying more conventional techniques of seduction, opening out the latent or possible. Deleuze expands the argument in Différence et repetition/Difference and Repetition (1968), where he writes of love as arising from ‘the revelation of a possible world as such, enwound in the other which expresses it’, so that jealousy becomes an imaginative and coercive labour: an attempt to decipher, inhabit and perhaps master the possible worlds of the beloved. Julia Kristeva, in her essay ‘Le temps, la femme, la jalousie, selon Albertine’ (2007), remains with Proust but gives jealousy a different inflection: as bound up with narration itself, the effort to construct a plot in order to displace an absence. Both perspectives matter for ‘Fascination’: the song circles around a predecessor who is scarcely described, but whose shadow lies over the whole emotional narrative. The beloved, shadowed by this predecessor, becomes what Proust called un être de fuite — a being of flight, whose opacity is not accidental but constitutive.

Anne Carson, in her book Eros the Bittersweet (1986), brings one much closer to the emotional pitch of the song. Carson looks to Sappho’s word glukupikron especially in fragment 130 of the Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta:

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up

Carson preserves Sappho’s ordering, ‘sweetbitter’ rather than the more conventional ‘bittersweet’ in English, to convey not merely that sweetness can turn sour, but that both sweetness and hurt are entangled from the outset. Desire for Carson depends upon distance, lack, postponement: upon a gap between lover and beloved which both wounds and sustains at the same time. One wants what one cannot wholly have: if the gap were simply abolished, desire itself would begin to fade (as she argues through a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus).

She frames desire as a triangle between the lover, the beloved, and that which comes between them, which are ‘three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching’. In ‘Fascination’, the beloved is never encountered simply in an immediate fashion, but is always shadowed by his earlier attachment, the lover’s predecessor, and by remembered places and associations that remain part of him. The desire is intensified precisely by that interval which cannot be closed. What wounds the singer is also what sustains desire: the gap between herself and the beloved’s prior life is not incidental to the love, but one of the very conditions under which it continues to burn.

Carson’s reading of Sappho’s fragment 31, in a key chapter on the ruse, is even more directly relevant:

He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
   to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
   is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
   fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
   I seem to me.

The man sitting opposite the beloved, who listens to his speaking and laughing, is not incidental. Carson calls him ‘a cognitive and intentional necessity’, the third figure who makes visible the distance between lover and beloved and thereby helps to constitute desire itself. This is the role occupied by the predecessor in ‘Fascination’: she is absent, but psychically vivid; her invisible presence is the condition of the song’s jealousy.

René Girard offers a more rigorous model of triangulation than Carson. In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque/Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965), desire does not run directly from subject to object, but is always mediated by another person, who confers value upon the object, as with the knight errant Amadis of Gaul for Don Quixote. Where this mediation is internal, and mediator and subject inhabit the same social world, the mediator becomes a rival; desire thereby turns jealous. One no longer wants simply the beloved, but what the rival seems already to have possessed: precedence, intimacy, prestige, a superior claim, resulting at its most extreme in metaphysical desire, a form of obsession, vanity, sadism and masochism, and inner torment. Jealousy once again becomes not only fear of loss but humiliation before another’s prior occupancy of the desired place.

This model fits ‘Fascination’ with particular force. Thorn experiences her beloved through the shadow of his former lover; knowledge of that former intimacy heightens his desirability even as it wounds, because the predecessor has already occupied the place Thorn now seeks to occupy. The beloved’s past becomes denser, more glamorous and more inaccessible as a result. Even places bear traces of earlier scenes, and so acquire a painful symbolic force.

Melanie Klein, in her essay ‘Envy and Gratitude’ (1957), helps refine the emotional texture of this jealousy. What matters in ‘Fascination’ is that the beloved remains, in Kleinian terms, a good object: loved, valued, not attacked or degraded, even while experienced as precarious and not wholly secure. Thorn does not seek to spoil or punish him; rather, she suffers from the sense that his love, memory and inward attachments are not fully available to her because they have already been shared, and perhaps not wholly relinquished. This helps explain the song’s unusual tenderness. Its jealousy is possessive and wounded, but not vindictive; it is governed less by aggression than by anxious dependence and the pain of incomplete possession.

There is also a longer genealogy for such entanglements of pain and attraction. In La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica/The Romantic Agony (1930), Mario Praz traces the Romantic and post-Romantic fusion of beauty and love with suffering, eroticism with mortality, and desire with cruelty, from the nineteenth century cult of Medusa through the work of Byron, Keats, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Swinburne and D’Annunzio, showing how deeply nineteenth-century literature aestheticised torment, fatality and the compelling nature of hurt. Denis de Rougemont, in L’Amour et l’Occident/Love in the Western World (1939), argues that Western romantic love is constitutively oriented toward obstacles and suffering. Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), inherits much from Praz while giving it a broader, quasi-anthropological sweep: for her, erotic life is permeated and structured by conflict, humiliation, distance, fascination and power, in which context she also interprets Sappho’s fragment 31. ‘Fascination’ obviously inhabits a far quieter world than those described by Praz, de Rougemont or Paglia, but it still belongs, in miniature and in a chastened late-modern idiom, to this longer history of romantic agony: a muted, civilised form of resignation before what cannot be controlled. Each of these traditions traces metabolic outlets for jealousy - into violence, aestheticised torment, narrative obsession, compulsive repetition, or destructive possession. ‘Fascination’ is defined by its refusal of all these transformations.

Georges Bataille, in L’Érotisme/Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (1957), takes desire in a still more radical direction. For Bataille, erotic life depends upon taboo (modesty, shame, restrictions on nakedness make eroticism possible), transgression, shame and the disturbance of bounded, self-identical being; erotic intensity is tied to a partial dissolution of the composed, separate, discontinuous self. Even so, he illuminates one aspect of ‘Fascination’: the singer cannot experience her lover as entirely discrete from his previous attachments, cannot feel him as wholly and cleanly hers, and it is precisely this failure of secure discontinuity that keeps desire alive while making it painful. ‘Her name’ is the symbol of the earlier lover’s discrete existence. Thorn’s register of humility, non-dramatised vulnerability, maturity belongs fully to the glukupikron, the inseparability of sweetness and bitterness. But such maturity allows her no means of metabolising the pain; it turns inwards instead.

But one of the sharpest lenses for ‘Fascination’ can be found in Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux/A Lover’s Discourse (1977). Barthes anatomises not love as social institution or metaphysical truth, but the inner speech of the lover: its hesitations, recursive tests, shame, sudden images, humiliations and repetitions. Jealousy, he says, involves ‘three permutable terms’: the lover, the beloved and the rival. Yet the rival is not simply hated. He or she is magnetic, fascinating, because it is through that figure that the beloved’s opacity and desirability become more acute.

That is exactly the paradox Thorn sings. She does not want ‘past details’, yet keeps circling back to them masochistically; she asks for reassurance, yet reassurance cannot quite abolish the wound; she wants to appear composed, generous, unthreatened, yet she remains caught in comparison. Barthes also writes of suffering jealousy ‘four times over’: through jealousy itself, shame at being jealous, fear of hurting the beloved through one’s jealousy, and shame again at being trapped in such a drama. This formula captures with extraordinary precision the emotional register of ‘Fascination’. Thorn’s suffering is not only caused by the rivalised past, but by her own recognition of herself as jealous.

What Thorn does with all this is remarkably precise. Her predecessor becomes, as in Sappho, a structurally necessary third term; as in Girard, a mediator who heightens desire by having come before; as in Barthes, a figure of fascination as much as pain. Yet the beloved remains, in Klein’s terms, a good object - loved, not attacked, not degraded - and the jealousy never curdles into the wish to spoil or punish. The song holds these traditions together without strain, even though the narrator need not know that she is doing so, and remains a quiet form of romantic agony.

Jealousy, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt

Ben Watt covered a similar theme in ‘Thirst for Knowledge’ on his own solo album North Marine Drive (1983) – ‘I cannot bear the thought of someone touching you / Even in the days I never knew / A thirst for knowledge is the thing that drives me on’. But Watt’s tone and high tessitura are more anxious, anguished, somewhat panicked. Thorn’s is more sublimated. The anxiety is no less intense, but is filtered through a need to perform civility, composure and erotic self-command, where Watt sounds more openly stricken. Arguably, his more ‘externalising’ tone and overt emotionalising (arguably more transgressive for a man) may enable a greater degree of metabolisation. By contrast, Thorn’s composure impresses as a chosen aesthetic strategy: the glukupikron as craft rather than compliance, but amounting to a form of compelled sublimation.

Thorn and Watt appear to have become a couple during their first term at Hull University in 1981, when both would have been eighteen or nineteen. Little is known of either’s earlier romantic life. Watt has spoken of having had ‘quite a lot of ex-lover baggage… which was quite awkward and unpleasant’ before meeting Thorn. Thorn, by contrast, recalls in her memoir of teenage years, Another Planet (2019), adolescent crushes, snogging, efforts to impress boys, being dumped, and the attempt to tell herself in her diaries that she had ‘never fancied him anyway’, but gives little sense of anything more sustained. An autobiographical reading of ‘Fascination’ therefore remains speculative. One possible context is Thorn’s attempt to come to terms with Watt’s ‘baggage’; another is that the song inhabits a largely fictional or composite world.

‘Fascination’ is unlike many other jealousy songs, except perhaps ‘Thirst for Knowledge’. It is not about active betrayal or present erotic contest, but about the existence of a predecessor - a woman whose name the narrator cannot bear to hear, whose prior occupancy of the beloved’s life cannot be undone. Thorn’s smooth voice, moving within a restricted tessitura and avoiding any overt inflation of emotional temperature, performs the composed exterior that the lyrics steadily betray. The vocal manner is essential to the meaning: Thorn never strains towards expression, never reaches for effect. The pain is more present for being controlled than it would be if directly stated.

Thorn recognises that there may always be part of her lover’s inner life to which she does not, and cannot, have full access: memories, associations, prior attachments, scenes that remain beyond her, even if the earlier relationship is over. What troubles her is not simply the possibility that this part of his heart might return to another, but the fact that it cannot be made not to have existed. That irreversibility wounds her, but it also keeps desire alive: love here is animated by the very knowledge that full possession is impossible. The song does not resolve this. It subjects jealousy to decorum - the composure she performs, her willingness to listen, to laugh along, to remain reasonable - and then quietly admits that decorum is not enough. The pain lies in the gap between performed equanimity and the admission that her courage fails.

That admission is so undramatic that it takes a moment to register as the most honest thing in the song. Thorn does not dramatise jealousy through accusation, revenge or collapse; instead the song enacts pain through restraint. This gives it its peculiar force: it is at once intimate and withheld, candid and ashamed, tender and quietly self-wounding. It is the glukupikron in its most unspectacular and most devastating form: the ache is the love, the love is the ache, and the song would not be about either if it were not, irreducibly, about both. It is in the gap between desire and knowledge, composure and inward pain that its emotional power resides. Few songs render so unspectacularly, and so piercingly, the pain of loving what one cannot fully possess.

With thanks to Sarah Hill, Julian Horton, Caroline Potter and Kenneth Smith for some feedback on earlier drafts.

ADDENDUM: Since publishing this article, I realised there was a very different way of reading this song. I have detailed this in a follow-up article here.

So this is an introduction, and I hope some will choose to subscribe. I intend to keep all posts free-access - I am looking for readers, not money. I have had a varied career, beginning (and continuing) as a concert pianist, specialising in avant-garde music. Almost from the beginning of my performing career in my early 20s I wrote, primarily about music, but occasionally on other things, including politics, theatre, social and cultural theory and more. My formal musicological career began in 2003, when I gained a research fellowship at the University of Southampton. After this (which was fixed-term), I took up a lecturership at Dartington College of Arts in 2007, then at what was City University, London in 2010. Through the course of this I also did various teaching and other work at the London College of Music and Media, and Trinity Laban, as well as a wide range of guest piano teaching, masterclasses, composition workshops, and lectures at many institutions around the UK, Europe, North and South America, and occasionally in Asia.

Social, political and cultural theories have been a major interest since my 20s, especially the work of the Frankfurt School and French structuralism and poststructuralism, also many areas of the aesthetics of romanticism, modernism and postmodernism, while in the last decade-and-a-half I have become much more engaged with educational theory and history. My primary musical interests encompass much of the Western classical tradition from Bach to the present day, with wider interest (but lesser expertise) in early music, but also in much jazz and popular music, which I have taught regularly and continue to in a sociological context. I also have written widely on different areas relating to performance - historically-informed performance, analysis and performance, practice-as-research, performance history, etc. - see this article for some wider consideration of the field of musical performance studies as a whole. But I also have strong interests in multiple forms of music analysis, have been a trustee of the Society for Music Analysis since 2018, in which capacity I serve as Awards Officer, and am currently working as lead editor on a new textbook on music analysis, and also as a co-editor for a planned large handbook on analysis and performance.

Beyond music, major cultural interests are in visual art, film, literature, theatre, and television. My PhD (which I undertook in my late 30s and 40s) was on The reconstruction of post-war West German new music during the early allied occupation (1945-46), and its roots in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich (1918-45), and was really half-musicology, half-history, involving a vast amount of archival work and grappling with historiographical issues, which continue to fascinate me to the present day.

Politically, I have had a long interest in various traditions of Marxism and Western Marxist thought, but in the last decade my political sympathies have shifted, and would now characterise myself as a social democrat loosely aligned with aspects of an ‘Old Left’, while deeply antipathetic to the way much of the modern left has dissolved into tribal identity politics and neglected class and economics. I have no time for kneejerk anti-Westernism, and value a lot of the types of societies which have been built in Western Europe since 1945, reflecting also my particular focus on Germany. The hard line anti-capitalism I once espoused is no longer, but I feel unsympathetic to commercialisation and commodification of many areas of human life, from the perspective of a reformer rather than a revolutionary. I am fascinated by mid- to late-twentieth century history in particular, and at some point hope to write something more substantial about the first few decades after the war in Europe in a historical, political, social and cultural sense, believing this period to be much misunderstood and caricatured. I also have books planned with a musical focus on the Weimar Republic and the period 1945-1960 in West Germany.

Having worked in higher education for over two decades, beyond my teaching and research I have spent much time examining changing education policy and history, as regards the nature of institutions, expansion of participation, the ways in which a mass higher education necessitates rethinking of various basic assumptions, the effect of wider economic conditions upon education, as well as questions of pedagogy, technology and more. One of my most sustained pieces of writing on higher education can be found here, but there are numerous other writings on this in my output for Times Higher and The Critic. The most comprehensive of my writings on music in higher education was in a guest lecture at Oxford, the text for which is here.

I am involved with multiple organisations dedicated to free speech and academic freedom, in particular as a founder member of the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom, and co-convenor of the City St George’s branch of Academics for Academic Freedom. In my view, academic freedom is the very lifeblood of universities, and I am deeply concerned at ways in which, especially in the last 10 years, various types of activist ideologies, but equally external pressures (whether from non-academic partner organisations or foreign governments), have sometimes been allowed to supersede commitments to independent scholarly and scientific knowledge and truth. Opposition to hard-line postmodernist thinking, that which dissolves knowledge and truth into relativist ideologies or pure expressions of power, has been a constant in my thinking for three decades in this context.

On a darker note, from 2013 I became (somewhat unwittlingly at first) involved in campaigning and researching on the issue of sexual and other abuse in musical education. This came out of the trial of Michael and Kay Brewer, a terrible case in which the victim, Frances Andrade, took her own life during the course of the trial. Brewer was the Director of Music at Chetham’s School of Music, which I attended between 1978 and 1986, and the events in question took place during my time there. I and others were aware that this was far from an isolated case, and there was much else involving multiple teachers at the school, above all the terrible case of violin teacher Christopher Ling, a serial abuser who fled the country for the US in 1990 as suspicions grew. The case received minimal publicity at the time, and the police investigation appears to have been quite lacklustre. It was only after the Brewer trial that this was re-opened, eventually leading to an extradition warrant being served in 2015 on Ling, now living in Los Angeles, who shot himself when a US marshall arrived at his place. Following the Brewer trial, I hosted a petition calling for a public inquiry on my blog, following the verdict. This led to a huge number of people getting in touch with terrible stories of their own about abuse. I worked on lobbying politicians for such an inquiry, ultimately leading me towards learning more about wider patterns and networks of abuse and paedophilia, and becoming involved in the negotiations leading to the creation of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. A section was ultimately adopted looking at abuse in residential schools, including specialist music schools, for which I provided written and verbal testimony in 2019. All of this led me to a greater understanding of wider patterns of abuse, in particular emotional/psychological abuse, frequently linked to sexual abuse by survivors I spoke to. This, and unhappy personal experiences (going back to school days and extending into work environments) led me to consider more bullying and especially mobbing at work (I published a big academic article for Sex Matters on this in the context of higher education). Forthcoming on here will be a piece on emotional abuse in the context of personal relationships.

Since moving to a sociology department two-and-a-half years ago, I have been more immersed in social theory and sociological thought than ever. I teach cultural sociology, urban sociology and sociology of music, and have wider interests in sociology of media (and have been undertaking a recent research project relating to representations of ‘Clydesideism’ in the media through the TV dramas of Peter McDougall, linked to study of social structure and wider urban sociology of Glasgow and Greenock from the 1960s to 1980s) and the sociology of romance, relationships and emotions.

On here I plan to write more on music, culture, society, education, politics, and sometimes on more personal matters. Do subscribe to read my pieces!