We asked writers and thinkers associated with Blue Labour for their reading suggestions for lockdown. The choices both reflect the strange circumstances we now find ourselves in and provide the intellectual and cultural backdrop to the wider politics of Blue Labour. The second selection in this series is by Tobias Phibbs.

You can read the first selection, by Jonathan Rutherford, here. The third selection, by Jack Hutchison, here. The fourth selection, by Liam Stokes, here. The fifth selection, by Paul Embery, here. And the final selection, by Maurice Glasman, here.

Last Friday, Jonathan Rutherford recommended the Russians Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam. The former reassured us from Soviet exile that, ‘In Petersburg we’ll meet again / As though it was where we’d laid the sun to rest.’ From our more mundane exile we can look ahead to reunions in our own Petersburgs. In the meantime I’ve been led to books whose vividness contrasts with this strange, sterile passage of time. 

There is no man who better embodied this vividness than poet and polymath Samuel Coleridge. His life is brilliantly described by Richard Holmes over two volumes (which I wrote about at greater length here). The first, Early Visions, shows Coleridge at his sparkling best. Even as his life fell apart he matured as a thinker. His perceptive disillusion with the French Revolution and the failure of his own ‘pantisocratic’ commune did not lead to cynicism but greater spiritual and political insight. His time in Germany, which he loved, only deepened his affection for his ‘Sweet Native Isle’. But his finest contribution was his approach to living itself. While at times echoing Augustine in his regret for his ‘wild and Bacchanalian’ youth, he continued to live his ‘whole Note’, delighting in the natural world and folk customs, whether in the Lake District or Somerset, London or Lower Saxony. He mastered the simple art of noticing, finding beauty in both the mundane and sublime, and in people as well as nature (his love letters to friends as well as romantic partners are extraordinary outpourings of human vitality). It is a biography of an extraordinary man and a life well lived, and it contrasts not just with sterile lockdown but with much of our lives before lockdown too. 

Continuing the theme of English poetry, Other Men’s Flowers is an anthology collected by Field Marshall Wavell, a decorated army officer. It began life as a gift to his son and contains only poems that Wavell could recite by heart, as well as sweet and sturdy annotations that speak to an age and set of virtues that have passed (the collection was published in 1944). Wavell eschewed romantics like Wordsworth — although a few of Coleridge’s proto-psychedelic poems snuck in — and modernists like T.S. Eliot. Though both were great poets, the former shied away from our fleshy, embodied and imperfect world, and the latter wrote with the precision of a clinician. Wavell looked for something more than abstract literary value: invigorating poems with feeling and rhythm, written to be declaimed out loud rather than subject to literary criticism. The collection is full of Browning and Kipling and Chesterton and reading them you feel the urge to live with renewed joy and vitality once the bare life of lockdown comes to an end. 

Remarkably for a poetry anthology, the collection sold hundreds of thousands and in its emphasis on recitation and rhythm it speaks to an older, working-class tradition. Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes describes the flourishing of working class and peasant self-education in the 18th Century. The Enclosure Acts turned the lives of ordinary people upside down and they formed associations in which together they made sense of these changes. Out of farms, factories and mines people poured into nighttime classes where they read and discussed philosophy, politics, theology and literature. Their reading list was both radical and conservative: Carlyle and Cobbett, Shakespeare and the Bible. Canonical texts were prioritised and Rose shows that ‘the classics were an unambiguously emancipating force for working class readers.’ It is one of the many paradoxes of state education and social democracy that it put pay to these associations and began severing the working class from its own traditions of auto-didacticism. 

I have also returned to the American historian Christopher Lasch, who has enjoyed a posthumous resurgence in the last few years. The most pointed of his books, The Revolt of the Elites, skewers the self-absorption and self-righteousness of the liberal, allegedly meritocratic ruling class. In the name of liberation this class undermined the collective traditions, communal politics and forms of life that held together the body politic. Though an unabashed populist, Lasch was far from the anti-intellectual caricature and his fundamental concern was with the growth of a narcissistic and therapeutic culture and the loss of meaning. As citizens and producers became consumers (and now, ‘content producers’), as identity transformed from something given to something individuals created as a form of ‘self-expression’, something serious was lost. Reading Lasch one is struck by how contemporary it feels, but anyone looking for a 21st Century update should read French geographer Christophe Guilluy’s Twilight of the Elites. 

Finally, for those of us whose political education began in the noughties, Mark Fisher was where it was at. His blog k-punk and his book Capitalist Realism were read, lent, scribbled on and reread as though a samizdat. He made sense of a world that seemed empty, devoid of metanarratives and culturally stagnant. The traditional power structures much of the left imagined themselves to be challenging had been eroded, not by the left but by capitalism, and in their place was the operation of power as a HR department. Self-help and therapeutic culture had replaced collective politics. Nostalgia and nihilism had supplanted the shared cultural landmarks that furnished life with meaning. And postmodernism meant even subculture could only take the form of irony or kitsch.  

Though a cultural theorist, Fisher was not aloof or abstract and he found meaning in the palimpsestic histories imprinted on distinct places, especially in his beloved coastal Suffolk where he found a “fictional and cultural richness so dense that one could not exhaust it in a lifetime.” His reading of the cultural runes was second to none, and there is no chronicler who would have been better equipped to guide us through this plague.