Did Clausewitz Drink Coffee?

Over the last day or so the otherwise unremarkable arrival of another cake product at Starbucks has blown into a social media storm of moderate scale.

With some splash, Starbuck's proudly announced the "invention" (and that word's important) of the "Duffin", essentially a doughnut, made from more muffin like substance, and shaped like a muffin. Could be okay, like Starbucks' coffee in general, could be awful, a little like their Pumpkin Spiced Latte. Chances are most people would be blissfully unaware of the Duffin, ordering what they always do, and long term survival of the said cake would have been utterly dependent on whether the store staff we interested in pushing it, and whether it managed to get enough traction to sit alongside the usual Blueberry Muffin style things. My gut feel is it would have struggled, and come Easter we'd hear no more of it, but that's not the point.

The point, as has been adroitly raised by Bea Vo, who runs a quartet of nice coffee shops in Central London, is that Starbuck's didn't invent the Duffin. Not even close. Bea's of Bloomsbury have been selling them for over 3 years. It appeared in their cookbook in 2011. Countless food bloggers and reviewers have written about them. I've been to Bea's a number of times, I must confess to not having sampled a duffin, but overall the experience of going is lovely, friendly staff, nice surroundings, and very good coffee.

Bea is highly accomplished in using social media tools to build her business. Her twitter feed has the thick end of 10,500 followers, and the tone taken is consistently conversational and friendly, ranging from passing the time of day to promoting film evenings. It's unsurprising that her response to the duffin incident harnessed this, and what a job she's done. In a series of tweets opinion has rightly been roused against a big corporation appropriating the hard work of a small independent and then compounding matters by trademarking 'Duffin' - which given the amount of prior art out there seemed a particularly pointless act.

There's something interesting about this though. Bea's four shops are dwarfed by Starbucks presence in London, let alone the UK. More than this however, the experience of going to Bea's is entirely different to that of going to Starbucks. Indeed, I'd argue that the two don't compete in any meaningful way, Bea's isn't really taking custom from Starbucks, and I don't see Bea's target customer base being realistically tempted by Starbucks; certainly in Bloomsbury the existence of a Nero just down the road doesn't stop Bea's being pretty full a lot of the time. In the greater scheme of things, right now these two companies don't matter to each other, and I suspect that may well have driven Starbucks and their suppliers thinking when appropriating the Duffin, and making claims such as 'only available at Starbucks'.

But - there are winners and losers when engaging in the battle for hearts and minds, and the results to date, with extensive twitter (#duffingate) and main stream media (Guardian) coverage, are clear. Starbucks once again look like a faceless behemoth, lose the chance to get some positive coverage, and all in all look staid and unresponsive, caught with their hand in the cake tin, and not really having much to say about it; a small independent comes across with integrity intact and showing they've got the courage of their convictions.

It's easy to brush over this, remember, right now I don't think the two parties in this disagreement really compete against each other. But competitors come from somewhere, and all empires end, and when Starbucks falls it might be because someone is fundamentally better at figuring out what the centre of gravity is, seizing the zeitgeist and making their products desirable  Bea Vo's only got four shops at the moment, but what happens when she breaks out of her City/East bastion and opens one in Victoria? Or King's Cross? Or New York? There's a part of me that thinks Bea's have played Starbucks undeniable misstep with considerable aplomb.

Did Clausewitz drink coffee? I don't know, just in the same way I've no idea what colour the boathouse in Hereford might be.

“A Home on the Rolling Main: A Naval Memoir 1940-1946”, A. G. F. Ditcham

Representing life as a junior officer primarily aboard Royal Navy destroyers during World War Two Ditcham’s autobiography provides a frank, accessible, and unflinching account, highlighting the wry humour and periodic human tragedy that's inherent with any life spent when momentous historic events take place. In this way the matter of fact delivery is reminiscent of Fitzroy Maclean's marvellous "Eastern Approaches".

One of the things I have always found fascinating about accounts of naval life is the less dramatic description of what ordinary life below decks was like, and here Ditcham's account provides a vast amount of valuable local colour, with critical details such as the Gunroom not being slept in by junior officers when at sea aboard HMS Renown, and sailors having to find any available square inch giving a real insight into the realities of being at sea.

The work throughout is punctuated with a rich vein of understated humour, such as his introduction to drinking beer and other such substances, which he clearly took to with some gusto! This is coupled with a welcome level of self-effacement; in the face of Norwegian barbarity, when he recounts how a Norwegian cabin mate ashore "blundered into the cabin, sat down on the edge of his bed, and pee'd on his bedside rug like a horse in a stall". Ditcham took this as an opportunity to request a move in quarters, which in retrospect he sees as the move of a prig.

A keen aircraft spotter it's striking that he managed to see such rarities as a Messerschmitt Jaguar and Dornier Seeadler in the course of his career at sea. Continuing in the vein of the unusual, the work contains accounts of some lesser known aspects of the war, such as Vichy France's bombing of Gibraltar in retaliation for the Allied Operation ‘Menace’ against Dakar in 1940.

It's always hard to avoid being too gushing when you encounter a book as genuinely good as this. Ditcham's autobiography simultaneously adds valuable narrative material to our understanding of the war at sea and the experience of the ordinary people who made up its cast of characters while remaining an enormously entertaining read. The late John Keegan, on the cover endorses "A Home on the Rolling Main" as "one of the most vivid and immediate war memoirs I have ever read", it is very hard to disagree with this. No library on the Second World War at sea should regard itself as being complete without a copy of this on its shelves.

Disclaimer: A copy of this book was provided gratis for review purposes by Pen and Sword Books.

"Floyd on Italy", Keith Floyd

Back in the heady naive and optimistic days of 1995 Floyd on Italy inspired as television. I'd long been fond of him as cook and (dated phrase?) television personality, and "Floyd on Oz" had already done a lot to kick start my enthusiasm for cooking as an undergraduate in the distinctly non-Australian surrounds of Fife.

The combination of the Aston Martin, the Strangler's soundtrack, and Keith Floyd in all his pomp made for compelling viewing, and lusted after the associated book to an almost indecent extent.

Right, that is, until I came across the first "River Cafe Cookbook". Captivated by its polish, displayed so seductively alongside the desirable home furnishing of Habitat's newly opened Dublin store. Prior to leaving for my postgraduate time at Aberystwyth my mother bought me Rose Gray and Ruth Roger's book, commenting sagely when I would gush over Floyd, that I probably had all the Italian cookbook I was likely to need.

Off I went to Aberystwyth, and staples from the River Cafe, such as the classic Penne Cabonara, and what I'm sure they won't thank me for learning became known as 'sausage surprise', became standbys that last to this day. I still loved Floyd, did so for years, and was enormously sad to hear of his passing on that excruciating day for Radio 4, but I figured my mother was right, I didn't need another Italian cookbook.

Skip forward nearly 20 years and in the comfortable surrounds of South London, and seeing Floyd on Italy rerunning on the outer reaches of the Sky package, and suddenly the old urge is back. Floyd has style, he has panache, he has passion; how could he not have a brilliant associated book. Thanks to the miracle of the interweb a copy is duly purchased for a trifling sum, a package appears and...

disappointment.

Floyd on Italy remains brilliant, if now maybe dated, television, but the book does nothing, and I suspect will not become one of those loved cookbooks, food stained and annotated throughout. It will sit dryly on the shelf, occasionally looked at, and before long make its way to the charity shop contribution. Maybe it's time, but I doubt it, because "Floyd on Oz" works, and it's an earlier publication, but for whatever reason the pagination and typography of "Floyd on Italy" doesn't resonate.

In some ways you can never go back, maybe "Floyd on Italy" would have worked for me when I tried to cook to impress in mid Wales in the mid 1990s, but tonight's dinner came from the River Cafe (admittedly Puttanesca from one of the later books). The book will probably go pretty soon, but I'm smiling, because it means that I can still fall back on listening to Waltzinblack and remember Floyd in his television pomp, and what it inspired me to do.

Don't buy this book, track down the series and watch it, and cook great Italian food. It will be worth it.

Paul Sussman

A year or so ago a rather poignant FT review pointed me in the direction of Paul Sussman.

His archaeologically focussed crime novels, set predominantly in the Middle East can to an extent be seen as being a little bit formulaic, but much more importantly they're well written, thinking, and capture attention in a really satisfying way.

I've read his books in order, and tonight, as the rain stung on the windows and I figured lighting the fire was a logical thing to do, I succumbed to the temptation to start into his last work, "The Labyrinth of Osiris".

Paul Sussman passed away much too early. I'd have loved to see how his writing evolved and how he could continue to write novels that appealed to the Indiana Jones school of adventure while dealing with a Middle East that's clearly changing in all sorts of ways. It's such as shame that this has been denied to us, and it's with a few mixed feelings that I'm launching into this last of his books. 

I'm sure I'll enjoy it; I'm sure I'll be sad that there won't be any more.

"Hard Hearted", David Barrie

Back in 2009 I wrote a few lines about David Barrie's debut novel, the rather good "Wasp Waisted". Since then he's gone on to three more works featuring Franck Guerin connected variously with perfume, ballet, and now, with "Hard Hearted", high finance and (perhaps more loosely) 17th century literature.

Like the previous works in the series, "Hard Hearted" succeeds in feeling quintessentially French. This is Gitanes and espresso territory, where the geography of Paris is laid out before you, and everything is done with typical Gallic flair. This is delivered with a sense of wry humour, never more pointedly than when Guerin points out that "Defending French as a language of international communication is a keytone of our nation's foreign policy. Even if I could speak English, I'd have to pretend that I didn't".

The Paris of Barrie's work manages to combine the beauty of the Hotel Menier, by Parc Monceau, the elegant facades of the Sorbonne juxtaposed with the rabbit's warren within, and the more impoverished garrets in which the creatives and workers of Paris still exist cheek by jowl. Cast against this is a highly absorbing crime story mixing the theft of a rare manuscript, the murder of a beautiful woman, and the sort of financial activity that sits somewhere between being very clever and maybe a little bit criminal. Throughout it retains the ability to surprise, and at times shock, which holds attention throughout, and leaves you disappointed when you come to an end.

Barrie's works remain on the margins of crime fiction, strangely neglected by mainstream publishing. "Hard Hearted" languishes at 1,343,726 on the list of Amazon's best sellers. This is a huge shame. These engaging and erudite books deserve a much larger audience, and I can't help feeling that if anyone who enjoys the thinking person's flavour of murder picked one up they'd really enjoy it. 

Go on, try one, if nothing else it should spark an interesting discussion with your friendly local bookseller, and may encourage Barrie to finish the promised fifth volume in the series.

"Midget Submarine Commander", Paul Watkins

In Watkins’ preface to this biography of Godfrey Place it is revealed that it is a book written in surprise that there hadn’t previously been an account of such an accomplished naval officer. When one reads of Place’s enormously successful, varied, and colourful career, this is a surprise, and a pleasure that this wrong has now been righted.

The central thrust of “Midget Submarine Commander” looks at Place’s involvement with Operation ‘Source’, the attack on the German battleship Tirpitz in Alta Fjord. This focus reflects Churchill’s own fixation with Tirpitz, but a lot of what is contained here raises questions about whether this was warranted. Watkins highlights many of the reasons behind Churchill’s fixation with it, and yet also flags up how it was, to a large extent, something of a paper tiger. Churchill felt that the resources tied up by Tirpitz impacted the “entire naval situation throughout the world”, and that if she could be eliminated it would allow a significant rebalancing in the Pacific. That said, the coverage of Tirpitz through Watkins’ narrative illustrates how limited her activity was, with prolonged periods of her undergoing planned maintenance while the astonishingly long preparations for the X craft operations we carried out. Herein a key point is made about the nature of a fleet in being – a significant warship does not need to be particularly active to cast a very long shadow.

Place may have won his Victoria Cross for his operations against the Tirpitz, but in many ways this, and the title of the book, masks the wider achievements of his career. Indeed Place himself downplayed the significance of this episode in his career, seeing it as “a grossly over-publicized attack in a small submarine on the Tirpitz in 1943” (p.116). It is in this wider career that Watkins’ book is at its strongest, producing rich anecdote and delivering valuable context and colour to any serious student of the period.

In the accounts of Place’s service aboard the Polish submarine Sokol in the Mediterranean some genuinely fresh pieces of history emerge, including the ‘official’ declaration of war against Italy by Poland – the humorous delivery of which, described on page 34, and involving some fantastic language and a hand thrown shell – masks the real and potentially oft-missed point of how legal niceties such as this were handled during the Second World War. Place’s own accounts of his time on Sokol reveal the deep sense of humour that ran through his personality. His claim that his “award of the Polish Cross of Valour entitled him to a mistress, two cows and half a hectare of land” (p.56) cannot fail to raise a smile.

Perhaps one of the most striking points about Place’s career is that he was very much not just a submariner. After his release from prisoner of war camp and frustrated attempt to rejoin the submarine service, he transferred to surface ships where he played an active role in attempts to counter the insurgency in Palestine that led to the creation of the state of Israel, and then in another significant career change, in 1951 he joined the Fleet Air Arm and qualified as a carrier aviator. This led to his service aboard HMS Glory in the Far East, carrying out combat missions over Malaysia, and most significantly Korea.

Late in the book a small point jars. Place was promoted to Captain on 31 December 1958, having passed through the Joint Services Staff Course, and in many ways this marked the run towards the end of his career, and certainly the end of Watkins’ work; at this time he was 37. When the reader considers all that had been achieved by then it is reminiscent of Caesar weeping at the sight of a statue of Alexander the Great when thinking that by the age of 30 Alexander had conquered most of the known world. Place is similar to Alexander, achieving a vast amount in critical times for his country.

Disclaimer: a free review copy of this book was provided by Pen and Sword Books.

"With Haig on the Somme", D. H. Parry

May was a month when things related to the Great War bubbled up.

Across the media we had the mild kerfuffle of sundry cultural commentators protesting the UK government's plans to 'celebrate' the outbreak of war in 1914, and on a personal level, while driving to Spa in Belgium, we listened to Anthony Price's marvellous "Other Paths to Glory", which  probably warrants a piece dedicated to it specifically. Spa of course is where General Ludendorff commanded the German Army from in 1918, overseeing the ebb, flow, and ultimate collapse from the Grand Hotel Brittanique (a strikingly small building, now hosting a rather disappointing bar, pictured below) in that small but charming Belgian town. All of this puts one in mind of the 1914-18 war, and as such Parry's period piece, first published in 1917, and now available free in the public domain, provides an interesting view into how the war was represented at the time.

While the style throughout is more redolent of what Capt W E Johns would adopt with his Biggles series there are some serious points to be found here, most notably the running theme throughout the book of how successive elements of the Somme offensive were betrayed by German espionage and 'Hunnish dirty tricks'; intriguingly presaging the post-1918 German theories of betrayal in refusing to accept more mundane factual explanations of how events turned out.

Hard work too is put into vilifying the German character. Sometimes this reaches absurd degrees, not content with stealing plans for the British offensive from the Dashwood family home, the German spy steals three boxes of his host's cigars. This leads to the rather strongly worded assertion that

A German isn't a human being when you come to look at it - he's just a mean beast, a bully when he's top dog, and a grovelling worm when he's cornered.

which as abuse is perhaps trumped only by the description of a German woman's laughter

The unrestrained laugh of a German woman is the index to the German character. It is one of the most horribly unmusical sounds on earth.

This jingoistic tone of morality and an attempt to cast a clear notion of right and wrong does lead to some elements of strangeness, and a hark back to a more chivalrous age which one suspects was long gone by 1916. When a German prisoner in no-man's land gives his word that if his side does not make a breakthrough he will report to the British trenches it conjures up a vision of World War 1 as a version of the Combat of the Thirty writ large; a nice idea, but one I imagine with no grounding in reality. This continues, with recapitulations of the 'men against fire' theory, that moral fibre could allow infantry to cross killing fields of fire, and that cavalry, given the chance, could carry the day.

Oddly some of the more fantastic elements of Parry's novel are grounded in lesser known parts of the war's history. The highly unlikely seeming element of Dashwood accompanying a French pilot on a raid on a Zeppelin shed in the Black Forest in actuality owes a lot to Noel Pemberton Billing's raid on Friedrichshafen in November 1914 (engagingly told in Ian Gardner's "The Flatpack Bombers"). 

There is also value in extracting some small elements of detail from the text. Price, in "Other Paths to Glory", talks about the chain mail armour worn by tank crews on the Somme, which is a little known piece of colour, borne out by a little digging (see this exhibit from the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, not visited by me since 1978, but I remember it being rather good), and Parry refers to "medieval looking" trench helmets; maybe the Combat of the Thirty was not completely alien to the Somme.

On a lot of levels this is a terrible book, the direct descendent of the worst excesses of pre war invasion scare literature, but in this light it is still of value. Where tracts such as "The Battle of Dorking" brought into vision a Great Britain that had already lost, "With Haig on the Somme" conjures up a Britain that was striving to win. Don't read this as historiography, and if you want a rip roaring tale of World War 1 adventure, read Biggles or John Buchan, but for an insight into how consent for the Great War was manufactured in 1917, read this with your eyes open. 

Statue of General Haig outside his wartime headquarters in Montreuil sur Mer.

Outside Ludendorff's headquarters in Spa.