Pifflicated followed: drunk for which there was already the 18th-century spifflicated

Pifflicated followed: drunk, for which there was already the 18th-century spifflicated.. 14 December 1999

Regina v Whitehouse
Court of Appeal, Criminal Division (Lord Justice Pill, Mr Justice Rougier and Mr Justice Morison) 7 December 1999THE WORD “likely” in Article 55 of the Air Navigation (No 2) Order 1995, which made it an offence to do an act likely to endanger an aircraft or any person therein, should be construed as meaning that there had to be real risk, which could not be ignored .The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal of Neil Whitehouse against his conviction of an offence of doing an act likely to endanger an aircraft, or any person therein, contrary to Article 55 of the Air Navigation (No 2) Order 1995.On 24 September 1998, the appellant was a passenger on a British Airways flight from Madrid to Manchester. The book has only now been translated from the old Dutch, by E.M. Beckman, who brings this hefty study of tropical fauna all the allure of Sir Thomas Browne or Darwin, and remarks of his including contemporary comment, “It is instructive at times to experience piffle in order to appreciate what is superior.”

Piffle was originally a verb – to act feebly – in the mid-19th century, perhaps from Scandinavian, and by the Nineties the noun was an Oxbridge coining. ONE OF this year’s fascinating, little-noticed books, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, first appeared in 1705, after the death of its author, who had the splendidly Firbankian name of Georgius Everhardus Rumphius.

Let’s hope that William Cooper – with Anthony Powell a last, great survivor of that generation of English novelists born before 1914 – approves.The reviewer’s biography of WM Thackeray is published by Chatto. Cooper, Amis and Wain all migrated to London at the earliest opportunity.All the same, Cooper’s sense of otherness – a conviction that lives get lived beyond Bloomsbury or Waugh’s Mayfair – was genuine. Such stirrings that we can detect in the modern English novel are based on exactly this belief. In some ways the idea that Scenes from Provincial Life (with its successors Lucky Jim and Hurry On Down) represented an attempt to recolonise non-metropolitan territory in fiction, was a red herring – though it was much touted at the time. At its best (about 90 per cent of the time) it achieves astonishing shifts of gear and changes of emotional temperature, moving from semi-complacent light-heartedness to deadly seriousness within a paragraph.These seismic intrusions – Elspeth’s fatal illness, the death of several of Joe’s students in the Lockerbie crash – give a wholly distinctive edge: the rare sense of a consciousness at work, gathering up both small things and large in the same grip.

The upbeat ending is nicely judged; it is redemptive, but in no way cancels out the unease of what has gone before.Looking back on Cooper’s achievements in a career that spans six and a half decades, we find a welcome circularity. “You can’t read a page by me and think it was by anyone else,” Cooper has said This is true, if not necessarily a compliment. At its worst, notably in its distaste for all recent developments in literature and criticism, the voice is a bit too unmediated – simply Cooper ventilating his likes and dislikes. His hip is irking him, his two daughters are growing up and there’s another book on the way. The prospect of penurious retirement is eased by the offer of a job teaching English literature to a rich American university’s London outpost.