20-07-2025
I pity people who have no interest in culture
The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published almost a century ago, defines 'hinterland' only in a literal sense. It is from the German hinter, meaning 'behind', and Land, meaning, unsurprisingly, 'land'. Thus, the dictionary says it is 'the district behind that lying along the coast (or along the shore of the river); the 'back country'.' It found no use earlier than 1890; but new scholarship has turned up a usage from 1879. Lexicographers have also found that a book on psychoanalysis from 1919 used the word in a figurative sense, in the excellent quotation 'unexplored territories full of mystery and danger in the hinterland of their own minds'. D H Lawrence, shortly before his death in 1930, wrote that 'we are mostly unexplored hinterland'.
Almost exactly 10 years ago, I started writing the weekly 'Hinterland' column for the Telegraph's Saturday Review in which, throughout the decade since, I have sought to 'explore' aspects of culture that enrich one's existence. It has often entailed re-reading books, or re-watching films, or returning to look at buildings, or listening again to music that I first encountered 30, 40 or 50 years ago, and evaluating them afresh before sharing my findings with readers. Few things have benefited me more in life than being told by a teacher or friend that I should read, see or hear something that will enlighten me or make me think; I hope my column has provided a comparable service. The feedback from readers has been highly intelligent, and I am sincerely grateful for it. We do not always agree but, if the columns have stimulated thought and triggered curiosity, they have achieved their purpose.
I think of 'hinterland', for the purposes of the column at least, as the region of my mental life that contains those enlightening and engaging aspects of culture that have pleased or, sometimes, provoked me. Occasionally one meets people, even highly educated ones, with no interest in culture. That may be because they are workaholics, or they lack intellectual curiosity or artistic sensibility. I feel intensely sorry for such people, but would reassure them that it is never too late to begin the expedition.
We are all victims of our upbringing. My parents loved music, and my father was a competent pianist. He read extensively, inspiring the habit in me to such an extent that I now have about 11,000 books. Now, I mostly read non-fiction; earlier, I ran through the poets, the 18th-, 19th- and early-20th-century novelists, and some dramatists. We all have weaknesses, and theatre I find difficult, and idolatry of Shakespeare much overdone. Enoch Powell, a great textual critic, once told me 'he' had to have been written by a committee as no one man could possess the range of styles in which he wrote. I simply don't know, but I felt Powell had a point.
I was lucky to grow up in the middle of nowhere on the Essex marshes, one of the oldest settled parts of this old country. Medieval churches, many with Saxon foundations, were all around me. The second oldest church in England, St Peter-on-the-Wall, at Bradwell on the Blackwater estuary, was a few miles away. It was the chapel of a long-vanished monastery, all built by St Cedd within the walls of the Roman fort of Othona in 653. I recall staring at this strange, barn-like building about 60 years ago, as a little boy, and my father saying that the sight before us, of the chapel in front of the sea, hadn't changed for about a thousand years. Now, the panorama includes a distant wind farm.
Like many children of the 1960s, an early acquaintance with beautiful music was the Berceuse, or lullaby, from Fauré's Dolly Suite, It was the theme music of Listen with Mother, broadcast daily on the radio by the BBC and designed to soothe toddlers for their afternoon nap. It gave me, as doubtless many others, the awareness that music could summon up specific associations. If I hear the Berceuse now, I am again three or four years old, and sitting comfortably waiting for the story to begin.
But my real obsession with music – which, of all the arts, is to me the most indispensable – came at school. In those enlightened times, my state primary made every child learn the recorder. My father quickly taught me to read music, and the recorder is the only instrument in which I achieved any competence. We learnt to play tunes, mainly English folk songs such as were the staple of the BBC schools' programme Singing Together, which ran from 1939 until 2001, though predictably ruined from the 1980s by relentless dumbing-down. By the time I was 11, I had soaked up the English folk-song tradition; and not long afterwards, at my grammar school, I heard Vaughan Williams 's Sixth Symphony for the first time, and my life changed for ever.
It became, and still is, the piece of music I would take to the proverbial desert island; and as I explored that composer's music in my teens, I went on to explore his contemporaries (notably Holst), his teachers and predecessors (including Parry and Elgar) and his pupils (Butterworth, Bliss, Moeran and, eventually, Ruth Gipps and Stanley Bate). No avenue of British music remained unexplored, with my discovering Walton, Britten, Arnold, Finzi and John Foulds, the last of whom has a claim to be the only musical genius this country has produced apart from Britten. There are some who still think of us as a land without music: they are wrong. I love European music – especially Ravel, Beethoven, Wagner, Respighi, Tchaikovsky and Janáček – but there is something in British music that speaks directly to me, doubtless because of all those folk songs as a child, but also because of associations with landscapes and society.
I am a professor of British history, and my devotion to my academic discipline is shaped by my cultural interests. My father told me that if you wanted to understand the history of a locality, you started with its church: and although the difference between Saxon, Norman, Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular, Tudor, Baroque, Georgian and Victorian had been instilled in me by the age of 10, the exploration of a church or any old building is always a revelation.
My mother loved what even then were old films, and I caught that bug. I think most of us are particularly fascinated by the period before we were born. My own interest in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s was fuelled by films, including those made in France and America. I am not a brilliant judge of acting or cinematography, but I know a good story and I understand the context: and the films of those decades now seem to me first and foremost historical documents more than entertainments.
All culture, whatever its other intentions, gives us a clearer idea of where our country and indeed Europe and the world have come from, and why we are where we are. Having a hinterland means having a permanent opportunity for enlightenment. That, as well as the joy of the cultural experience, is why it is so important.
