The Commissioner agreed that "We're not as efficient as we should be" and in the best tradition of Whitehall (or Burley-Griffin) reported that 'measures were in place to speed up' complaint handling. He was 'also telling public authorities that they had to make the FOI process more straightforward'. There's no indication of whether those authorities are listening and whether there will be a substantive response an announcement that the authorities are committed to seeing that 'measures are in place'.
The blog reports that the Commissioner
described freedom of information as a cumbersome process like "a complicated stately dance with many parties", so that "it's a question of 'Will you walk a little faster?', said the whiting to the snail".While on the subject of time and quadrilles, sad or otherwise, I've finished reading Adam Kuper's disappointingly thin Incest & Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2009).
This reference to the Lobster Quadrille in Alice in Wonderland, where the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon dance slowly and sadly round Alice while treading on her toes, may indeed capture some of the spirit of how the FOI system operates.
But if Mr Graham and his team are really seeking inspiration from a character in Alice in Wonderland, perhaps they have most to learn from the Mad Hatter.
He informs Alice that as long as you keep on good terms with Time, he'll do almost anything you want with the clock. He can make it go from nine in the morning to half-past one, time for dinner, in a twinkling. Equally well, he can "keep it to half-past one as long as you liked".
It's an account of kin marriage among the 'cousinage' (Rothschilds, Darwins, Stracheys, Wedgwoods, Clapham Connection and Bloomsbury Group - the latter hyperbolically tagged as "the most eccentric product of English bourgeois endogamy" - more eccentric than the Plymouth Brethren?), for me less insightful than Noel Annan's writing on the intellectual aristocracy or Lawrence Stone's writing on the history of English marriage as a legal institution. From a dissertation perspective it's most valuable for a quick introduction to UK law regarding marriage of relatives within the 'prohibited degrees'. Harvard promotes it as
This groundbreaking study brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain.In reality it doesn't break much ground and the connection is rather thin, with few treasures for lawyers and little that's new or striking for a historian of the period. Ideally there would be a detailed comparison with intermarriage and influence among contemporary urban elites in say Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, New York and Frankfurt.
Starting points for an evaluation might include Frederic Jaher's The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana: Uni of Illinois Press 1982), R. J. Morris' Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies amongst the Leeds Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2005), Sven Beckert's The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) and Werner Mosse's The German-Jewish economic élite, 1820-1935: a socio-cultural profile (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1989).
Stephen Halliday in the THE sniffed that
a whole chapter is devoted to the Bloomsbury Group. There was a good deal of sleeping around among that strange and diverse cast of characters, but little if any intermarriage of any consequence; moreover, the group's members showed very little interest in anything as vulgar as business, and in many cases would have been very upset to hear themselves described as "bourgeois".Halliday goes on to comment that
The reference to "characteristic strategy" in Kuper's initial explanation of his thesis implies that there was something deliberate about the choice of relatives in marriage, but he provides other, more convincing explanations of the phenomenon. He reminds the reader that, in an age when chaperones were considered essential for young unrelated couples, cousins had more opportunities to be alone together.If you are lawyer you might want to skip Kuper and read Wharton's The Age of Innocence instead.
The interesting chapter on "The Family Business" observes that many of the people considered here were Quakers, and indeed Kuper could have concluded that friendships nurtured at Quaker meetings were a more likely explanation of their tendency to marry one another than any "strategy" to protect family interests. Perhaps they just liked one another.
Likewise, the chapter devoted to "Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect" could have suggested that people with common values, such as a fierce opposition to slavery, who meet frequently to pursue their common goals are likely to generate intimate friendships. ... Kuper should have called his book Networking in 19th-Century England, but that wouldn't have been a very catchy title, would it?
