{"id":196879,"date":"2025-11-24T01:51:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T01:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/196879\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T01:51:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T01:51:21","slug":"was-the-posh-do-gooder-ever-really-cancelled-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/196879\/","title":{"rendered":"Was the \u2018posh do-gooder\u2019 ever really cancelled? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katie Razzall begins Anatomy of a Cancellation<\/a>, her fine new BBC<\/a> podcast about a still-bubbling literary controversy, with a meditation on Akira Kurosawa\u2019s Rashomon. This was the famous 1950 film that had four witnesses to a rape tell stories that sharply contradicted one another. The viewer is, before a revealing denouement, invited to assemble their own truth from clashing testimonies.<\/p>\n

This is an apt analogy. The title of the podcast will alone cause some feathers to ruffle.<\/p>\n

Anatomy of a Cancellation concerns the debate around Kate Clanchy<\/a>\u2019s memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, from 2019. The book, which details the writer\u2019s experiences teaching poetry at a comprehensive school in Oxford, was published to largely positive reviews and decent sales. A \u201csuperb reflection on 30 years in the classroom\u201d, Carl O\u2019Brien wrote<\/a> in this newspaper.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0From the archive: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me \u2013 A superb reflection of the classroomOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Her students, some of whom went on to be published in Clanchy\u2019s anthology England: Poems from a School, cherished her insights into their varied verse. Reservations about the author\u2019s position as a middle-class white woman interacting with pupils from diverse racial backgrounds were initially expressed in reasoned terms.<\/p>\n

Clanchy herself worried about being \u201ca posh do-gooder, a Victorian lady on a mission who has not noticed that her message is obscured by her person\u201d. Lara Feigel, in her review<\/a> for the Guardian newspaper, acknowledged the honesty of that qualified self-own. \u201cI worried about this too,\u201d she wrote, \u201cbut I remained convinced that her efforts are worthwhile.\u201d<\/p>\n

All very civilised. All very grown up. The book won an Orwell Prize for political writing. Clanchy seemed set fair.<\/p>\n

The crash occurred during the febrile, shut-in aftermath of Covid. Clanchy came across a review on the Goodreads<\/a> website that, she said, \u201cmade up a racist quote and said it was in my book\u201d. She posted her objections on Twitter (as it then still was) and watched aghast as the subsequent conversation escalated in righteous intensity.<\/p>\n

The Goodreads review proved inaccurate, but the author did use terms such as \u201cfine Ashkenazi nose\u201d and \u201calmond eyes\u201d to describe her students. \u201cReading Clanchy\u2019s book, I was angered by the dehumanising language and felt a protective instinct towards the children,\u201d the journalist Monisha Rajesh, one of her more vigorous critics, wrote in 2021.<\/p>\n

As the attacks swelled on social media, the novelist Philip Pullman<\/a>, then president of the Society of Authors, came to Clanchy\u2019s defence<\/a>. Meanwhile, she felt she was getting insufficient support from her publisher. \u201cMacmillan and Picador three times apologised for her and successfully put pressure on her to withdraw an article she was writing in her defence,\u201d the Times reported<\/a>. In January 2022, she and Pan Macmillan, owner of Picador, which published Some Kids, parted \u201cby mutual consent\u201d.<\/p>\n

The headlines alone justify Razzall\u2019s gesture towards Rashomon. \u201cThe hounding of author Kate Clanchy has been a witch-hunt without mercy,\u201d we learned above a Guardian article<\/a> by Sonia Sodha. \u201cPointing out racism in books is not an \u2018attack\u2019 \u2013 it\u2019s a call for industry reform,\u201d the header on Rajesh\u2019s piece<\/a> in the same publication argues. Far worse was, of course, being said by both sides on social media. <\/p>\n

So back to that title. Not every contributor to Anatomy of a Cancellation agreed that Clanchy had, indeed, been cancelled.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course not,\u201d Rajesh told Razzall. \u201cEverybody\u2019s still talking about her now. You\u2019re not cancelled when your books are still being published.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clanchy\u2019s books are, indeed, currently with Swift Press, the independent publisher that recently launched Woody Allen\u2019s first nove<\/a>l in the UK. But there is little question that the controversy has caused her enormous discomfort. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine feeling happy again,\u201d she says on the podcast.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Clanchy\u2019s former publisher put some sort of punctuation point on the furore. Not a full stop. Not a colon. But maybe a semi-colon. \u201cThis was clearly a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan\u2019s past,\u201d Joanna Prior, its chief executive, told the Times. \u201cI\u2019m sorry for the hurt that was caused to Kate Clanchy and many others.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are no easy or comforting conclusions to be drawn from all this. But the hope is that we have moved past the stage where any sort of mass objection, particularly one emanating from social media, to a book, film, play or TV series is taken as unquestionable evidence of widespread popular concern. <\/p>\n

It is more important to do the right thing than it is to be seen doing what you guess, on that afternoon\u2019s evidence, the loudest body on the internet believes might be the right thing. <\/p>\n

Gatekeepers should listen to objections about potentially offensive content. They should also understand that it\u2019s vital to sometimes stand by work that makes you feel a tad uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

Now watch Rashomon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katie Razzall begins Anatomy of a Cancellation, her fine new BBC podcast about a still-bubbling literary controversy, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[3412,18,117,19,17,109345,109346],"class_list":["post-196879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-bbc","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kate-clanchy","tag-philip-pullman"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115602173678372392","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}