In the footsteps of Walter Benjamin
And a round-up of Multitudes news and reviews
On a warm afternoon last September, I met
on the beach in Banyuls-sur-Mer, to do something I’d been wanting to do for a while: hike the ‘Camino Walter Benjamin’ from Banyuls to Portbou in Catalunya — the path which follows the perilous, tragically fatal last steps he took through the Pyrenees, trying to escape from the Nazis in 1940. On the way, I went through National Rally-run Perpignan, read a lot about would-be escapees in Free France (quite reminiscent of Casablanca), and thought a lot about my grandparents’ escape from the Nazis in Czechoslovakia, Benjamin’s mysterious missing briefcase, the theories he was secretly assassinated, and agonised some more over Theses on the Philosophy of History, a piece of writing I am quite obsessed with, as readers of my last post on here will know.
The journey was beautiful as well as poignant — breathtaking Pyrenean views, the drama of Portbou squeezed between the mountains and the Med, all in the warm September sunshine — and we pushed on down the sparkling Catalan coast for a couple of days afterwards, with the result that I may now have ‘got the bug’ when it comes to hiking, and am seriously considering the Camino del Norte. (Have you done this version of the Camino de Santiago? If so please let me know.) My resulting essay about the trip, and Benjamin’s final days, legacy, and lessons for a barbaric world, was published in the FT Magazine two weeks ago.
If you haven’t read the piece yet, it’s on the FT website here (or look it up on archive.ph). I’m really proud of it, and grateful to Huw for the company and conversation, and Cordelia Jenkins for commissioning and excellent editing. Make sure you’re subscribed to Huw’s excellent Substack Utopian Drivel, not least because I hope he will be writing about the trip soon too.
Now a bit of Multitudes news, for people concerned that I haven’t banged on about crowds for at least a few weeks. If you haven’t bought it yet, please do.
I have an event coming up in Birmingham, at Voce Books on Tue 18 Feb, in conversation with my friend Kate Knowles from the Birmingham Dispatch. Tickets from £3 are now available here.
And a few big reviews of Multitudes, the first by self-confessed crowds-disliker Stuart Jeffries in The Observer, who says it “champions the erotic, capitalism-subverting, ego-transcending crowd”:
Here’s the Observer review in full.
“His poetic account of getting more than 30,000 steps each day of the Notting Hill carnival as he strolled soca-seething streets, feeling an interpersonal fondness that I might do well to cultivate, was blindsidingly touching.”
“The crowds that Hancox champions are, in this sense, antidotes to the modern world. They’re not consumable products but transformative experiences that you collaborate in making. Crowds show a different way of being, freer than one predicated on personal utility maximisation. The powers that be – from Gustave Le Bon to David Cameron to whoever’s running the Met – don’t get that.”
And here’s Sophie McBain’s review across two pages in the New Statesman:
“Hancox’s is a deeply humane perspective,” she writes, and that (shucks) I am “an elegant and persuasive writer” — which is very generous of her. “You might come for the assured, and very leftist, political analysis and stay for the lively diatribes against corporate festival sponsors and people who don’t appreciate London. There is no arguing with his central insight that individual health and the political health of a country depend on people feeling able to come together to create fellowship and community with their neighbours.”
And here’s Henrik Schoeneberg’s review in the New Humanist.
“In the spirit of democracy and in light of the agony of social distancing that inspired him to write the book, we must take on the broader challenge of restoring the reputation of the crowd and its egalitarian potential. Multitudes helps us to better reflect on crowds in a nuanced manner, weighing up pros and cons, with an emphasis on the good that crowds can bring as a vital source of self-empowerment, liberation and joy.”
I was also interviewed by Archie Bland for The Guardian’s excellent First Edition newsletter on New Year’s Eve, about how our usual free and open, chaotic NYE celebrations have been steadily caged, dispersed or monetised in recent years: more enclosure of the free-roaming carnival crowd! You can read that interview here.
Finally, this is going to be an exciting year for Cursed Objects. We have our first ever exhibition coming up in London in May and June: more on that very soon. In the meantime, here is a fun new free-to-all episode, in which Kasia and I discuss the Millennium Dome, Y2K and New Labour with noted Dome enthusiast Imogen West-Knights.
Followers of my Instagram will know I am travelling through Spain again at the moment (Donostia-San Sebastián, Iruña-Pamplona, Cordoba, Ronda, Arcos, Jimena, Algeciras, Sevilla), and yes, I am eating a lot of cured meats and things saturated in sherry and garlic, but I’m also doing a lot of research and note-taking — so more about that before too long too. Hasta pronto.