POLEMIC: IAN SANSOMreviews It's a PC World: What it Means to Live in a Land Gone Politically Correctby Edward Stourton, Hodder & Stoughton, 262pp. £14.99
IT'S A PC World is a work of vigorous cock-snookery, in which Edward Stourton (until very recently a much-loved presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme), puts what he calls his "Mr Grumpy hat" on and gives a five-fingered salute to, among others, philosophers, politicians, the police, art critics, do-gooders, his BBC bosses, and anyone else "who would place limits on the way we write, speak and think in the name of their social and political goals".
A few weeks ago the book might have seemed just another casual knock-about with the already half-deflated ball of political correctness. But suddenly since the BBC booted him unceremoniously off the Today programme, the book seems reckless, daring and dangerous. Stourton may have been pushed. But here see him jump.
Stourton styles himself in the book as a man of the people, but - amply educated as he was at Ampleforth College and Trinity College Cambridge, where he studied English Literature - he strains rather for the common touch.
At one point in the book he refers to meeting up with some old university friends, or "my old muckers", as he refers to them, but then adds quickly, lest we forget that these fellows are no mere oiks, that they have all "become distinguished figures in their various professions".
Such sudden swerves characterise both the tone and the content of the book, and this is either utterly charming, or entirely infuriating, depending on one's appetite for free-ranging anecdote.
One moment Stourton is scanning the headlines in the Sun, the next he is recalling "a convivial evening at a Cambridge college in the company of Mary Beard, the Professor of Classics there".
Whipping through complex arguments much in the fashion of a Sun editorial, or a High Table dinner, Stourton refers dismissively to "high-falutin' and abstruse academic arguments", and assures his readers that "I do not know what a Belgian deconstructionist looks like either." Really? Did he miss that part of the Cambridge Tripos?
He does refer at one point to having studied for the university's famous practical criticism paper, but his own close reading leaves a bit to be desired. Commenting on a quoted passage, he writes: "is this not, as they might say, 'going it a bit'?" And of another passage, "No matter how elegantly written this may be, it is plainly complete bollocks".
Quite. Elegance is clearly not Stourton's concern. It's a PC World is polemic, and as such it "goes it" quite a bit itself. There are vast and absurd generalisations. "Somewhere in the American soul", for example, Stourton pronounces, "there is a twitch towards censorship".
Just the American soul? What about the Russian soul? Or the North Korean? The Chinese? And how exactly might such a soul twitch make itself manifest? The book's crucial fatal generalisation may be this: "My bosses at the BBC have been banging on about the importance of recognising 'the nations' for as long as I can remember, and I think most of us have now had it dunned into our heads that it simply does not do to present the news as if you are addressing only people who live outside the M25."
Stourton, one can only infer from his peculiar choice of language here, would have preferred not to have his head "dunned" and would in fact be quite happy for all this stuff about the so-called "nations" to go away. But the nations won't go away. Perhaps the BBC bosses know it. Easier rid of Stourton than cut off loyal listeners outside the M25 ? The book, reckless and rambling as it is, does have some serious points to make. Stourton is insistent that - despite soothing liberal claims to the contrary - "some of the ideas which drive people to turn themselves into human bombs do have a connection with Islam".
And he is quite right to identify, post-Cold War, the "arrival of a politics of identity in place of a politics of ideology". He reads Milton's Areopagitica - at the prompting of the Chief Rabbi - seriously, and with understanding. He also reads the literary critic Stanley Fish. And Ezra Pound. And George Orwell. And in the last chapter of the book he provides a brilliant, thoughtful analysis of the process of German denazification.
But there is otherwise far too much bluster and fluff. One paragraph begins, worryingly, "Typing the phrase 'Political Correctness gone mad' into the internet search engine Google produced well over a million answers." It would.
Typing just about anything into Google produces over a million search results. Other examples of Stourton's research include chats with BBC colleagues, various e-mail exchanges, and quoting his former boss, Rod Liddle, writing about Big Brother, in his column for the Sunday Times. As Stourton might - and indeed does - say, "Hold on, chaps, time for a reality check."
The book derives, apparently, from Stourton's "vague sense of being bullied" by people using politically correct language.
Linguistic bullying is always of course to be deplored, but then so is speaking ill of the dead, the sick and the afflicted, and It's a PC World begins, alas, in extremely poor taste, with Stourton recalling a private lunch with the late Queen Mother, during which she apparently referred, jokingly, to "Huns, Wops and Dagos".
The book may have benefitted from fewer such indiscretions, and more argument. But Stourton is, momentarily, a man down on his luck and to say so would be beastley.
* Ian Sansom teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of the Mobile Library series of novels