The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

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      That pattern would recur: Mr Trump could not let slights slide. Fourteen months later, when they met for three presidential debates, Mrs Clinton, apparently on the advice of psychologists, baited him. In Las Vegas she said he would be a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump could barely contain his fury. “No puppet. No puppet,” he spluttered. “You’re the puppet.”

      Voters were already worried about his temperament. In the final days of the campaign his aides had blocked him from Twitter, to stop the acts of self-sabotage that frequently cost him support. His treatment of women would come back to haunt him, too.

      The summer of last year, however, became known as the “summer of Trump”. While the Clinton campaign churned out thousands of words of policy proposals and dodged press conferences, Mr Trump did things no candidate had ever done. At a fair in Iowa he gave children rides on his helicopter. He spent more money on “Make America Great Again” baseball hats than on polling. He demurred when he was asked to denounce a leader of the KKK. He did not release his taxes. He had fun: “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he said.

      Last February a second place in the Iowa caucuses for Mr Trump was followed by a victory in the New Hampshire primary. As the primaries headed first to the conservative Deep South and then north to the rust-belt states of the upper Midwest and the industrial Northeast, Mr Trump kept on winning. May 4 marked the Indiana primary. Mr Trump started his day by alleging without a shred of evidence that the father of Mr Cruz, one of only two rivals still standing, had helped to assassinate President Kennedy. By the end of the day the contest was over: Mr Trump was the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee.

      Mrs Clinton, meanwhile, was making campaigning look like solemn work. In July the FBI said it would not recommend charges after investigating whether she had broken the law by using a private email server. The revival of that investigation ten days before the election would send Democrats reeling, and the unflattering inner workings of Mrs Clinton’s campaign were revealed when private emails were hacked, probably by Russia.

      Time and again, though, Mr Trump defied the laws of political gravity. He won the votes of evangelical Christians despite saying: “I’m not sure I have ever asked God’s forgiveness.” He said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

      He called the voters of Iowa “stupid”. He said that women who had abortions should be punished. The leaders of his own party denounced his attacks on a Hispanic judge as racist. He made remarks some interpreted as promoting violence against Mrs Clinton. He was forced to fire his second campaign manager over alleged links to Kremlin-sponsored strongmen, praised Mr Putin and asked Moscow to hack Mrs Clinton. In the final presidential debate, he suggested he might keep the country “in suspense” and not accept the results of the election.

      America has seen populists before. None, though, rose as far or as fast. US politics will never be the same.

LEONARD COHEN

       Obituary

      NOVEMBER 11 2016

      FOR SOMEONE WHOSE songs earned him the epithet “the godfather of gloom”, Leonard Cohen had a highly developed and mischievous sense of humour. “I don’t consider myself a pessimist,” he noted. “I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain — and I feel soaked to the skin.”

      The subject of his songs over a career that spanned half a century was the human condition, which inevitably led him into some dark places. He suffered bouts of depression and his mournful voice and the fatalism of his lyrics led his songs to be adopted by the anguished, lovelorn and angst-ridden as a personal liturgy.

      However, there were also what Cohen called “the cracks where the light gets in”. Despite his image as a purveyor of gloom and doom, the inherent melancholia of his songs was nuanced not only by deep romanticism but by black humour.

      A published poet and novelist who was in his thirties before he turned to music, Cohen was the most literate singer-songwriter of his age. With Bob Dylan, he occupied the penthouse suite of what he called “the tower of song”. Together Cohen and Dylan not only transformed the disposable, sentimental métier of popular music into something more poetic and profound but, for better or worse, made the pop lyric perhaps the defining form of latter 20th-century expression. In an era in which anyone who warbled about “the unicorns of my mind” was liable to be hailed as a poet, Cohen was the genuine article.

      Many of his best-known songs — Suzanne, So Long, Marianne and Sisters of Mercy — were romantically inspired by the women in his life. In Chelsea Hotel #2, the theme of longing, love and loss turned to pure lust as he described a liaison with the singer Janis Joplin as she gave him “head on the unmade bed/ While the limousines wait in the street”.

      Story of Isaac and The Butcher touched on religious themes, and war and death loomed large, particularly after his experiences during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war when he offered to fight for Israel and ended up performing for Jewish troops in a tank division that was under fire in the Sinai desert.

      Depression and suicide also informed several songs, including Seems So Long Ago, Nancy and Dress Rehearsal Rag. This tendency to lapse into morbidity led one critic to wail, “Where does he get the neck to stand before an audience and groan out those monstrous anthems of amorous self-commiseration?” Yet if his writing had a philosophical stock-in-trade, it was more stoical perseverance than the abandonment of hope.

      Many of his compositions shared a search for self and meaning and were driven by a restless quest for personal freedom, nowhere more so than on Bird On The Wire, which opened with probably his most quoted lines “Like a bird on the wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried in my way to be free”.

      The song was covered by dozens of artists, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins and Joe Cocker, and was once memorably described as a bohemian version of My Way, sans the braggadocio.

      Even at his darkest, the prospect of redemption and perhaps even a glimmer of salvation was evident. He described Hallelujah, perhaps his best-known composition — and certainly his most covered, with some 300 versions performed or recorded by other artists — as an affirmation of his “faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion”.

      The song took him years to write as he pared back 80 draft verses until each line felt right, as with the second verse: “Your faith was strong but you needed proof/ You saw her bathing on the roof/ Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you/ She tied you to a kitchen chair/ She broke your throne, and she cut your hair/ And from your lips she drew the hallelujah.”

      It was characteristic of the meticulous way he worked to make every word count and led to a well-documented exchange with Bob Dylan, who expressed his admiration for the song: “He asked me how long it took to write, and I lied and said three or four years when actually it took five. Then we were talking about one of his songs, and he said it took him 15 minutes.”

      Unfailingly courteous and possessed of an unfashionably old-world charm, Cohen’s intellectual coming of age predated the advent of rock’n’roll. His early cultural heroes were not Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry but the beat writer Jack Kerouac and the poet Lorca, after whom Cohen named his daughter. His artistic leanings were liberal and bohemian, but he was never a hippy. Dressed in dark, tailored СКАЧАТЬ