FROM feeling a little blue to thinking you are a teapot, pretty much every psychological condition has now got an official name. But one of the commonest forms of obsession has not. And, in Bearing Grudges (Radio 4, Monday of last week), Marcel Berlins made the case for giving it the respect it deserves.
Berlins is best known as the even-tempered presenter of Radio 4’s Law in Action: not a man to hold a grudge, you might think. But Berlins is a virtuoso, nurturing slights made not against himself, but against a third party. Grudges gnaw away at our mental well-being; we become bitter and twisted, while the object of our grudge is blissfully unaware of any offence caused.
On the other hand, grudges are the engine of a good story. Trollope described a grudge as the next best thing to money in the bank, and the triple-decker Victorian novel is generally kept in motion by the device. Similarly, the narratives of real-life politics often rely on a deep grudge: Ted Heath against Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown against Tony Blair.
But it seems that there might be a way to hold a grudge responsibly. The author Sophie Hannah, who is about to publish on the subject, says that you must carry the memory of a wrong without bitterness, so that you can learn from it. It sounds like something from a Bruce Lee movie; and I suspect that most of us enjoy holding grudges far too much to respect this wholesome advice.
If you hold a big enough grudge, and you are powerful enough, you get to impose sanctions. The news has been full of Iran and the sanctions that President Trump is planning to impose now that he has withdrawn the United States from the Iranian nuclear deal. The question for In the Balance (World Service, Saturday) was whether sanctions actually work. This is the kind of analysis that the World Service does very well, and, with the help of three international experts, we benefited from insights that are rarely to be found even on the BBC’s sister stations.
The headline answer is, yes, they do; but not everywhere, all the time. In the case of Iran, there had, in any case, been a reluctance by banks to fund businesses working there, or even to provide such basic facilities as a Swift banking-transfer code; so the latest ban will not be hitting a flourishing market. But, when it comes to targeting specific individuals — as is the case with certain Venezuelan government officials accused of drug trafficking — sanctions can make life distinctly uncomfortable.
John Sessions tells a good story about a grudge, when Oliver Reed cottoned on to the fact that Sessions was his mimic in Spitting Image. Reed exorcises his grudge with a great punchline, as recounted in Six Degrees of John Sessions (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week); and, if you are minded to indulge the ramblings of a good raconteur, then this series is perfect bedtime listening.