Moritz Neumüller’s active suppression, in his article, of the public complaints levied at Halliday … obscures the fact that a deep-seated and long-standing professional jealousy, and a concomitant battle over the psycho-geography of London, lay at the heart of Halliday’s entire campaign against Butturini. […]
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The Mercedes Baptiste Halliday narrative legitimised Gian Butturini’s detractors, and kept them respectable. On paper, it superficially resembled a clear, ideological position, fuelled by a defiance of racial injustice. In actuality, it was a subterfuge, a mere foil – albeit one cut from noble principles – to hide the pettiest and basest of motives: the green-eyed monster of professional jealousy. […] For all of Moritz Neumüller’s profuse appeals to impartiality and critical objectivity, the very notion that Gian Butturini’s book LONDON had not only offended, but offended widely — indeed, globally — remains an untested one, founded not upon documentary evidence, but on faith, or magical thinking, alone. […] Exuding an exhaustive scholarliness and an air of academic authority, Neumüller’s textual apparatus thus becomes unstable on close inspection, at its worst incomplete, misleading, and factually inaccurate. … Parr and Butturini’s social media detractors, very limited in number and audience, never put forward a case to support their claims that Butturini’s London was a racist text. […] So when did Capa board LCI(L)-94? I believe it was at the end of the ship’s first beaching, before it shifted 100 yards down the beach. But that would have been a far less dramatic tale, so he crafted a hodge-podge story based on details he later observed around the ship and inserted himself into it. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |