Book Review

As a break from the Advent list, I thought I would share with you a couple of books recently read and which I recommend.

In an earlier Advent list I included Clement Attlee as one of my spiritual (that may not be the best word - do I mean intellectual?) influencers. Citizen Clem is a well-constructed biography of this great man, written with zest by John Bew. Bew I must add is an academic based at God's own King's College London. Any minor eminence by association will be exploited by the shameless Overgraduate.

Very different in timbre is Christopher Buckley's No Way to Treat a First Lady. This rabelaisian tale of unscrupulous American politicians and pond scum lawyers had me smiling and reading avidly. It was written a decade and a half ago but it chimes pleasingly with the present rotten state of America. You have to laugh because the only alternative is to cry. Enjoy in particular the machinations of Boyce 'Shameless' Baylor, 'the man who broke $1000 an hour, the sound barrier of legal billing.' There is a part of even the crustiest workaday lawyer that wants to be like Baylor.  

Plus Ca Change

I have three pieces of recreational reading on the go at most times: early evening non-fiction; daytime fiction; nighttime fiction. From the first of these the following caught my eye:

"The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, called for a 'supranational community' to be established in Europe. The first stage was to pool coal and steel resources in order to improve the efficiency of the European economy. From this would eventually emerge a project with the professed aim of establishing 'ever closer' political union in Europe." Citizen Clem, John Bew

Prime Minister Attlee's government is described as 'squirming' at Schuman's proposal - Schuman, by the way, was the Foreign Minister of the West German government. At least Attlee understood what this all meant - later governments practised wilful ignorance or plain deceit. Take your pick. And we are now squirming all over again, which probably serves us right.

My musical tastes puzzle me - today I have been listening to John Denver, a voice as clear as those mountian streams he sang about. 

This Caught My Eye

Apropos of my last blog, this is from John Bew's highly readable Attlee biography, Citizen Clem:

In other words, Attlee's instinctive and immediate response to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was that Britain must have this weapon for itself. In a brutally realistic assessment, he came to the conclusion that there was no alternative. He had  heard a suggestion that, in a new Geneva Convention, all nations might agree to abstain from the use of the atomic bomb. Yet while gas was forbidden in the First World War it was still used. Indeed the British were quite prepared to use it on Germans if they had landed on British beaches in 1940. Attlee himself had been the minister responsible for stockpiling thousands of gallons of poison gas against this eventuality.

Nothing is truly simple. Happy Easter.

What A Waste Of Words

A wise person told me that the proper response to the inaugurating of the Donald will be to shed a tear for the world. There is something in this. However the thought occurs to me that waking on Friday to a Hillary Clinton presidency would be almost as deadening for the soul - another wave in the cruel statist tide. Sad times.

Nichola Sturgeon. I mean bloody hell, talk about overstaying your fifteen minutes of fame. I care not what she thinks her little bitty piss-ant economy is entitled to over and above what the rest of us citizens have to put up with. Not being Alex Salmond is hardly a life skill, but I struggle to comprehend what else recommends her to us.

giants in the earth

Nick Clegg. Some people just don't get it do they? Here's an expensively well-educated polyglot and yet he has not lost his mastery of getting it wrong. Nick, son, don't (as you did on Radio 2 this morning) presume to tell me what I did or did not vote for in the referendum. Deal with it.

If we get the politicians we deserve then we must have done something pretty gruesome in a previous life. I am currently enjoying John Bew's Attlee biography Citizen Clem, which only serves to accentuate the intellectual poverty of our political times. There were giants in the earth.