corrigan1

Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
Henri Poincaré


In his Letter To A Christian Nation, Sam Harris informs us that he is ‘dumbstruck’ by the beliefs of Christians and Muslims; in this, David Berlinski observes dryly, the word has met the man.  It’s that kind of book: one imagines the author regnant in wingback armchair, snifter to hand, expounding on affairs of the day.  It’s an image from another time, but that, though not explicitly stated, is perhaps one of the underlying themes of the book.  That there has been a massive failure in the intellectual quality of our higher learning establishments over the last thirty or so years is certainly a proposition to which I would subscribe; if I’m reading Berlinski right, so does he, and the target he is using to expose that deficit is the New Atheist movement.

( Read more... )

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation
Walter Benjamin


History, so the saying goes, is written by the winners; to be strictly pedantic, it’s actually written by the historians. Roger Crowley and James J O’Donnell have both received honourable mention here, and although I have not reviewed him, Tom Holland’s Rubicon and Persian Fire were both amazing reads.  If we are to believe Francis Pryor, however, historians have their limits, chief among which is that they don’t get out much.

( Read more... )

We Are Corrupted By Prosperity
Tacitus


Life, they say, is rather like a party - it’s all about knowing when to leave.  If so, Bertie Ahern was born in a toga.  Like Tony Blair, his opposite number in London, the former Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) took his leave just as the party was dying, leaving a hapless finance minister to clean up the mess.  Indeed, Bertie’s timing was so inimitable that one can’t help but think of Road Runner stepping off the falling boulder just before it hits the ground, tossing off a cheery ‘beep-beep’ and disappearing into a trail of dust.  A pivotal figure in the story of the Celtic Tiger, Ahern was the personification of a peculiarly Irish political phenomenon probably best epitomized in Tammany Hall (which was, after all, Ireland’s little gift to the US; the French only gave them a lousy statue, the cheapskates).  Of course, even Tammany Hall had its seedy side, and in this short and compelling narrative of the Tiger years, the critic and columnist Fintan O’Toole posits the surprising opinion that such politics may not actually be desirable (gasp). 

( Read more... )

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
GK Chesterton


There is something very childlike about Chesterton.  You’ll note that I do not use the word ‘childish’, although in the cynical world in which we live today, doubtless many would consider them identical; there is, however, a great deal of difference.  Possibly, it’s a matter of faith.  A child will not understand all that his parents tell him (he is, after all, a child) but he will remember it, and one day, if he is lucky, it will suddenly dawn on him that his parents were right after all.  It just took him a while to twig.  It’s a bit like that with Chesterton.  I read him a lot when I was a teenager, and I didn’t get a quarter of him, but as I grow older, with every apparently new idea that presents itself I find that GK was there first.

( Read more... )

A Bad Show Of Good Form


When film producers mine the quarry of great literature for new movies, one of the perpetual problems they face is that there was usually someone there before them.  Jane Austen has been filmed until the her stays have popped, there have been more versions of Dickens than Fagin had boys thieving for him and if I say ‘Long John Silver’ you will almost certainly see Robert Newton.  Sometimes the frustrated mogul will produce something which he might term a re-imagining, which usually means it bears small relation to the underlying book, or he might even have the nerve to claim that he’s filming the book as it was written, relying on the fact that because he’s never read it himself, it probably means no one else has either, so he can get away with it.  Personally, I have always thought that were I in the happy position of being a Hollywood mogul, there is one literary character I would cheerfully film as he was written: Raffles.

( Read more... )

And If You Don't Like This Review, You Know What You Can Do!



Lynne Truss had a surprise hit a few years ago with her light and breezy (and did I say ‘surprise’?) bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, about, of all subjects, punctuation. It was a kind of anally retentive primal scream, if such a paradox can be imagined, and one which appealed to all of us anally retentive punctuators who insist on spelling out the words correctly when we text, not even baulking at the use of the semi-colon. There must be quite a big constituency of anally retentive punctuators out there, because in the same vein, the author has returned with this perusal of manners (or rather, their demise) and the rise of rudeness in our increasingly belligerent societies. It is not an etiquette guide, but rather a musing on how it is that good manners are bad form in a country (Britain) where, fifty years ago, stabbing somebody was permissible so long as you used the correct knife.

( Read more... )

Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.
GK Chesterton, Heretics.



Most of us with any knowledge of history are aware that in both Britain and America - and, indeed, in the rest of the western world - a strong eugenics movement existed in the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Today, when we think of these people, we tend to think of them (particularly the British incarnation) as cranky and somewhat liverish individuals, irascible and very much of their time, but now a colourful memory of a more distinctive age. If Dennis Sewell is correct (and he makes a very strong and disturbing case) then we would be wrong on both counts: in the day, they were not simply an endearing piece of local vividness like your eccentric maiden aunt, but dangerous racialists and vicious class warriors; nor (much more disturbingly) have they gone away. Eugenics was just one product of something that is still very much alive to trouble us today: the use of Darwinian theory for political motives and as a fuel for social engineering.

( Read more... )

A Highly Articulate Primal Scream


Quentin Letts is a diarist and political sketch writer for a British newspaper, the Daily Mail. Some would regard that as an odd combination, since political journalists tend to take themselves tremendously seriously, notwithstanding the fact that most of them are so far up the crevices of the politicians they cover that nobody knows where one ends and the other begins. You get the impression that Letts thinks as much of his fellow scribes, although he does not say it explicitly: that’s not really what this book is about, though certain journalists - most notably, those on the Mail’s rival, the Guardian - do come in for a kicking. Rather, the core of Letts' primal scream it the ever encroaching blanket of egalitarianism which is covering Britain in particular, and the West generally.

( Read more... )

Stiff Upper Lips And Chota Pegs All Around


You may, if you’re old enough, remember those hoary old British TV adventure shows from the 1960s like The Avengers or The Saint.  If you are, you’ll know that one of the recurring types who appeared in them was the Old Colonial Hand, the retired planter or army officer, spare of body but stout of heart, with a brisling moustache and a boyish sense of adventure tucked behind a weather beaten face and an alert pair of eyes used to scanning the hills for signs of  Pathan insurgency.  Such stock characters were a common sight in reality in the England of the time, flotsam of empire beached by imperial retreat, taking their daily constitutional along the front at quick march pace and addressing each other, public school style, with clipped accents and by surnames only.   Despite the revolutions - social and political - of the day, and the comprehensive rejection of the England they had stood for, one gets the impression that the only regret the OCH had was that he couldn’t do it all again.  It really must have been tremendous fun kicking some dhobi wallah up the backside if he put too much starch in your shorts or roaring at the punkah boy if he fell asleep on the veranda, and despite the archetypical image of elderly energy which has seeped into the public unconscious, these people must have been young once.  If they were (and of course they were) and were very lucky, they may have had the kind of adventurous youth Barbara Cleverly describes in her Joe Sandilands books.  

( Read more... )

Phase Space And The Rossmeister General


You know those Star Trek episodes where Kirk or Sisko cross over to an alternative universe in which everything looks like it should but you just know it’s not quite right?  I guess they’re popular because everybody has days when the world feels like that.  In my case, it’s weekdays.  Saturdays and Sundays too.  That’s the trouble with life; just when you’ve organized the world exactly the way it should be (sometimes referred to as ‘the way you want it’) somebody comes along and kicks the props out from under you.  It's said that the way one handles these little setbacks is the mark of a man, and most of us swallow it down and act with the maturity and wisdom of adults.  But I’d bet you’d prefer to freak out, spit back and throw your toys out of the pram, wouldn’t you?

( Read more... )

Good Meal, If Not Haute Cuisine

One man’s meat, so they say, is another’s poison; if it is, Somerset Maugham got rich off something that choked a lot of critics.  It is, therefore, ironic that what brought me to this book were the almost verbatim opinions of two critics - separately voiced some twenty years apart - that Maugham was ‘a good, but not a great’ writer.  The somewhat sniffy qualification pushed my buttons, kind of like when you were at school and had to be careful not to copy your homework too closely from the class smart kid: if you were any way clever yourself, you put in a few mistakes to make it look good.  Not that I’m suggesting that there’s a classroom full of trainee critics out there somewhere learning who they’re supposed to adore and who they should abhor, but the very existence of a canon of ‘great’ literature presupposes an evaluation committee of some sort, however informal.  

( Read more... )

Well, It's Different...


A lot of people are of the opinion that the greatest mistake the Roman Catholic church ever made was to do away with the old Latin mass. It didn’t matter that the congregation hadn’t a sufficient command of the language to closely follow the intonations of the priest; what mattered were the intonations themselves, the ritual observed by millions of Catholics in exactly the same way in thousands of churches all over the world. Much like the Muslims who kneel to Mecca five times a day, they were part of something greater than themselves and were proud because of it. If David Peace is to be believed, it’s a bit like being Japanese.

( Read more... )

White founts falling in the courts of the sun
and the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run...
GK Chesterton, Lepanto



History has become rather a sexy subject over the last decade or two.  Where previously it was sometimes considered the fusty bachelor uncle of academe, it has more lately come to be regarded with a certain rakish regard by undergraduates, the chattering classes and, indeed, even by serious people.   Partly, this is due to the efforts of those like Tom Holland and James J. O’Donnell, to whom I have previously referred, and even, to a (very much) lesser extent, to populist pipsqueaks like Andrew Roberts.  Between the sociological histories of Holland and O’Donnell, and  whatever it is that Roberts does, old style date-and-battle historians seem to have fallen through the cracks.  In a way, that’s because of the very success the subject has recently enjoyed commercially and educationally: we know the facts in more intimate detail today than probably any generation in the past.  Now what we want is some intellectual depth.  Enter Holland and O’Donnell.

( Read more...a lot more... )

...And Quickly Forgotten

Jonathan Kellerman, or Kellerman Père as I have previously referred to him, has been cranking out the Alex Delaware novels since 1985.  A long time ago (it seems) I used to be an avid fan of the series, but, as is the way with these things, I drifted away and only came back when I ran across a rather battered copy of this 2006 effort which somebody had left behind them on the bus.  Reading it, I can see why that was an easy thing to do.  It’s not that it’s a badly written or unfit for the purpose; rather, it’s a by-the-book thriller that reads like it was written the way most of us do our daily work - with one eye on the clock and half our minds elsewhere.  Hardly surprising, since this is the twentieth in the franchise.  It’s adequate, but he’s phoned it in.

( Read more...if you like watching paint dry )

It's Got A Je Ne Sais Quoi - But I Don't Know What It Is

There is a theory, most recently espoused by the British expatriate writer Lucy Wadham, that the key to understanding France is through understanding the historical, or rather the anthropological, influence of a form of civic Catholicism which is unique to that country: thus, we have the educational system, notionally secular, but actually modelled along Jesuit lines; the sense of communality which causes the French to desendez dans la rue when they don’t like the new cheese tax; the massive respect for learning and culture, but the complete incomprehension of the protestant work ethic, and, it goes without saying, the almost religious love of beauty (almost, but not quite)

( Read more... )

Why They're All The Same

It was by coincidence that I happened to pick up this book, following on from Theodore Dalrymple’s effort, previously reviewed.  The two books, taken together, make a good fit, covering as they do the sociological decline of the British state, but whereas Dalrymple’s view is that the rot is coming up from the bottom, Oborn describes a country essentially taken over by something that amounts to a junta.  His thesis is that a group of professional politicians, ‘bred like racehorses’ for no other function but the exercise of state power, has ascended to authority in Britain and, in detailed and excoriating prose, he explains how they are not only destroying the country from the top down, but actually have no anthropological choice but to do so, for in order to perpetuate themselves (the ultimate biological goal of any species) they must systematically destroy those organs of the state which they cannot control.

( Read more... )

Leading The Charge

When the French Army mutinied in 1917, the curious point to was the location of the uprising: not in the trenches, where one might expect men to crack fastest, but in the rear areas, among the soldiers who had rotated out of the line and had time on their hands to think.  There was no mutiny in the British army, because, paradoxically, the British officer corps was not a meritocracy; the British officers had a sense of entitlement that only a certain type of upbringing can imbue and consequently had not the slightest compunction about overseeing the lives of their men when supposedly resting, just as they would have done in the trenches.  They organized sporting fixtures, lectures, concert parties, ‘voluntary’ activities amongst civilians and anything else they could think of to pass the men’s time.  By contrast, the French officers would allow their men to lounge around the various estaminets, no doubt discussing Kant and Hume and Rousseau over a glass of wine in that inimitable French manner until they decided (in that inimitable French manner) to shot their officers and refuse their orders.  The French officers, who were often promoted from the ranks, reasoned that the men had earned their rest and were entitled to spend it any way they liked; the British officers reasoned that the Devil makes work for idle hands and there were no hands more dangerous than those of idle soldiers.  The French officers were right in justice; the British officers were right in practice.  

( Read more... )

A Ripping Yarn

Way back during the 1930s, in the last flush of British imperial grandeur, when mass unemployment and social upheaval was the new black, (a colour which remains strangely topical) a few hardy souls like novelist AEW Mason and film producer Alexander Korda were still doing their bit by king and empire with dashing stories of plucky derring-do in the colonies, the heroes of which tended to be rather spiffing types calculated to re-inspire the flagging imperial ethos and give a new direction to an increasingly uncertain hoi-polloi.  In stories like The Four Feathers, the Empire was used as a kind of British variation on the Wild West, with stout hearted public schoolboys and chirpy, uncomplaining cockneys taking on the Mahdi’s hordes with clean fighting, manly bonding rituals and rapid firing machine guns.  The genre - at least in its cinematic variation -  did not last long, being eclipsed by the much more serious considerations of the Second World War; as much as anything else, the reality of modern warfare being brought home to the British masses, together with the absolute necessity of deciding exactly what it was they were fighting for, is what brought the Empire to a close, and for years afterwards, it was considered bad form (old boy) to revisit the scene.

( Read more... )

Four Old Devils On The Lash


Robert Sellers is best known as a journalist and chronicler of film, as a contributor to many movie magazines including Empire and Total Film, and as a biographer of several show business personalities such as Sting, Sigourney Weaver and Sean Connery.  In this one, he attempts a kind of four way, chronological biography of some of the biggest shit stirring drunkards in cinematic history.  One would, consequently, imagine the ‘rollicking read’ which is emblazoned across the front cover; well, it is, kind of, but you come away at the end thinking there was a great opportunity missed here.  The book is an interesting read in a tabloid kind of way, but it’s really more or a piss artist’s almanac than any kind of inquiry into the minds and souls of four men who, whatever else they were, were good actors.  It’s hagiography more than history, and while you get a whiff of the legend, ultimately it’s little more than ‘Richard got hammered, then Richard fell down’.

( Read more... )