Books read in the years of grace 2013 and 2014

Bold means I loved it and highly recommend it. * means I have read it before.

2013

Not for Turning Charles Moore I reviewed it here.

The Ministry of Fear* Graham Greene I've read it three times. His best book. One of the best books about the Blitz and the war: surreal but also a ripping yarn. Reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, John Buchan and Michael Innes.

Mister Johnson Joyce Carey I loved this wonderful novel set in Nigeria. 

The Tao is Silent Raymond Smullyan

Dark Star Safari Paul Theroux - I reviewed it here - very good but I think my account of Ethiopia is even better

Notes from a Small Island Bill Bryson For a mass audience, but full of insights into England 

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes* Conan Doyle was not a good writer, unlike Buchan, the stories are silly melodrama,  but Holmes and Watson are wonderful, peerless characters

The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford

Golden Earth Norman Lewis - he wrote very well about his journey to Burma in 1951

2014

Burmese Days George Orwell (much) better than Thackeray. Great social comedy.

Around the World in Eighty Days Jules Verne I skimmed it - fun. 

Finding George Orwell in Burma Emma Larkin - interesting, though not well written.

The River of Lost Footprints - Thant Myint U absorbing history of Burma

The Glass Palace Amitav Ghosh - unfinished, but a readable historical saga set in Burma

Greenmantle* John Buchan I reviewed it here. My comfort blanket.

Iron Curtain Anne Applebaum - I reviewed it here. Liberals do not write thick, satisfying history like conservatives or Marxists but she proves to be a historian, not just a journalist.

Romania John Villiers (ed.) - dull little collection of essays. Don't bother.

Selfish, Whining Monkeys Rod Liddle A big disappointment - I reviewed it here.

De Ce Este Romania Altfel? Lucian Boia Very, very good.

Dracula’s Bloodline Radu Florescu, atrociously edited but fascinating.

The Man without a Face Masha Gassen - MG is a Russian-American lesbian. She is a good writer too. Very informative account of Vladimir Putin and recommended. 

Everything is Illuminated - unfinished -  East European narrator's comic English was wearing

Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers - unfinished: very well-written but too much yachting

Fragile Empire Ben Judah - I keep meaning to post my review.

Bloodlands Timothy Snyder - a good book, though very harrowing. I wrote about it here.

Cheating at Canasta William Trevor unfinished

The Beetle* Richard Marsh unfinished. I loved this 1890s occult novel when I was 26. Now disbelief cannot be suspended. A man turns into an Egyptian god and then a beetle?

The Perfect Spy John Le Carré unfinished - not enough spying, too much a novel.

The Classless Society Alwyn Turner - about John Major's Britain, not a patch on Andy Beckett's books about recent past in Britain, but it just about whiled away a plane journey.

Churchill:  The End of Glory John Charmley in progress

The Danger Tree Olivia Manning - a good novel. The Second World War now seems long ago. 

What a lowbrow list. My schoolboy self would be disgusted that everything I read was written after 1890, it includes four thrillers plus Jules Verne, no poetry and nothing literary, except The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, which I hated. Ford reminded me of Henry James. Worse than that I cannot say.  

How very few books I read in 2013. The reason was my internet addiction. In fact I only read THREE cover to cover: the three novels. At least I read three novels. I usually only manage one or two. I do most of my reading online, though, these days, which is a great shame because books, even on a kindle, are so much more enjoyable. Books are absorbing,the net enervating.

In 2014 I started by reading more books in two months than in the year before, although most were connected to my holiday in Burma. I then started reading on my kindle but tailed off and The Danger Tree was the only thing I read in the last three or four months. It's the first novel of Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy, the continuation of her Balkan Trilogy which I have read several times. I strongly recommend the first two autobiographical novels set in Bucharest in 1939 and 1940.

The Danger Tree is better than any of the Balkan Trilogy but I shall not read the remaining novels. Olivia Manning writes well but I do not care a jot about any of her characters. Still, it's a much better series of books than Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (and I am a huge Waugh enthusiast). I am not sure how it compares with Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.  ADTTMOT is probably better but I have only read the first and third volumes, many years apart. 

John Charmley's Churchill:  The End of Glory, published in 1993, is very good, though before starting it I had already come to accept his thesis and think that the conventional history of Britain's role in the Second World War is very misconceived. Dr. Charmley tells the heart-rending story of how Great Britain gave away her power and became the American satellite she is today. Cicero said

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

That is not always true, but true very often.

I have a big pile of books to read, I still intend to finish Gibbon, laid aside two years ago, but my priority now is War and Peace (about time) in preparation for my expedition to Moscow.

The grand old Duke of Norfolk and the MCC tour of Australia in 1962-63

From the memoirs of the cricketer Ian Wooldridge.

It was the first time that most of us had met the portly, florid aristocrat...we hardly knew what to expect: he hadn't exactly sprung to mind as a front-running candidate for the job. It was a black-tie affair, of course, and none of us dared get drunk. Eventually, over the port, the Duke rose, cleared his throat and delivered himself of a sentence I shall treasure till the end of my days:

"Gentlemen",

he said,

"I wish this to be an entirely informal tour. You will merely address me as 'Sir'". 

Wikipedia fills in the background to the Duke's appointment

The announcement that the Duke would manage the MCC cricket team in Australia in 1962–63 came as a complete surprise. He was a keen cricketer, who was President of the MCC in 1956-57 and was still a member of its powerful committee. He had managed his own tour of the West Indies with a Duke of Norfolk's XI in 1956-67, which had included the England players Tom Graveney, John Warr, Doug Wright and Willie Watson, and would organise another in 1969-70. His father the 15th Duke had built the picturesque Arundel Castle Cricket Ground and the Duke hosted matches against touring teams there from 1954, a tradition continued by his wife Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk after his death in 1975. He was not a good cricketer, even at village green level, and it was customary to let him get off the mark before he returned to the pavilion. At Arundel the umpire was his own butler, who when he was out would diplomatically announce "His Grace is not in". The Duke was chosen after a chance remark while having drinks after a MCC Committee meeting. Billy Griffith was the prime candidate to manage the tour, but he had just been appointed the Secretary of the MCC and needed to remain at Lord's to oversee the change from the old divisions between amateurs and professionals that had been decided that autumn. The Duke offered his services when it was mentioned that the new captain Ted Dexter would be difficult to control. Like Dexter the Duke was a keen follower of horse-racing, and as President of Sussex County Cricket Club he was often at Hove and Arundel and had appointed Dexter county captain. When his appointment was announced it was joked that only a duke could manage "Lord Ted". In those days the MCC tour was seen as a social event.

In England the 1950s were intended to be a return to the 1930s and the early 1960s were a continuation of this. The 1960s social revolution only got underway in about 1964. My grandmother and her sisters and my father, working class people with not a lot of money, all maintained that England was a much better place before the war and especially before the 1960s. It was wrong of them, as  my mother once pointed out, to poison my mind against my own era but they did. 

Nevertheless, I was convinced that they were probably mistaken about the 1930s having been better. In the 1930s, as they themselves repeatedly said, there had been real poverty in England ('There's no poverty today'). So I thought, before I came to live in Romania in 1998. Romania in 1998 had the same standard of living as in England in 1959 and many other things in common. It felt like the 1950s here and I came to see why my parents regretted the 1960s. 

The 1962-63 MCC tour reminds me of Belloc's immortal lines

For the hoary social curse 

Gets hoarier and hoarier, 

And it stinks a trifle worse 

Than in the days of Queen Victoria, 

When they married and gave in marriage, 

And danced at the County Hall, 

And some of them kept a carriage. 

AND THE FLOOD DESTROYED THEM ALL. 

But, pace Belloc, I still regret the passing of a cohesive, homogeneous, repressed England united by class distinction, jokes in common, a sense of patriotism and what Maurice Cowling called 

England's real religion, low-key respectability.

I hope and believe that that England has not completely passed, despite the politicians. 

Danube delta in November (Sorin Onisor)

A young boy thinks girls are genetically programmed for housework

Victor Beltran, a 12 year old boy, has won the Junior Masterchef competition in Spain but become notorious for saying, when contestants were asked to clean their stoves,

“My goodness, I’m surrounded by girls, and girls already know how to clean because of genetics.”

Rocío, a 12-year old girl, immediately warned him,

“Eh, eh, eh, watch what you say.”

He was then ordered to clean the entire kitchen as a punishment but his punishment has continued in the media. His mother was abjectly apologetic, the Spanish media mortified. 

How far things have changed since General Franco's day. The Generalissimo forbade married women to go out to work.

The Guardian, unsurprisingly, felt the story would appeal to its readers and you can read the article here. The comments under the article are fun, the ones that the Guardian moderator did not remove. I wonder what the ones that were removed said.

I liked this informative comment:

He couldn't be further from the truth

Women may enjoy cleaning more, but the average female's kitchen is about 5x more dangerous because they use the same wash cloth on multiple surfaces, generally spreading bacteria around, whereas men rely more on antibacterial products 

Also interesting to note a woman's handbag harbours more bacteria than a toilet 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2324247/Womens-handbags-contaminated-bacteria-average-toilet.html

And the inevitable immediate response to this comment:

The Daily Mail? Nice choice. 

The comment on the Mail got 47 likes. On the internet, whenever anyone posts a link to or quotes the Daily Mail, the subject immediately changes from whatever was being discussed to the Mail. The Daily Mail is the sin eater of British life.

The Guardian readership inhabit their own time-space continuum, contiguous with but distinct from our world. The legendary editor of the Daily Telegraph (and model for William Boot in Scoop) William Deedes used to read the Guardian letters page each day for laughs but it has always frightened me.

Sexual and racial equality and homosexuality have taken the place of the sacred in Catholic Spain as much as everywhere else in Western Europe and the boy has gravely offended against this secular religion's fundamental tenets. Being only 12 mitigates the offence, but only partly.

Still the Guardian writer possibly felt slightly sorry for the boy, despite everything. She ends her story with his poignant words

“Everyone took it as if I were an adult, but I’m just a kid.”

More about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, if you can bear any more

A French police commissioner has reportedly killed himself after meeting relatives of a victim murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. These very sad stories that reality writes. If it were in a novel you would throw the novel down and not pick it up again. Such grand guignol. I wonder why, when I was growing up, I thought the age I lived in was grey and dull.

Meanwhile the wife of the al-Qaeda man who mentored the Charlie Hebdo murderers is living on benefits in Leicester. She came to England with her children in search of a more "Islamic environment". 

Andrew Gilligan has a ghastly story about how many dangers Britian faces from Muslim extremists here.

A Syrian Facebook friend posted these moving words.

I am Iman, a Syrian citizen. I hereby declare to all, that I am against any form of terrorism, of any kind, likewise; I'm against any kind of sarcasm against ANY RELIGION. Those who killed the journalists in Charlie Hebdo are the same extremists who've been sabotaging my country for almost four years now under a fake goal that is called FREEDOM, and they have nothing to do with Islam, nor with any religion on earth, so let the whole world make an effort to demolish the devil, let the whole world rise against the enemies of God and all mankind. Blessed be my country and all our martyrs! Bless all Humanity!

'Liberals', not Muslims, are the enemies of freedom

In France it is the government, not Muslim extremists, who prevent free speech and in the UK it is, of course, exactly the same story. 

Our old enemy the ideas of the French Revolution are behind the disgraceful Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but this does not mean murder is any less dreadful. This is an explanation of why the leaders of Europe are not interested in free speech - only free expression of liberal ideas. 

You can offend religion, or the religious. That is fine. But you cannot offend the secularists Gods of Equality and Diversity for instance.

Had Charlie Hebdo been an anti Islam, nationalist paper the deaths wouldn't have been mourned by politicians in the same way, but they published these things for republican (in the French anti-clerical sense of the word), liberal reasons. That's why the leaders turned out, not abstract belief in free speech. Imagine had the Le Pens been killed.

French satirists had demanded that Pegida (the German anti-Islam movement) should not commemorate their killed colleagues using their demonstrations. To ridicule Pegida, the satirists used a 80s-type bald, tattooed skinhead. The problem with that is that the caricature is pretty much off target: Pegida is a crowd of regular folks worrying about job security and the confrontation with novelty.

German officials forbade Pegida to use the Charlie Hebdo caricatures during their demonstrations. And one German minister demanded that the Pegida demonstrations should be forbidden. The irony is that during these demonstrations there was never any mockery or hate speech - organisers always demanded a respectful tone from their participants knowing they were being observed world wide. So much for the German government's commitment to free speech.

Meanwhile, a French police commissioner has reportedly killed himself after meeting relatives of a victim murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. These very sad stories that reality writes. If it were in a novel you would throw the novel down and not pick it up again. Such grand guignol. I wonder why, when I was growing up, I thought the age I lived in was grey and dull. (But the 1960s and 1970s were grey and dull, even though a man landed on the moon and the Cold War divided the world into two.)

And the wife of the al-Qaeda man who mentored the Charlie Hebdo murderers is living on benefits in Leicester. She came to England with her children in search of a more "Islamic environment". 

Andrew Gilligan has a ghastly story about how many dangers Britian faces from Muslim extremists here.

A Syrian Facebook friend of mine, the daughter of a mixed marriage (Christian-Muslim, these almost always end in divorce in the Arab world), posted these moving words.

I am Iman, a Syrian citizen. I hereby declare to all, that I am against any form of terrorism, of any kind, likewise; I'm against any kind of sarcasm against ANY RELIGION. Those who killed the journalists in Charlie Hebdo are the same extremists who've been sabotaging my country for almost four years now under a fake goal that is called FREEDOM, and they have nothing to do with Islam, nor with any religion on earth, so let the whole world make an effort to demolish the devil, let the whole world rise against the enemies of God and all mankind. Blessed be my country and all our martyrs! Bless all Humanity!

'Fellini didn't make me famous. I made him famous.'

Anita Ekberg who died at the weekend aged 83 here makes a, to me, much more alluring sight than Ingrid Bergman. But de gustibus.... Or perhaps, de bustibus.

Ingrid Bergman hoped for a Nazi victory in the Second World War. I don't know if Miss Ekberg took sides in the war but Marcello Mastroianni said she reminded him of a German officer who arrested him. I think one can see something of that in her performances and her pictures.

I saw many years ago a television documentary about her in old age and she was a very sad, vain and self-absorbed old woman, of hideous aspect, who knew herself to be a star as exiled royalty knows itself to be royal. It reminded me of what Lytton Strachey said about the death of the egotist.

"While he is alive, he devours all the happiness about him,like a grub on a leaf; but when he goes, the spectacle la not exhilarating."

In Anita Ekberg's case she had ceased devouring happiness many years earlier, one saw. 

However, she was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. This is important.

Neagu Djuvara: the killings in Paris are part of an inevitable Muslim conquest of Europe

The distinguished Romanian historian Neagu Djuvara, who is 98, said on Saturday that he believes that the recent murders in France are a step in a process by which Europe will be conquered by Muslims, who are taking a revenge for the conquest of Muslim lands by the European powers in the 19th century. There is now nothing that we can do, he says, to stop this process. 

Neagu Djuvara outlined his theory of the rise and fall of civilisations in 1975 in his Civilisations et lois historiques, Essai d'étude comparée des civilisations.

His bleak prognosis, for those who read Romanian (or for those who understand Google translate), is here. He thinks Europe will, in time, be ruled by Arabs and gypsies.

American hegemony, which kept world peace for so long, will not last much longer. Europeans lack ideals and have stopped having children. The West has thus created a vacuum which people from the Third World will fill. It is a universal law, he says, that civilisations burn themselves out and disappear.

I think that his points about immigration being about to transform Europe for the worse are right and that Western civilisation is in decline. What great writers, painters, artists or thinkers have appeared since 1950? None. I am not sure I believe in a Muslim conquest of Europe but it is possible. I am sure, however, that a war on Islam would be exactly what the extremists most want. As they wanted the Americans' reaction to September 11th. 

The German television station ZDF recently reported that half the population of Germany would be immigrant-descended in fifty years' time. A German Christian Democrat MP, one Martin Gillo, even apparently put this on his website (but then took it down).

“According to current calculations, people with an immigration background will be the majority of the [German] population as early as 2035. That is less than a generation… A new age begins in 2035! It will be an age when we ethnic Germans become a minority in our country. How will we be treated then? Friendly, courteously and as belonging to the “Future Germans”? Or will we be satisfied to at least be tolerated as a protected minority?”

He welcomed this new age but 2035 was a big mistake on his part and much too soon. Only about 5% or 6% of the population of Germany are probably Muslims nowadays. 9.1% of all newborn babies in Germany had Muslim parents back in 2005.

I agree with Robert Reich who made made this point yesterday.

Few ideas are as wrong-headed and dangerous as the notions that the West is engaged in a "clash of civilisations" with the Muslim world, or that we are at "war" with radical Islam. The vast majority of Muslims are moderate, they have nothing to do with radical Islam, and they eschew violence. Radical Islam itself is not a unified force or a movement; it's a set of gangs manoeuvring for dominance over other gangs, and using violence mostly against other Muslims. But the extremists would like nothing better than for the West to embrace the notions of a clash of civilisations, or a "war" against a coherent organisation, because these ideas give them legitimacy, enhance their appearance of power, and give them more resources and recruits.

Did we learn nothing from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?

Muslim extremists represent a fifth column in Europe, a huge danger and a strong argument that mass immigration into Western Europe was not a good idea. However, nothing could be more disastrous than a situation where most Muslims in Western Europe resent the governments which rule them and the non-Muslims around them.  This development is possible, is what the bad men want and must be avoided at almost all costs.

At the same time, we should reduce immigration into Europe from the developing world to a trickle, otherwise indigenous Europeans will in time, perhaps in less than a century, become a minority in Europe.

In praise of hot baths

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

So said Dodie Smith in that wonderful book,  I Capture the Castle, but I think she was talking about feeling low, not about depression. 

On the net I just came across hot baths described as liquid psychotherapy, which makes me feel I should not rush them so fast. I have some back problems after going around Europe with heavy baggage and I find somewhere else on the net that tells me that hot baths not ice are the best treatment. How nice to know.

In any case baths are wonderful. Sir John Betjeman made fun of them though, in 'Business Girls':


From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam's escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the draughty skylight
Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor unbelov'd ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!

Baths I realise are zen and about finding calm. If, as Gibbon said, solitude is the school of genius calm is too - and hot baths the mothers of many deep thoughts. One of the very few blogs I actually read, Zen Habits, agrees, though I have no wish to have bubble baths or a subsequent cold shower.



I bath every day though I consider it rather middle-class for men to do so - or to shower each day. Showers are un-English and newfangled, for continentals, Americans and commercial travellers.




A textbook in English that we used at school when I was 8 in the 60s but published in the 30s (even at a young age I always looked first at the copyright date when I opened books) mentioned in an exercise for teaching grammar that it was normal to bath once a week. In my first job at the House of Lords i noticed my 2 great friends, one Eton and Oxford, the other Winchester and Cambridge, both related to peers, wore their shirts two days running, as in those days did I. We all took our clothes home to our mothers to be washed, except the Etonian, whose father's housekeeper did it and our two married colleagues who had their wives do it.




I wonder how often Dr. Johnson, who had 'no passion' for clean linen, bathed, no doubt in a hip bath. Old man Steptoe had his weekly bath in the kitchen sink in Steptoe and Son. This was eccentric but it was usually for working class men to bath once a week in the 1940s.



However I feel women should be much cleaner than men and was surprised to see that in England four out of five women don't shower every day or bath. Still, as one might expect, frequent showers and baths remove natural oils that the skin produces and thereby dry up the skin. Doctors advise against daily baths and advise only washing the hair once a week, apparently.

Death in Paris and the revolution in Europe

Coming back from my holiday the taxi driver told me at 3 a.m. about the murders of twelve people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris because the magazine published a couple of years ago a cartoon of Mohamed.

This morning I see that a propos of the cartoons, someone in the Guardian has opined: 

"Observant Muslims anywhere would be angered by such images... Islam is not unique. Judaism forbids the use of “graven images”

So far, so laughably predictable, I thought. 

Someone on Facebook has equally predictably posted a wiki link to Anders Brevik, reminding us that it's not only Islam which commits atrocities and someone else a comment that the professionalism of the two men points to them being a false flag French SAS style attack. Sky News pointed out that these people aren't real followers of Islam. 

The freedom to cause offence is sacred and we are losing it. I'd like Europe to return to freedom of speech and decriminalise offensive behaviour and hate speech. I also think we should also bring to an end immigration into Europe from outside but, even if Europe does so - and it won't - hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers will continue to pour in. 200,000 people sought asylum in Germany last year, many of them from Syria. 

But life is very complicated. When I saw the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo I saw they were not innocent jeux d'esprit. The cartoons below are the ones that led to this murder and I have to say that they are very wrong.  So I found myself partly changing my mind.





This is a weak joke about copies of the Koran not being able to stop bullets. It uses the word 'merde' which means excrement to describe the Koran, though in French 'merde' is used so much that it has lost its force and means something like 'crap', not 's-t'. 

These things are wrong, even though I do not think that they should be illegal in a Christian country or in a secular country like France. That they should never have been published does not in any way ameliorate or justify murder but it does, unfortunately, explain it.  I realise that this is not a very satisfactory conclusion.

There is something infuriating about advocates of immigration and multiculturalism expressing outrage about these killings - the same people who extol the merits of diversity. They combine great dislike of conservative religion with an inordinate love for Islam, along with love for feminism and homosexual rights. Instead of getting angry with the murderers I find I am angry with Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and David Cameron. And yet for people who want Europe to become increasingly multicultural, increasingly an ethnic and religious mosaic, Islam is the threat to their project.

This is another Charlie Hebdo cover from the past. 

The caption reads:

Muhammad Overtaken By Fundamentalists: "It's a drag being loved by a-holes."

But I wonder whether Muhammad would have disowned the murders or not. I am not sure. I do think he was probably an Islamist. I say 'probably' simply because we know nothing for sure about Muhammad - even his very existence, though supported by evidence from  Christian sources, is not certain. I suspect that the murderers may have been good Muslims in killing the journalists, though who am I to judge? 

I have recently acquired a Muslim Facebook friend who posted this.

So many toss pots will come forth and say "not in my name" -
Most Muslims will agree - inflicting punishment is the job of the state - and will not agree with the shootings /

But please don't ask me to feel sorry for those that insulted my Prophet - pbuh
And for those that pray for them - May the curse of the Prophet be upon you -/

I suspect he speaks for many, perhaps most Muslims.

One of my most intelligent Facebook friends, a libertarian and republican atheist, made this comment with which I tend to agree:

Donald Trump has been reported as having said in a "Twitter rant" that if the Charlie Hebdo journalists had been armed they'd have had a chance. This is of course true, and it's the only way they could have had a chance. It's the only way massacres could be prevented in shopping centres and the like, and it's only a matter of time before one of these happens.The choice might be between a police state, an armed society, or a society that suffers regular random large scale massacres.

Actually I am not sure what I think about gun control laws but I get cross with all those annoying people who read the Independent and who bore on about the subject with much moral superiority. They may be right or wrong but no-one in the UK seems to care anymore about freedom. They seem to now after these murders in Paris but they don't really. They still want hate speech to be illegal (and probably rude remarks about homosexual marriage too) -  and all the rest of the curbs on freedom.

We must demand free speech but Islam does not brook offending God and never will. Islam is a warlike creed. We are at the limits of the liberal imagination. They were always fairly narrow. 

Things were easier, perhaps, when the law of blasphemy protected the Christian God from insult, as it did in England and Wales until Tony Blair's government abolished the offence. There is no going back to that. I wish it were just France that has a problem (and things are worse in France than elsewhere) but Western Europe has the problem - because of a small minority of Muslims. 

I don't think this problem has a solution.

If you know of one please tell me.

Christmas crackers: twelve thoughts about work to enjoy over the holidays

When Sigmund Freud was asked how we can achieve happiness he said two things were necessary: the ability to love and the ability to work.

According to the internet this quotation appears nowhere in Freud’s published work but, even if he did not say it, it is close to things that he did say and, in any case, it is very true. Here are some more thoughts I like on the subject of work.


I don't like work no man does but I like what is in the work the chance to find yourself. Your own reality for yourself not for others what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Joseph Conrad


They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

Socrates 

Work hard, do the best you can, don't ever lose faith in yourself and take no notice of what other people say about you.

Noel Coward

Choose a job that you love, and you will never work a day in your life.

Confucius

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William James

Things can be done. The people in life who get them done are the ones who know that, and the ones who don't are the rest.

Tony Hawks

A clumsy right hand cannot be trained into a skillful right hand by taking thought, by wishing it were less clumsy, or even by avoiding clumsiness. It can become skillful only by exercise in practical achievements, and the incentive to the achievement must be more deeply felt than the discouragement at the hitherto existent clumsiness.

Alfred Adler

There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.

Alfred Adler


All happiness depends on courage and work.

Honoré de Balzac


Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

Gerald Brenan


I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Douglas Adams

Victor Ponta gives up his doctorate

As Metternich said when he heard of Talleyrand's death, 

"What did he mean by that?"

Things that seem strange to a foreigner about the Romanian presidential election

Why were the opinion polls in the Romanian election so very wrong, with one exception giving Victor Ponta the PSD (Social Democratic Party) candidate a very healthy lead throughout? 

I have not heard any convincing explanation. Presumably, people are reluctant to say that they are going to vote against the PSD. I wonder if this is in case this information is used against them in some way. The PSD is the reinvented Communist Party, after all. But are there better explanations?

The one rogue poll was published by CCSCC two days before the vote and showed the candidates exactly equal. It was dismissed by almost everyone because it was a telephone poll from a no-name company. That poll was nowhere near the final result, but it was a lot closer than the rest of the polls.

Why did Gabriela Firea attempt to claim moral superiority for Victor Ponta over Klaus Iohannis just because he didn’t have children? Klaus Iohannis, by the way, is a Protestant who is deeply religious, according to his childhood friends, didn't plagiarise his doctoral thesis and didn't leave his pregnant wife for another woman.

Why were Mircea Geoana and Marian Vanghelie expelled from the PSD, rather than the people who were responsible for losing the election - Victor Ponta, Liviu Dragnea, the campaign organiser, and Adrian Nastase? (Nastase's friends, it is said, did not get out the vote because he wanted to get even with Mr Ponta for allowing him to be sent to gaol the second time.) 

In an old-fashioned Western the baddies always start fighting among themselves at the end of the film. It's like that after the PSD lose elections too. 

As Mircea Geoana said,

I lost the presidential election by a very few votes and I got expelled from the party. This guy lost by a lot of votes and I got expelled from the party again.

Mr. Vanghelie was expelled, even though he commands a faithful following of gypsy voters and is very rich. He is considered (fairly accurately) to be a semi-literate buffoon and could be described as the Romanian gypsy equivalent of Tony Blair's deputy, John Prescott. I am told Mr. Vanghelie was expelled 

because he has a big mouth

and so he certainly has, but this should have been a reason for  keeping him in the team. Instead he has been telling us all sorts of things the PSD doesn't want us to know. (I am sure it is not by chance that evidence of corruption is surfacing in the papers about Mr. Vanghelie exactly now.)

Actually, I know the reason why Messrs. Geoana and Vanghelie were expelled, in very rough terms. It was because they were a danger to Victor Ponta. I am told Mr. Geoana compounded his fault by telling Mr. Ponta after the result was known,

At least I believed I was president for a night.

However Mr Ponta's action makes him look weak, not strong (rather like Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives). And those who live by the sword die by the sword.

People allege that over a million fraudulent votes were cast by 'electoral tourists', people bussed from area to give multiple votes for the PSD candidate. The same thing was said in the election of 2004. I don't, of course, know the truth. Nor does anyone for sure. Why were no investigations made then or now? 

Readers who are not familiar with Romanian politics are, I hope, shocked to learn how the votes are rigged and manipulated here. Even so, what is much more shocking is that Romania is, on the whole, a much freer country than England, even though a less democratic one. Western Europe is becoming less free week by week. Romania will one day, I hope soon, get clean elections. She will never have clean politicians, but she will presumably in time have the same restrictions on freedom that, for example, the British and Dutch have.

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in making money

Dr. Johnson said that 

“There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”

Christopher Hollis said this was the most un-Christian remark imaginable (Hollis was the kind of Conservative politician I like) but I am coming round to siding with Dr Johnson. He was being deliberately paradoxical but he was usually right. 

I sympathise with Hollis but working hard is one of the most innocent ways of spending time. 

I always thought a knowledge of Dr Johnson and his best lines was the parole of educated men, to adapt what he said about knowledge of Latin and Greek. But a former master of a Cambridge college told me a few years ago that very few Cambridge undergraduates until recently read the 18th century authors. It reminds me of what Johnson said to Boswell: 

“Sir, they [his college friends] respected me for my literature, and yet it was not great but by comparison. Sir, it is amazing how little literature there is in the world.”

He of course was talking about the classics, not English writers.

I suppose Johnson's most famous joke is

"Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all"

but on whether he was right I cannot comment. I only ever heard one woman preach and she did so in Swedish, in Stockholm Cathedral. She was, or believed she was, a bishop - and what surprised me was that she was very beautiful. And a blonde. That I had not expected.

It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all"

also applies to my ironing a shirt, once every eight or ten years.

I really cannot see why people read Johnson less than Wilde. Johnson is better, in my judgment, and a better Christian - and his philosophy is manlier and more wholesome. He was also a staunch Tory and a great saint. Though he might have been disagreeable in real life, as opposed to in his writings and in the pages of Boswell. His table manners were appalling. He once spat out an entire roast potato that was too hot on to his plate and told the girl beside him

A fool would have swallowed that.

Fox told his nephew, Lord Holland, that he met Johnson only once and thought he was he was 

A very coarse man. He said 

Talk of pleasure, sir, the greatest pleasure is emission.

On the subject of his philosophy I am reminded of his old Oxford friend, Mr. Edwards, whom he met by chance in Fleet St and who told him

You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

But to Dr. Johnson stories there is no end, so I stop now. But if you want more, please click here.

If you haven't read Boswell's Johnson, dear reader, you have a great treat awaiting you. A book for a desert island.

We used to think the unions were the enemies within [Great Britain], but it was always the universities

The trade unions did enormous amount of damage to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. We now know that in the 1970s the two most powerful and famous trade union leaders, household names who were better known than almost all the politicians, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, were secretly Communists or, in other words, admirers of Brezhnev's USSR. MI6 knew that they were security risks. So of course were a great many trade union officials and activist - as were many academics. 

The influence of the unions however was limited to (harming) the economy. Academics in the humanities, on the other hand, are what Shelley said poets were, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” If you seek their monument, look around you. It is odd that in the 1960s and 1970s, exactly when the working class people decided socialism was out of date, the intellectuals embraced it.

'SOAS tops the Which? University Survey

'SOAS, University of London has been ranked one of the Top University for the in the Political Scene scoring 97%.' 

According to the Which? survey (a consumer magazine reviewing universities is appropriate because university education is now a commodity to be bought and sold):

One SOAS student describes their uni as 'a definition of a political university. Spanning from the Marxist to the Anarchist societies, there's a flavour for anyone choosing to be more politically involved... The student body is very aware of the political climate and ways of making a difference.'

Very diverse... but then diversity does not apply to right-wingers. Ask how many conservatives are employed in women's studies or development studies faculties. 

Back in the 1980s and recently Conservative student associations were forbidden to display the Union Jack as it could be perceived as racist. A student at Liverpool who supported the BNP was recently sent down and had his career prospects severely harmed because he criticised a lecturer who justified the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. The lecturer remains there. Ukip supporters are not allowed to speak nor people who oppose abortion. A senior lecturer in Russian studies was hustled out of his jobs for expressing racist opinions to a student newspaper though they had no bearing on how he did his job.

Unfortunately this lack of diversity of opinions is not confined to the student body (in fact most students are always conservative but usually keep fairly quiet about it) but applies to the academic staff too.

In the words of Mark Griffith:

The left-wing rejection of tradition is usually framed as "questioning tradition". But in fact there is no asking of real questions which run the risk of returning an answer that suggests that tradition contains wisdom or virtue or efficacy, so this so-called "questioning" amounts to rejection. This rejection seems to those involved to be invigorating, fresh, daring... it seems to open up new possibilities, but in fact it closes them down.

Romania is the Orient dreaming that she is France

I am proud of a line I coined many years ago

Romania is the Orient dreaming that she is France

and repeated it to a British diplomat friend this week. His rejoinder was to quote a British diplomat in Paris who told him,

It's taken me years to see that France is the Middle East with a very thin veneer of civilisation. Paris is essentially Cairo.

It's good to know that we still have diplomats like that.  

Gabi Firea thinks not having children is a deficiency - she is entitled to her opinion

One more comment on the Romanian presidential election.

Psychopaths have a very strong urge to reproduce but I'm certainly not saying Gabriela Firea is a psychopath. I'm simply saying that psychopaths feel this biological imperative for which there might be an evolutionary explanation. 

Gabi Firea was Victor Ponta's spokesman during the presidential election and earned a lot of disapproval for her remarks about the childlessness of Mr. Ponta's opponent, now the President-elect, Klaus Iohannis. She said,

“From my point of view, a person is complete when he raises a child from his first days up to maturity. A man living in a cold house, without hearing baby’s chatter, without seeing his first steps, his first grades, cannot feel all these things … You can adopt a child if you want to have a complete family … In all civilised countries, all aspirants to the presidency  belong to complete families, they are married with children and grandchildren..."

Asked by a journalist if having no children was a defect in a president, she said,

“Categorically.”

A particularly stupid remark, even in a particularly stupid PSD election campaign. Romanians want an efficient president, not one who has children. I wonder how many childless people were impressed. I wonder what the last PSD President, Ion Iliescu, made of it. He is childless, which cynics say is the reason why he famously did not steal from the country (unlike those around him). 

Perhaps if Adrian Nastase, the PSD's failed presidential candidate in 2004, had not wanted to provide for his son he might have avoided going to gaol for corruption. But this is taking alternate history too far. Let's just say that childless politicians have their advantages.

I am no fan of Gabi. I have been no fan of the television presenter turned politician since she said back in 2002 or 2003 that calls from the Presidential office at the Cotroceni, ordering television companies not to run certain news stories, happened in President Emil Constantinescu's time as well as after Ion Iliescu regained the presidency. I never believed that.

But I am equally not a fan of the the National Council for Combating Discrimination. The National Council ruled during the election campaign that Gabi's remarks were "discriminatory" and breached Mr. Iohannis's "right to dignity" (what on earth is a right to dignity?) 

This is almost very funny, but it is not - it is in fact very disturbing. 

The Council is a deeply authoritarian and illiberal institution at the best of times, but when an unelected body seeks to curb free speech during an election campaign things are very bad indeed.

I don't like referring to a politician's lack of children in a political fight. Nor did Romanians. I didn't like it when people said the same thing about Condeleeza Rice. I didn't like it because it is irrelevant, has nothing to do with politics, is none of the public's business and may cause pain. But people are perfectly free to disagree with me and say that not being married or not having children does have a bearing on whether a man would make a good leader of his country. It is of incalculable importance that  people should be free to express this or any other opinion that is not defamatory or calculated to lead to what the Common Law calls a breach of the peace. 

None of this should even need saying, but it seems it does.

Here are some unmarried leaders, to refute Gabi's idea that in civilised countries presidents have children, though some of these do have children and not all of them lead particularly civilised countries. Pope Francis is one ruler whom the list omits.

Nastase was never angry with Traian Basescu; SOV says he deserved much longer in prison; Victor Ponta asks for pardon

Perhaps because it is Advent, in a very Christian spirit Sorin Ovidiu Vintu and Prime Minster Victor Ponta have publicly acknowledged their sins and former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase has said he holds no grudge against President Traian Basescu, whom Nastase must consider is responsible for his having gone to gaol. Nastase (I drop the 'Mr.' since he is a gaolbird) said yesterday:

"Angry? I was never angry with [Traian Basescu]. It's not about anger..... Life is very complicated." 

Read more here.

Sorin Ovidiu Vintu was very frank:

“If the state had caught me with everything I’ve done, I would have been in prison for life. The state has no idea what I’ve done and what I would have deserved to be imprisoned,” said Vantu in his interview for Adevarul. He added that the prosecutors invented some causes to arrest him. 

“I don’t claim that I shouldn’t have been in jail, I deserved it. Thank God, I got away cheap. And not only I. There are many people who you see today in business, politics, administration, who would deserve to serve tens of years in prison.”

More here.

And Victor Ponta has also caught the modern habit of apologising for his mistakes, as shown in this mea culpa delivered to his foe Dan Andronic, in an interview published yesterday in Evenimentul Zilei.

"Certainly I made ​​many mistakes but at 42 I have the ability to recognise them. Not only to recognise them but also to learn from them, regardless of the position that I have on the public stage! What are my regrets? It's a pretty long list, but everything I did wrong was human! I do not want anyone to endure the amount of negative energy, even the hatred, that was directed against me in the recent past. I think we all need to understand that hatred and passion leaves wounds that are very hard to heal. I would say that once again I apologise to those who were offended by my words and to those who supported me. I often used words that I wanted to be able to avoid. This I truly regret! "

I don't like politicians saying sorry, for some reason. It makes me distrust them more than if they didn't, though I prefer them to say sorry for their own mistakes rather than for the Amritsar massacre or the slave trade. But it somehow seems slippery to me - like that boy in an H.G. Well novel (which one?) who instead of standing and fighting asked for forgiveness.

Was Russian money behind the anti-fracking protests in Romania?

A very interesting story in the New York Times suggests that Russian money was behind the anti-fracking protests in Romania. It sounds extremely likely to me.

The Romanian Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, announced three weeks ago that Romania does not have shale gas and so there was no need to argue over the issue. But Chevron is not so sure.

People without imagination should make money

People without imagination should pursue well paid careers. For them money supplies poetry.

Robert Graves was told by his publisher

There's no money in poetry

To which he replied 

There's no poetry in money. 

But in fact it depends on what poetry means to you. 

A. H. Clough's Spectator ab Extra expresses many people's philosophy, including that of quite a few nouveaux-riches I know in Bucharest (almost all the riche here are nouveaux)

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf, 

And how one ought never to think of one’s self, 

How pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking— 

My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking 

How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho! 

How pleasant it is to have money. 

Schopenhauer was characteristically bleaker:

"Money is happiness in abstracto; he, therefore, who is no longer capable of enjoying happiness in the concrete pursues money.

But Schopenhauer was wrong. Lots of people find great happiness in money.