RussellinVT’s Comments (group member since Apr 11, 2024)

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

scarletnoir wrote: "We had people who didn't come in to assembly either - I assumed they were Catholics and (maybe) Jehovah's Witnesses... ..."

It was just the same at both the primary school and the grammar school that I went to. There were several Roman Catholics and one Jehovah’s Witness and two boys from a Jewish family, though no Muslims then. I don’t recall it making the slightest bit of difference outside assembly. We were all mates. The Jehovah’s Witness boy and I walked home together every day, and got up to mischief. One of the Jewish boys and I joined a tennis club together, and I was a regular visitor to his home. I still think of him quite often.

It was all due to the section in the Education Act 1944 requiring schools to hold a daily assembly with religious observance. I don’t know that the law specified that it had to be C of E in content, but that’s how it was: the Lord’s Prayer, one other prayer or reading, and one hymn, generally with a good tune that you enjoyed singing, and carols in December. Did that law get repealed, or is it just universally ignored? Impossible to enforce anyway, and just as well in a multicultural society. I should ask my sister how it changed. She grew up in the same system, and was a teacher for decades.

scarletnoir wrote: "I've also read Gp's response... FWIW, and from what little I've read of SDB (except...) I also was much more impressed by her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter than by her novel The Blood of Others. The memoir struck me as truthful, sensitive and well written."

Interesting, thanks. It does seem the memoirs are the way to go.

I suspect her high reputation has receded even in France. There was a mention of her in Annie Ernaux’s Les années, which is fairly recent. After Sartre’s death, and now looking aged, SDB had agreed to give a TV interview, which Sartre never did. Ernaux thought she cut a sadly diminished figure.

Gpfr wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Have I got you to thank for the collection of French short stories by various authors Les chemins intimes?..."

Yes, that was me. I'm glad madame liked it :). Russell enjoyed it, too."

Russell did enjoy it, and the Désérable was one of the best.

After a year as Logger 24 I’ve decided to re-emerge in my own name. I only made the change back then because, weirdly, I was notified that someone had compromised my account. Who would bother with a contributor to a book group?

Just finished Funny Girl by Nick Hornby, a very entertaining behind-the-scenes tale of British TV comedy in the 1960s. Well-written, and high up on the enjoyment scale.

Tam wrote: "I have had a terrible time over Christmas for reasons I cant really go into at the moment as I am still processing it all, but it has put the mockers on quite a lot of what I would refer to as my normal life for the moment...."

Sorry to hear of your travails, Tam.

A book from the 1960s about a family that was “unfortunately too middle class” sounds like something I would absolutely identify with - and feel grateful for, in retrospect.

Gpfr wrote: "Dalva by Jim Harrison..

I loved it. I've now seen that there is a sequel, The Road Home.

It was included in a Guardian series of articles on overlooked classics in American literature..."

That sounds good, and talking about overlooked classics, at least overlooked by me, I’ve just today been reading a piece in an old NYRB about a novel from the 1850s called The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a fugitive slave. It is described as astonishing, and written with a powerful energy and a love of language, combining the gothic, the sensational, the domestic and the satiric. It became a best-seller when discovered and published in 2002, before we came to live here, which I suppose is why I wasn’t really aware of it. Anyway, clearly one to catch up with.

Gpfr wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "I’m enjoying La force des choses by Simone de Beauvoir..."
I've read most of her writings, memoirs, novels, letters and as you
might guess, enjoy them...

Thanks, Gp, that gives me a good steer.

I’m enjoying La force des choses by Simone de Beauvoir, her memoir of the Liberation and after, which I had started on a while back. She captures the feeling from the very first lines – children singing in the street:

Nous ne les verrons plus
C’est fini, ils sont foutus.

I have to confess I’ve never read anything else by her, not The Mandarins, not The Second Sex. I had this idea that she was just too earnest and too prolix and too dated. How wrong I was. Her style here is lively and attractive, and she conveys it all with immediacy – the reawakening of the literary world and the theatre, the épuration, the trial of Brasillach, and then an invitation to give a lecture in fascist Madrid, where, in contrast to the shortages and general shabbiness in France, she is dazzled by the abundance of food and clothing, and the bourgeois comfort. Back in Paris, in the thick of the existentialist uproar, she laughs along with being called La grande Sartreuse.

Thanks again to giveusaclue for recommending The Eagle and the Hart, which I have now finished. It was a ripping read. It gave an unforgettable picture of a self-obsessed Richard II, whose rule was erratic, unjust and cruel, to the point that after his fall ordinary people hacked his lieutenants to death in the street. And any ideas about Henrys IV and V gained from Shakespeare have to be completely revised. Henry IV was an imposing man of wide experience who gained the throne through steady effectiveness, and some luck. (He had a substantial private library, and played and composed music, including two motets, which survive.) Henry V from his mid-teens was a remorseless and brave military leader and an efficient administrator. As far as one can tell, there were no Falstaffian interludes.

A flood of fact and incident is rendered in effortless flowing prose. It comes to Ms Castor so easily that you think she must inhabit the world six centuries ago as if it were the present.

AB76 wrote: "..i have to say, the book about the Desert Campaign is truly superb..."

It's now on my TBR list. I've tried reading about the campaign - an uncle was a gunner in the Eighth Army - and I thought Alamein to Zem Zem might be the book but I had trouble getting into it despite the fame of Keith Douglas, and I didn't look around for anything else.

A couple of years ago I met a very old German gentleman who lives nearby and who was in the Afrika Korps. He said it was terrible, because ”we got bombed to sh*t” by the Allied aircraft when they had no air cover at all.

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Seems a bit quiet in here in 2025 so far, i hope all are well and not nursing any new ailments or situations?"

It occurred to me that we haven't heard from Bill for a while. I've just looked him up and it says his last activity was October. I hope he's OK."

I was thinking that as well. I seem to remember him saying he was reading very little, so I hope it’s just that and nothing else.

I’ve also been reading up some back numbers of NYRB. One has a piece on Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen, brother of Leslie and uncle of Virginia and Vanessa. This volume, edited by Christopher Ricks, is on the Novel and Journalism. Priced by OUP at a very moderate $210, it seems to be the first of a projected six. It actually looks well worth dipping into. The reviewer, Tim Parks, says JFS reads novels like a prosecuting attorney scrutinizing a defendant’s testimony.

On Austen:

“Each incident, taken by itself, is so exquisitely natural, and so carefully introduced, that it requires considerable attention to detect the improbability of the story.”

On Dickens, one of the authors JFS thinks altogether too willing to feed readers with pathos:

“[He] gloats over [Little Nell’s] death as if it delighted him… touches, tastes, smells, and handles [it] as if it was some savoury dainty which could not be too fully appreciated.”

And readers, says JFS, are complicit: reality is more solemn.

Compared with that kind of knifework, his brother Leslie’s essays in Hours in a Library, a three-volume set inherited from my father, while interesting, seem rather High-Victorian ponderous.

AB76 wrote: "good anecdote from N Africa,Maj-Gen messervy was captured by the Afrika Korps briefly ..."

Great story! It reminds me of that bit in Master and Commander where the captain of the captured French vessel deceives Russell Crowe into thinking he's the ship's doctor.

giveusaclue wrote: "Re the Teutonic Knights, the popes might have approved of them, but there was a lot of slaughter of pagans who would not conform to Christianity. Dan Jones talks about this in his book Crusaders."

Yes, strange bunch the Teutonic Knights. I learned from the book that they actually had their origin in the Holy Land, being modelled on the Knights Templar and having a base in Acre, which was news to me as I had a vague idea of them always fighting up north in snow and ice - thanks, I think, to a very confusing movie by Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky.

The Eagle and the Hart - The laxity, irresponsibility, extravagance and utter egoism of Richard II, continuing even as a huge French force threatens to invade, is amazing to read. Even more amazing is how a group of rebel lords defied him and in early 1388 brought about a proceeding in parliament, with the king obliged to sit and preside, which caused his most powerful friends (a duke, an archbishop, a chief justice, the chancellor) and their associates to be tried and condemned for treason (on a generous reading of the statute of 1352), and forthwith executed, those who had not already fled the country. All this a decade before he is deposed.

Now I’m onto young Henry of Lancaster joining the Teutonic Knights on a crusade to convert the pagan Lithuanians, and then travelling on through the courts of Europe to visit Jerusalem and the holy sites. Great stuff.

Much reference to contemporary records - Froissart and Walsingham and unnamed clerks - and a multitude of modern academic monographs. Ms Castor makes it all flow very readably, in the modern idiom (“no exit strategy”, “cognitive dissonance”, etc). Quite a few passages seem to lean heavily on another general work, Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years War.

Meanwhile, for a bit of diversion, I’ve started Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, the book that was turned into a TV series with a delightful performance by Gemma Arterton. How he does the zippy, hilarious conversations among the scriptwriters, the producers and the actors is something to behold.
...
No ailments here, but it's plenty cold (two weeks way below freezing, night and day), so much encouragement to stay in and read.

Also finished The Small House at Allington. It’s not surprising I can never foresee how a detective murder mystery will work out. I couldn’t even foresee how things would end up for any of the main characters in this Trollope.

giveusaclue wrote: "How is The Eagle and the Hart going ?"

Going along nicely. I'd forgotten how mighty (and how profoundly unpopular) was John of Gaunt.

Thanks for the new thread, GP

I’ve finished Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Although Marxism is the enveloping theme, there is less analysis of it as a system of thought than one might expect. It’s also quite old now, completed in early 1940 (so Trotsky is discussed in the present tense, because he hadn’t been assassinated yet). But despite all that it says ample for a non-specialist, and it’s perfectly brilliant on the succession of personalities and their life stories.

I think my top reads in 2024 (including some I started in 2023) were:

Lord Byron – Don Juan
Céline – Voyage au bout de la nuit
Katherine Rundell – Super-Infinite: The Transformation of John Donne
Jenny Uglow – The Lunar Men
Seneca – Six Tragedies
Emile Zola – L’Argent
Ivan Turgenev – A Sportsman’s Notebook
Annie Ernaux – Mémoire de fille
Thomas Hardy – Jude the Obscure

I got pleasure from many others, fiction and non-fiction, too many to mention.

AB76 wrote: "...Posting this here as the woke moderators at the G still havent let this post go through...."

I can't see what could be wrong with that post, AB.

Gpfr wrote: "I'm also continuing with Michael Pearce's Mamur Zapt stories, set in Egypt in the early 20th century...MK recommended this series..."

I remember that comment from MK.