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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

AB76 wrote: "I remember the Guiness trial, the LRB mentions that one of them claimed alzheimers and then made a remarkable recovery..."

Yes, remarkable recovery. The gentleman is still alive. Looking him up reminded me of the problem with DTI inquiries. Inspectors had the authority to require evidence under oath from witnesses, which might well be self-incriminating and could then be used by the prosecution in subsequent criminal proceedings, and was in the Guinness case. This was criticised in a judgment of the ECHR. Following an overhaul of the inquiry system in 2005, inspectors in statutory inquiries still have that power. I’m so long out of practice I’m not up to speed on what use can be made of such evidence.

AB76 wrote: "interesting Russ, i had never heard of these ..."

They get a bit of a round-up in the final chapters of A Club No More, 1945-2000, the fourth volume of David Kynaston’s work on The City of London, though his main concerns lie elsewhere, with London’s global position in markets and deal-making. The most famous of these scandals was probably the Guinness affair, from the mid 1980s. It all reads now, post-Brexit, like a lost world.

Charles Freeman seems to be controversial, not just for his 2003 book The Closing of the Western Mind, on the period 300 to 600 AD, which I’ve looked at but not read, and which has been condemned by academic commentators as superficial, misleading, vulgar and wrong, while conceding that it might actually be entertaining, but also it seems for his new book The ReOpening of the Western Mind, which takes the story up to around 1500 AD and looks really interesting – so I’ve bought it (for much less than the cover price of $50) and look forward to reading it.

AB76 wrote: "For all lovers of whodunnits and crime novels, the english jury system plays a part in the drama of many of these novels and especially in film, excessively so in the litigation prone USA..."

Francis FitzGibbon is a very prominent barrister specializing in criminal law, whose views command respect. But equally Brian Leveson was a no less prominent barrister, and subsequently a highly regarded judge whose views likewise command respect. I would like to express a view, despite my own experience being almost entirely on the civil side, but haven’t yet seen anything in detail on either side of this debate (the LRB won’t allow access).

The inquisitorial system did actually exist in England for a period in what were in effect serious fraud cases, in the form of inquiries by DTI or Bank of England inspectors (usually a QC and an accountant) or insolvency administrators, appointed to look into and report on the collapse of major companies. There was a string of these inquiries in the 1980s and 1990s. I had an involvement in several such cases. I say QC rather than KC, because they seem to have fallen into disuse, for reasons I’ve never seen explained. Some led to criminal trials before juries, and there have been very public examples of these trials collapsing, or verdicts being overturned on appeal, because of the stunning complexity of, say, a contested takeover bid, or the workings of the foreign exchange market. So I can at least say that the suitability of such cases for a jury trial certainly deserves attention.

AB76 wrote: "...i dont think Browne is read outside academia much at all, in answer to your question..."

I now see that NYRB brought out an edition in 2012, and it’s still available to buy, so perhaps it is having a small revival. We think we might get it for the bookshop and see what happens. It won’t be wholly out of place among the other books on religion and philosophy. I must have passed over it before when choosing titles from the NYRB list.

I thought I’d see what Christopher Hill had to say about it in The English Bible. He’s rather dismissive – “cautiously royalist” and “timid” and “indulged in speculation” – and seems not to have regarded Browne as altogether serious. But I know who writes the more lively prose. I gave up on Hill about two-thirds through.

I too picked up a book on a religious theme, from a different time.

Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, written around 1634, is a text of a hundred pages that is deeply out of tune with the modern liberal temperament, expressing as it does a humble confession of faith in the truth of the Holy Scriptures, a mild submission to the hand of God in all the deeds of men, and a complete acceptance of the tenets of the Church of England. Nothing in nature can be ugly when it is all the creation of God, no miracle is implausible when it is attested in the Bible, and no doubt should be entertained as to the existence of Angels.

In the second, shorter section Browne expresses his desire to avoid all disputation and, in conformity with the will of God, to live in charity and friendship with all men. He gave money to any beggar. “Hee is rich, who hath enough to bee charitable.”

The introduction makes the puzzling statement that this is not a religious treatise. If a treatise is an ordered doctrinal argument, I suppose that is right, since here we follow a man reasoning out his own beliefs regarding the soul, the influence of the stars, the four last things, and much else besides.

Browne was educated at Oxford (Pembroke) and then attended the universities in Montpelier, Padua and Leyden. He spoke six or seven languages, and is at ease citing the Latin and Greek authors. His education exhausted his patrimony. Needing to earn a living he became a country doctor, in Norfolk. He sets no great store by his profession, of which there is only passing mention. He seeks to relieve sickness, and yet believes that true relief from suffering comes to everyone only at the moment of death and salvation.

How to explain the classic status of this short essay? Enjoying European fame in its time, is it read by anyone today, outside a course of theology? Hardly at all, I should think. Nevertheless, I was glad to learn how a modest and thoughtful man (who can frankly acknowledge that there is “a great deale of obscurity” in the early chapters of Genesis), sustains a steady adherence to his Church in tumultuous times. The rhythm of his rolling periods, at first rather difficult to follow, becomes beguiling, and there is also the pleasure of his enquiring turn of mind: “I can looke a whole day upon a handsome Picture, though it be of an Horse. It is my temper, and I like it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is a musicke even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, farre sweeter than the sound of an instrument.”

The book was circulating in manuscript for some years before coming into the hands of a publisher named Crooke who brought out a pirate edition in 1642. Crooke gave the book its title, which stuck. A copy was given to Sir Kenelm Digby, with whom it was dangerous to be associated. Then in the Tower, Digby read it overnight and immediately wrote his own Observations. The publisher bound them up with the book and sold them together. Browne now felt compelled to bring out an altered and authorized version, in 1643, using the very same pirate publisher. CUP brought out a nice fully corrected edition in 1955.

AB76 wrote: "Popped into Oxfam aiming to find a neglected modern novel to read but was unsuccessful so decided to investigate its copious Sci-fi shelves .."

I know I should be more open to sci-fi as a genre, and probably the authors you mention are the ones I should go for, but I just find it inimical. The only ones I can recall reading recently are various early stories by HG Wells (interesting as period pieces), The Martian (not bad but all I feel I need to read by Andy Weir), The City & The City (appalling, Mieville never again), and Station Eleven (a present from my sister, well before Emily St John Mandel became modish during the pandemic – completely outstanding, just about the best modern fiction I’ve read this century!). My excuse is I’m quite busy enough reading about the present and the past without having to grapple with speculations on the future. But if my sister sends me another …

Robert wrote: "Nancy Scheper-Hughes' Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics is a very readable study of the Irish West, with an analysis of the high number of bachelor farmers...."

So apposite you wonder if NS-H was an O'Brien fan. The library ought to be able to find it for me. Thanks.

AB - nice story.

I picked up an interesting little book by Edna O’Brien, from 1976, Mother Ireland, a writerly meditation on her early days and the culture and people of Ireland, full of striking black and white photographs, all more or less bleak, and concluding with her Escape to England.

Though even now, years later, she would not wish to be anything but Irish, leaving Ireland was “no wrench at all”. When she revisits, after her great success, it is still a low period in the history of the country, no Celtic tiger yet, the Church still a force.

“The new poems and new plays are few indeed and represent either small voices that are sad with their own alienation, or works of such tastelessness that they are indexes of the mass psyche of a people who are throttled. No great philosophers, no great psychiatrists, no achievement where logic is paramount; a great literary endowment, true, but lean offerings over the past thirty or forty years.”

The rain, the swearing, the drinking.

“What would Yeats have to say now? – his literary revival gone to ashes with no phoenix poised.”

Strong recollections of growing up in County Limerick, just like in Country Girls, vivid and funny stories, where there was little money, and death was a frequent visitor, all viewed from the angle of a child looking up wide-eyed at the adults. You know the famous dinner scene in Joyce’s Portrait is coming, and it does.

A chapter on The Books We read – romance after romance, the sort of book where the heroine is always beautiful and the moon swims high in the heavens. For diversion, the occasional visit of a touring theatre group, whose Shakespeares were lofty, too lofty, and melodrama was the thing, wringing from the audience shudders and tears.

Then she is away to a convent for an expected five years, where briefly she feels destined for nunhood, and at last to freedom and drudgery in Dublin, where by chance she discovers Chekhov, “the truest voice I have ever known”.

One caption next to a picture of a man herding sheep in an empty landscape says this of The West:

“Today’s population consists of 391,000 souls, of whom 75,000 are bachelors.”

So she cannot have been the only woman who fled.

Robert wrote: "Roberts presents Halifax after Munich as a man disillusioned by appeasement of Hitler, and as an ur-Churchill filled with activity..."

I think I saw that interesting fact somewhere, not from Roberts’ earlier book The Storm of War (no mention there), so probably from a review of The Holy Fox itself, or an extract. It does deserve attention, particularly coming from Roberts, as Churchill's great defender against revisionist critiques (he did a piece quite recently in the WSJ on absurd arguments from MAGA theorists that Churchill pushed Hitler into war), but it surely won't be enough for Halifax's rehabilitation.

I finished Claudius The God. As Robert said, it was even better than I, Claudius. What made it absorbing for me was the way it shows how power might have been exercised effectively in those times by a thinking person. Claudius was always reading and writing books, and in consequence was viewed as an idiot by all around. On unexpectedly becoming Emperor he surprised everyone by his judicious actions. For the most part humane, he does not hesitate to be severe (exiling, flogging, executing) whenever necessary.

It was good also to be reminded of the almost unbelievable story of the lascivious Messalina (and her 146 adulteries), the murderous Agrippinilla, and the vaunting Nero.

Intriguing to see how a contemporary might have thought about the growing cult of Joshua ben Joseph, called Jesus by the Greeks.

No Labor Day celebrations as such, but I see the G are reporting anti-billionaire rallies.

Not sure about a sleepy Labor Day – we are just recovering our calm after a long weekend when the house felt like Grand Central Station – but we had a very happy family occasion, and perfect weather.

(Labor Day itself is just a day off, with no public celebrations anywhere that I’m aware of, unlike Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.)

I didn’t expect to be meeting Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday again quite so soon, but here they are, in Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road, journeying through Italy and taking samples of a natural hydrogen gas from vents high up in the Apennines. Faraday’s journal has nothing to say about the beauties of Florence. His only remarks are on the availability there of labs for the work of analysis. Huxley calls him one of only three men in English history who were gifted with the necessary quality of imagination for great scientific work – “touched by this sense of wonder at the strangeness of things” - and who also were profoundly religious (the other two being Sir Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, both of whom he says were really mystics). Huxley also thinks he was one of the few men who was happy his whole life long, because his only interest was in discovering the truth. The problems of life never troubled him.

Compared with other essayists of around that time, Huxley doesn’t have the supreme elegance and wit of Strachey, nor the direct common sense of Orwell, nor quite the penetration of Virginia Woolf, and some of his pieces just feel light and out of date. But his style can be pungent, and several of his essays are very fine, including the one on Piero della Francesca. Overall this set has been a satisfying read.

AB76 wrote: "Sociological studies are an interest of mine, especially confined to small areas and timeframes..."

Bologna is a pleasant, lively, fairly typical Italian town, with attractive architecture (all those colonnades) and fantastic food, and it's not completely overrun by tourists, like Venice and Florence. We've been a few times, and each time I’ve been interested to see what the effect of being run by the CPI for several decades might be. It seemed just normal. I suppose we would have to live there to understand what the municipal services and local politics are really like.

AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "Robert/AB - I expect you both know it well, but if not I recommend John Lukacs' Five Days in London, May 1940..."

If either of you havent read War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War 1939-40 by Jean Paul Sartre, i recommend them as a kind of companion piece to Junger...."

Thanks for that reminder. They will be a companion also to my very slow reading of the successive volumes of memoir of Simone De Beauvoir.

Robert/AB - I expect you both know it well, but if not I recommend John Lukacs' Five Days in London, May 1940, a short and gripping account of the fateful struggle between Churchill and Halifax over whether to make an approach to Hitler via Mussolini. It led me to read seven or eight of his other WWII monographs, but none of them was as good as that one.

Welcome to the new thread.

The only news to report is that the Romans gave the Britons a hell of a beating at the Battle of Brentwood, and Claudius was awarded a Triumph on his return home.

A book review that caught my eye was Three Rivers by Robert Winder about the Rhône, the Rhine and the Po, and the three powerful cultures that formed along them over the centuries. Rather remarkably, these great waterways all have their origin in the same small patch of ground high in the Alps. It sounds like an entertaining piece of historical writing, in preparation for the next trip to one region or the other.

I'll close this thread in an hour or so.

giveusaclue wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "Enjoying Claudius The God, just a chapter or two a day. We are about to invade the Druid-ridden island of the Britons."

Gets nasty.

If you read https:

//www.fantasticfiction.com/s/ge...

There are some nasty events. Can certainly recommend the book though.

Thanks. Could well be inspired to try that. I re-read The Eagle of the Ninth not so long ago, enthralling when I was 10-11, and found it surprisingly mature on loyalty and male friendship, and just as exciting. Still waiting for the library to come through with the Mary Grand.

Enjoying Claudius The God, just a chapter or two a day. We are about to invade the Druid-ridden island of the Britons.