I heard one of the cleverest men in Britain, master of an Oxbridge college, quite calmly say the other night: ‘The best hope for the monarchy is that Prince Charles dies before the Queen.’
The boomlet for challenging Obama reiterates the fallacy that Presidential politics is the crucial arena for political activism.
State of Emergency: Britain 1970-1974. It was four dozen months in which Britain lost the Beatles, but gained Edward Heath. It certainly seemed to be an out-of-balance moment. But culturally, it may have been, as one of our reviewers writes, a ‘golden age’. Twin reviews by Anthony Howell and Michelene Wandor.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Anthony Howell: I shake my head at our attempts to conjure up the dream that is the past, especially the more or less immediate past. One friend of mine started a dream notebook, but stopped when the dream of the night before took more than 24 hours to jot down.
Allen M. Hornblum: Little more than a last-gasp attempt to prop up the dispirited and dwindling Rosenberg forces, Final Verdict (barely 200 pages, with only 22 footnotes) promises “a surprising new narrative of the case” and one that actually “stands on its head” what the Schneirs and “millions of others formerly believed.”
Roger Berkowitz: A new urgency has energized those who welcome and those who fear the power of man to transform his nature. While hopes of technological utopias and fears of technological dystopias may be part and parcel of the human condition itself, we are living through a moment when extraordinary technological advances are once again raising the question of what it means to be human.
Juliet du Boulay: To recognize the enduring quality of much that I describe is not, however, to ignore the fact that change has always been a part of village life, and indeed so many changes have happened since I was in Ambeli in the 1960s and 1970s that much of the way of life recounted here can no longer be found. Earlier changes begin with the village itself, which had been built around 1800 by families who escaped there from a lower village which had been devastated by the Turks. Before this some of the big families were said to have come in a boat from the north, perhaps Pelion. These upheavals, however, dramatic though they were, did not necessitate a deep change of values but simply a reinterpretation of ancient themes in the new situation.
Anthony O’Hear: Do we have reluctantly to conclude that in 2010, for all our personal chippiness, when it comes to what really matters, deference and servility are now uppermost (or is it just laziness)?
Early in September some good baseball should be seen on the Hyde Park ground, for the championship of England is to be decided there, between the best American team and the best Canadian. It is greatly to be feared that there is no possible chance of an English team carrying off the world’s palm. The Americans would be delighted if there were such a possibility.
Ronald G. Walters: To attack present-day critics of science as misguided and cranky radicals does more than violate the historical record: it obscures problems within science itself and the degree to which it invites hard scrutiny, particularly when applied to social issues. On that score, the sources of frustration among intellectuals and the public alike are several. The historical record contains reminders that what seem to be progressive uses of science from one perspective look reactionary in hindsight.
Anthony O’Hear: The picture of philosophy which I am here sketching, in which philosophy is part of a rational, but personal quest for meaning might not be recognised in many philosophy departments (or not by their students, anyway), and would be hard to discern in many of the most acclaimed philosophical writings of to-day.
Basil Field: In the happy days of old, when fish were foolish, and fishermen were few, one, two, three, or more flies were fastened at intervals on a line; a cast was made across the stream, the rod-point was depressed, and the flies allowed to sink as they drifted down the current. When the line became fully extended, the flies began to rise to the surface, and to sweep round in a curve towards the bank on which the angler stood, the fly nearest him, called the “bob-fly,” tripping and dancing as it skimmed the water.
Denis Boyles: Populism finds a way, even in Europe. Your grandmother may die of neglect in Paris while you go to the beach and the government dithers, but if you want real populist outrage in Europe, try freezing the salaries of bureaucrats. The state is Europe’s largest employer. When the reality of that unaffordable fact of political life sinks in, as it has in Greece and as it no doubt will elsewhere, you get a kind of populism even Timothy Egan may wish to avoid: riots, death, anarchy and an impending collapse of the currency.
Denis Boyles: In the Euro-zone, populism is kept in place by encouraging dependence on the state. That dependence is so deeply entrenched now that not even the French health-care disaster of 2003 could disturb it. When 15,000 mostly elderly citizens perished in a three-week heat wave after government services collapsed, it left utterly unaffected both the political establishment and the journalists who cover and largely support it.
Anthony O’Hear: The main objection to a hung parliament is that it will involve horse-trading, ‘messy’ compromises and sordid lobbying for power, as if such behaviour was not already the norm within political parties, and as if political parties ever did anything other than seek their own power and growth.
Why doesn’t Britain have a Tea Party?
Anthony O’Hear: Do we have reluctantly to conclude that in 2010, for all our personal chippiness, when it comes to what really matters, deference and servility are now uppermost (or is it just laziness)?