At the moment, I'm reading a Wodehouse Jeeves book because people say they're relaxing. Not my experience, but mildly diverting. The only other one I've read is the one with Roderick Spode (thinly-disguised Oswald Mosley), from historical interest. What did strike me was the huge range of half-submerged literary references: Wooster knows his poetry but pretends he doesn't by mangling quotations slightly - neatly capturing toffs' anti-intellectualism. Sorry John Cowen - being mildly amusing doesn't make up for collaborating with the Nazis.
I'm also on Germaine Greer's 1960s-1980s journalism: very enjoyable and sometimes strikingly profound - even at the heart of the underground press movement she retained a sense that they weren't getting anywhere. What a shame that she now produces instant opinions on absolutely anything rather than sticking to what she knows about.
Finally, I'm reading Gildas's On the Ruin of Britain (originally De Excidio Britannia): giving my medieval lecture the other week reminded me what fun all that stuff is, and I've bought several more academic books and collections on the period. Gildas is a bit Daily Mail-ish, to be honest, constantly going on about social decay. It was written in the 500s but he whinges about 'the general destruction of all that is good' already - only 100 years after the Romans left and 50 years after the Saxons put their towels on a new stretch of beach. Still, it's bracing stuff, despite the awful prose into which it's been rendered. Dodo Books have clearly skimped on their editorial side - no dates anywhere, but I'm guessing it's a bad Victorian translation. I'm now so boring that the publication details page is the first thing I look at in a book now…
2 comments:
History is a funny old thing isn't it? I never hear anyone saying they can't forgive Sophocles or Juvenal for their connections to unsavory politicians. Just enjoy the Wodehouse.
They were, frankly, a long time ago, and didn't go in for fluffy humour as though the world were in tip-top shape, while consorting with and taking money from, an organised Holocaust machine. Maybe I am over-serious about this stuff, but it does matter to me.
You might have mentioned Milton - inventor of modern liberty while supporting the wholescale slaughter of Catholics and Irish…
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