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Fiat lux
Lucy of Syracuse was a young woman of strong principles who wasn’t going to let anyone put one over on her. Today she is honoured as the bringer of light in darkness, an appropriate saint for this time of year.
Things can only get better
After another defeat for the Labour Party in Britain it is time for some clear thinking, and action. It’s not as if this debacle was not predicted. The party recovered from the depths once before, though one should be wary of thinking that the recipe that proved successful then can simply be repeated.
Harmless Hatred
Election results suggest that Scotland, once a supplier of many useful seats to the British Labour Party, has transferred its allegiance very decisively to the Scottish National Party. But is this likely to lead to independence and continued EU membership? That could well be a quite different matter.
The review as cultural bridge
Frank Kermode argued that the modern literary review offered academic writers the chance to introduce sometimes complex ideas about literature or history or art to a larger audience. All they had to do was to write clearly and not forget that learning can be a pleasure.
Clive James (1939-2019)
Clive James knew that an unintelligent intelligentsia is a permanent feature of human history. He knew that the hard-to-read would go on being worshipped, and that writers who were merely funny, informed, and scrupulously honest would have to find their way as best they could.
Regrets, he had a few
Jonathan Miller was famous as a comic actor, satirist, medical man, highbrow television presenter, theatre and opera director, and all-round intellectual. And yet he regretted having failed to concentrate on his medical career, telling many interviewers that he felt he had been a ‘flop’.
History wars
History books sell, particularly if they are packaged by publishers in a way that makes them attractive to the general reader in search of enlightenment. A recent history of France has sold more than 100,000 copies – though it is not everyone’s tasse de thé.
Why do fools fall in love?
The idea that because a person is beautiful, or handsome, she or he must be good is a trap that humans fall into time and time again. This causes a great deal of misery, but also provides material for thousands of popular songs and even some great novels.
The Real Susan
A recent widely reviewed biography has portrayed Susan Sontag as an imperious, vain and often cruel woman who had no real friends. The Susan I knew, writes Ed Vulliamy, was not like that at all but rather a humorous, listening person who preferred to talk of others than herself.
With the people
A new book argues that it is largely the insistence that central and eastern Europe should slavishly follow the western, free-market model that led to the success of ‘illiberal’ populism. Perhaps, but one should not forget the sins of the liberals, or the political skills of the populists themselves.
At rest in Zurich
James Joyce died in Zurich in January 1941 after fleeing Vichy France. There is now a proposal to have him exhumed and brought back to Dublin, but there is no reason to believe he is particularly unhappy where he lies in Fluntern cemetery, listening to the roars of the lions from the nearby zoo.
Fighting England with Knife and Fork
James Joyce, though ill-disposed to Irish establishments, had time for Arthur Griffith, the first president of the Irish Free State, who is referenced in ‘Ulysses’. This goes back in part to Griffith’s defence of Joyce’s right to have his views on Yeats’s Irish Literary Theatre heard.