In the Good Old Days people would report to this list their sense of
interesting reading. This being summer, I thought I’d revive the idea.
I have discovered, quite by chance, a book that might well be funny. It
certainly begins in that manner, a description on page 14 reading, “Carstairs
is not the smallest member of the [golf club]. In fact…Beamish once remarked
that he’d be considerably taller if he lay down…”
David Feherty, “A Nasty Bit of Rough.”
No doubt it will deteriorate, but one hopes.
In 1910 Lord Roseberry published, “Chatham, His Early Life and Connections.”
It opens, “There is one initial part of a biography which is skipped by every
judicious reader; that in which the pedigree of the hero is set forth, often
with warm fancy, and sometimes at intolerable length. It is, happily, not
necessary to enter upon the bewildering branches of the innumerable Pitts, but
only to keep to one conspicuous stem. We must however record that the Pitt
family was gentle and honourable; ‘it had,’ says one of them, ‘been near two
centuries growing into wealth without producing anything illustrious.’”
We turn the pages to learn of William’s youth. “William’s only public
achievement at Oxford was a copy of Latin verses which he published on the
death of George I. They are artificial and uncandid, as is the nature of such
compositions, and have been justly ridiculed by Lord Macaulay. But the
performance is at least an early mark of ambition.”
And now we come to Pitt himself, writing on the hiring of Hanovarian troops in
Flanders, “The troops of Hanover, whom we are now expected to pay, marched into
the Low Countries, where they still remain. They marched to the place most
distant from the enemy, least in danger of an attack, and most strongly
fortified had an attack been designed. They have, therefore, no other claim to
be paid than that they left their own country for a place of greater security.
I shall not, therefore, be surprised, after such another glorious campaign….to
be told that the money of this nation cannot be more properly employed than in
hiring Hanoverians to eat and sleep.”
A biography of Stanley Cursiter, an artist whose work I saw on Orkney, and
David Lubin, “Grand Illusions; American Art and the First World War,” have not
reached the top of the reading pile yet, which is to say I’ve looked at all the
pictures but so far read few of the words. That will change.
And you?
David Ritchie,
Portland,
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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