One fellow to another

I shall venture to defend Gibbon to you.
I don't find him smug. It seems to me
that, behind the genuine belief in prog-
ress there is always, in Gibbon, a sub-
tlety, a sensitivity, occasionally a mel-
ancholy, which is totally absent from
(say) Voltaire. I suppose I have, by now,
got so used to the formal style that I
hardly notice it, and I enjoy all the 
more the urbanity, the irony, the human-
ity, which underlies it. Also I love the
marvelous precision of language, the ex-
act choice of words to convey such del-
icate shades and ambiguities of meaning.

   Do write again: I love
   your letters, and I      long to hear from you.    Do keep well. I wish I    could see you.


        yours ever
        Hugh

































Hugh Trevor-Roper
Regius Professor of History
  Oxford
Master of Peterhouse
  Cambridge
Lord Dacre of Glanton 
Letter to Gerald Brenan
  [fragment]
11 March 1968

Richard Davenport-Hines
  and Adam Sisman, editors
One Hundred Letters from
  Hugh Trevor-Roper
Oxford University Press, 2014©

Tassos Paschalis
Northern Greece
2013

A talent to abuse

I think it is probably not widely

understood that the cultivation of

invective in the practice of his-

toriography is as indispensable as

a reading fluency in Latin, German,

and French. With as few or as many

of my generation as you may care

to cite, formal education exposed

me to this prerequisite at the age

when one would have been loitering

in a paddock somewhere, not very

uncomfortably, in visual charity

to one's friends. By chance I was

also one of a minority cultivated

by one of the truly great exponents

of these talents of the last cen-

tury, whose shattering humiliation

at his first university became the

stroke of luck of mine, whence he

emigrated instantly to the highest

circles of power in American academ-

ia, charismatically indulging some

of us with a brilliant bitterness.

Now I come to find, that his glam-

orous nemesis, while openly and ex-

uberantly cruel when it pleased him,

is not mysteriously at all one of

the most lovingly remembered intel-

lectuals of the British establish-

ment before the age of Murdoch, un-

der whose thumb his reputation was

most ungenerously shattered. Look-

ing back through his published let-

ters, I can see how our unsuspect-

ing gang were much undereducated in

the humane impulses which drew us

to history in the first place, by

virtue of a grievance which never

did heal, against a complex mental-

ity of prodigiously far-seeing na-

ture, despite its joy in rivalry.

I am not going to publish anything

more about that relationship in

which I was steeped, in high prox-

imity to one of its two poles; but

I do interlineate this background

into the blog, forgetful as the

form incurably is, to enable the

reconciling introduction of that

second polar personality in the

next posting here - an extract of

a letter to another Englishman of

high influence upon my education,

formal and otherwise, at a time

of his grieving. How genuinely in-

timate it was of him to embrace

his friend in argument, I don't

think anyone from his time would

fail to recognise or trust. 

  

Benjamin Eidem

I'm terribly sorry, but in North America it's still Thursday ii

 As we studied poor Mr Boehner

 on his throne the other night

 he seemed to summon to memory

 the awful diatribes of coach-

 es on how to play their game.

Their game, can you be-

lieve, when we're the

ones who have to suit

up for it, and take

those slings and arrows

of the limning class,

faulting us for defects

in our poise. Fellow

can't even propose his

own portrait, spiffy

as he is, without be-

ing tweaked for how he

heats the tipple in his

clasp. He's the one who

has to down it, after all.

What has Thursday not in

common with that predica-

ment?

Rex Whistler

Self Portrait

The New York Review

  of Books

January 9, 2014©

Rumble

Rumble is almost a neolo-gism again, in the way I would invoke it in criti-quing what one heard last evening from the Presi-dent. It refers to a pat-tern of audible fluctua-

tions between the sound being sampled and its playback. It is a feature of discontinuity, in a table we all know.

A precaution of Mr Cheney's, I believe

Even as we speak, in some undis-

closable but, we must suppose, 

secure location - probably har-

dened and buried unapproachably

deep - there is being prepared

this evening's stand-in for the

talking Head of State, imperfec-

tions in the resemblance being

touched up to a fare-thee-well,

for a pie in the face from some

junior Supreme Court justice ap-

pointed in the previous Adminis-

tration, for his resentments of

of diversity-seeking elites. How

compassionately these Bushes do

identify their men, one must re-

call, when one considers the long-

suffering Mr Thomas, victimised

by admission to another runway to

the stars. But I stray.

Yes, the innovation is probably

one of the decidedly un-late Mr

Cheney's inspirations from the

light side of the dark side, to

preserve the Presidential suc-

cession in permanent lockdown,

from the top down, by floating

surrogates for these silly pub-

lic facetimes of ancient custom.

Here, of course, Le Cid, himself,

must weep for the vitality of the

effigy under spiffing-up, so ob-

viously Chicagoan in aerodynamics

and of the Big Island in footwear,

that absolutely nobody is likely

to suspect an impostor. Even those

who may wish for one, could hardly

complain.

Pierre Corneille

Le Cid

1637

If only not to listen, could mean there were no statement

I assume, it's widely

understood, the Pres-

ident is not required

to speak his obligato-

ry report to Congress.

The "framers," as men

of more experience of

our world than we let

the children worry a-

bout, were of a prac-

tical bent. Rough mu-

sic can be expensive.

The sounds of certain

frailties are no fun.

But an honest school-
yard riposte is some-
thing to exonerate as
high spirits. Now who
will try a satin tie?

William Hogarth

Hudibras encounters the

  Skimmington

1726

Jenny Uglow

Hogarth

  A Life and a World

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997©

E.P. Thompson

Customs in Common

  Studies in Traditional

  Popular Culture

The New Press, 1993©


P.G. Wodehouse
Psmith in the City
1910
Overlook Press, 2003©

"Mr Speaker, the President of the evening's entertainment"

Readers and movie-goers recall
John Le Carré's definition of
a fanatic as a man who is con-
cealing a secret doubt. The
only problem with this allur-
ing formulation is its univer-
sal application. We need not
look, it seems to me, for the
links between meticulous tep-
idity in the most exposed pos-
ition of leadership in modern
life, and an excruciating dis-
dain for engagement in its ob-
ligations. We can recognise a
careful fellow as the connois-
seur of complication he would
like to seem; in another life,
a watchmaker. 

Ah, but when the world's most exalted practitioner of secret doubt - who knew, how little that he heralded so nobly of the faith of others, would imperil his manicure - keeps company with the media's most exalted connoisseur of it, in the re-luctances of Gorbachev, it is unseemly to speculate on who is courting whom, who enacts the fanatic to the other's admiring manipulation. Delectations wink their expedient ways between stories, all the time.
I read the wrong New Yorker, the one of Shawn's back pages in the writings of Herbert Warren Wind. Lad finds himself in a difficult bunker, of course he reaches for a wedge. But he follows through. He doesn't hustle a caddy to mourn the rules of the game.

John Le Carré
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
op. cit.

Herbert Warren Wind
Following Through
  Golf Writings from 
  The New Yorker
Ticknor & Fields, 1985©

David Remnick
Lenin's Tomb
  The Last Days of the
  Soviet Empire
Random House, 1993©