The Life of Johnson

(James Boswell) Incomparable biography (or stalker’s notes) of the great Tory grump Dr Samuel Johnson, packed with wit and wisdom. My favourite vignette: Johnson speaks of one of Boswell’s Scottish acquaintances who affects a savage, Rousseau-like disdain for civilised order: “if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.”  

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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

November 17, 2014 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classic Film, Drama Film, FILM, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

(dir. Martin Ritt) (1965) Agent Alec Leamas returns from Berlin, defeated and discouraged, and Control gives him a project: go back and set up his adversary for a big fall.  So far, so good, but nothing is what it seems in grand espionage… Great, grey, grim, cold war nasty. Dick Burton, et al, play for keeps with nary a hint of glamour.

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The Embarrassment of Riches

(Simon Schama) There’s the Amsterdam dutch And the Zaandam dutch And the Rotterdam dutch And the God-damn dutch… However, despite their slightly dodgy record in slave driving, tulip speculating, trade finance and robust colonization, this admiring and admirably crammed history of culture in the Dutch Golden Age is a delight. The ‘Burgemeester van Delft’ in Jan Steen’s painting on the cover is a dead ringer for Jeffrey Jones (Mr. Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).

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The Long Goodbye

(Raymond Chandler) I shaved and made some coffee and then parked on the settee to start reading this thing and then I got up and went back to the bathroom and stripped off my tie and shirt and sloshed cold water in my face with both hands and then went on reading and then fixed some more coffee and cooled it down with a slug of scotch and then I went out on the back porch and smoked a cigarette and that’s more or less where I got to.

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Human Accomplishment

(Charles Murray) A subversive book which purports to rank the top 20 men and women (mostly men) in the arts and sciences on the basis of historiometry. Awash with Bell curves, Lotka curves, and arbitrary methodology, it fascinates but does not convince: one imagines  oneself drawing a silly graph on the blackboard and quoting J. Evans Pritchard.      

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