Category Archive: Non-Fiction
The Flight of the Intellectuals
There ain't no Muslim Sisterhood...Tariq Ramadan at Oxford, 2009 (photo by Kaihsu Tai)
(by Paul Berman) This hasty, readable, tendentious book bills itself as an attack on liberal intellectuals, and in particular, their inability to confront the paradox of a modern Islamism that hearkens back to its glory days of stony fundamentalism. But really, it is an assault on one man. Via that attack, the book ends up saying important things about the impulse of humans (even and perhaps especially those of ‘superior intellect’) to choose sides, deny opposing points of view, and draw near to attractive extremes. Berman, from the outset, leaps straight at his target, Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Islamic philosopher, alleged here to be an apologist for Islamic…
Continue Reading →Damned Whores and God’s Police
Black-eyed Sue and Sweet Poll say goodbye (by Robert Sayers)
(by Anne Summers) (1975) (updated 1994, to 2000s and beyond) The title is a bit of a howler, for it derives from a statement attributed to someone in partial error. But it is still a great title, and it synthesizes the point of the book, which is to reveal and detail how the bifurcation, by colonial authority, of early Australian females into saints and tramps, has formed the nation’s bedrock and permeated the social fabric ever since. This is a difficult case to make. For instance, such ‘types’ are considered somewhat one-dimensionally cartoonish now. And wouldn’t the outlook change with the development of a free…
Continue Reading →Must You Go? (Antonia Fraser)
Nymphaea Black Princess Water Lily
One half of the TVC team considers published diaries and collections of letters to be a lazy form of memoir. This review is written by that half. In the opinion of this half, plodding through a (probably) heavily edited and unsynthesised lot of journal entries or epistles is an unedifying and disjointed experience. And so it is with “Must You Go?“, Lady Antonia Fraser’s annotated diary of her time with the late Harold Pinter – who, as a playwright was master of the notorious, enigmatic pause. Pinter was also an actor and political activist, particularly in the causes of the Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia…
Continue Reading →My History: A Memoir of Growing Up
Dragon School, Oxford. Not my alma mater.
(by Lady Antonia Fraser) It would be unfair for me to compare Lady Antonia Fraser’s first volume of memoirs with that of her cousin, Ferdinand Mount because in many aspects Fraser had the (early) life and has had the career that I wanted, whereas I felt only the vaguest envy for Mount’s connections and have never aspired to working for Margaret Thatcher. While growing up in the hideous new lower-middle-class outer suburb of Dust in South Australia, attending Dust Primary and High Schools, I knew that I really belonged in a large nook-filled house in Oxford, attending a private school, learning Latin and Greek in preparation for Oxford, in its turn a preparation…
Continue Reading →Winter is Coming
'Winter is Coming and I don't care...' (photo c/- Russian Presidential Press and Information Office)
(Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped) (by Garry Kasparov) When the Soviet Union finally bit the dust, and the new Russia elected itself a vodka-swilling party animal (Boris Yeltsin) as President, who could have foreseen that a mere few years later, an obscure KGB Lieutenant, a colourless unknown, would assume power, and rise to the status of absolute dictator after the style of that chap Hitler? Well this fellow, Garry Kasparov, did. He has suffered for it, certainly, but in the face of ignorance, cowardice and corruption, he is a valuable Cassandra to remind us what President…
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