This is a passage from T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem, The Waste Land.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,  
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,  
Endeavours to engage her in caresses  
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.  
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;  
Exploring hands encounter no defence;  
His vanity requires no response,  
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all  
Enacted on this same divan or bed;  
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows on final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…

Q: Why does this passage remind one of a famous international banker?

Nice LRB blog post by Glen Newey.

The New College for the Humanities must have looked like a winner on paper. A higher education Britain’s Got Talent fronted by celebrity academics not just on the payroll, but taking a dividend. Financiers on board. Mayor BoJo’s blessing. Saudi princes by the tanker-load offering their custom. And then the project has seemingly shrivelled faster than a LibDem campaign rosette. Birkbeck swiftly distances itself from the NCH and parts company with its founder. The college’s financial, fiscal and institutional status prove foggy. It turns out that the Cannadine-Colleys are only showing up for one lecture each a year. Poor A.C. Grayling gets ambushed in Foyle’s and smoke-bombed when all he wanted to do was puff his college and shift a few copies of his rewrite of the Bible. Is nothing sacred?

[…]

The problem with the NCH is not that it is ‘elite’, or that several of the big names are getting on. The problem is that it epitomises the worst features of the 2012-spec UK higher education system: it amplifies rather than damping down inequalities inherited from UK schools’ state/fee-paying apartheid, and makes ability to pay a further necessary condition beyond academic ability for admission. It also doubles students’ indebtedness and it’s not yet clear – as became plain in an interview Grayling gave this week – that NCH students will be eligible for a loan. The big-ticket professoriate will exemplify trends in the HE sector generally, where salaried faculty’s research time is bought out with low-cost teaching by casual staff.

Strange goings-on with Olympics tickets.

Probably the most complicated system for buying tickets ever thought up by man is in a new phase. The London Organising Committee (LOCOG) has run the initial ballot and assigned the first round of tickets. They've now taken money out of the accounts of those who were successful in the ballot and had a functioning visa account.

There could however be another chance for people who were unsuccessful as there are thousands of transactions that LOCOG have been unable to process because people's accounts have not had the money in or because the bank details have been incorrect for example. There are numerous reasons why a transaction could fail but if they try three times and it still fails, then the next person on the ballot waiting list gets the tickets.

I wonder if there might be another explanation. Could this be a reflection of a downturn in people’s economics circs? Maybe they’ve been forced to tear up their credit cards? Or have simple maxed out? Hmmm….

Doesn’t affect me. I propose to leave the country while the games are in progress.

From the University of London’s web site.

About the New College of the Humanities

The University is aware of the intention of the New College of the Humanities NCH to provide tuition to students of the University of London International Programmes. There is no formal agreement between the University of London and the NCH concerning academic matters. As with any other Independent Teaching Institution, a dialogue will be maintained about when to apply for recognition under the Institutions Policy Framework, but normally a track record is required. To avoid any confusion, it should be made clear that NCH is not, and will not be, a part of the University of London. Meanwhile it is legitimate for NCH, as an entirely independent institution, to provide tuition to students of University of London International Programmes as other institutions in London and around the world do. These students’ applications for registration for degrees would be made individually with the University of London International Programmes.

No agreement has been concluded as yet regarding access to the Senate House Libraries by NCH students, but financial terms exist for the payment of fees for access by any students of University of London International Programmes and this would, of course, apply to students of NCH. The position is similar for the University of London Union, and it should be noted that all students of the University of London International Programmes are eligible for associate membership for a payment of £20 per annum, but are not eligible to compete competitively in University sports teams.

Quite so. Just in case there might be any misunderstanding, m’lud.

Thanks to Doug Clow for spotting it.

Nice Salon.com piece by Michael Lind about Fergie, the Tories’ favourite historian. Sample:

What accounts for the attention lavished by the American media on a huckster as vulgar and shallow as Niall Ferguson? His accent surely is part of the explanation. Only a combined lack of personal and national self-confidence can explain the way that America’s publishers and producers — many of them insecure, upwardly mobile social climbers — will fawn over a mediocre British pundit or pop historian whom they would completely ignore if he were Tony Zacarelli from Long Island or Fred Huffernagel from Oregon. Little has changed since the Midwesterner Jay Gatz, to be taken seriously on the Anglophile East Coast, had to change his name to Gatsby before he could qualify as "dashing."

Ferguson is the most prominent of a number of British conservative intellectuals and journalists who have found more sympathetic audiences in the U.S. than in their own country, where their enthusiasm for Victorian imperialism and Victorian economics stigmatizes them as cranks.

Anyone contemplating a biography of James Joyce has a formidable mountain to climb in the shape of Richard Ellmann’s magisterial tome. But Gordon Bowker has risen to the challenge and his James Joyce: A Biography is in the shops in good time for Bloomsday. This morning on Radio 4’s Today programme he was interviewed by John Humphreys about his discovery that Joyce had decided to renew his British passport rather than opt for an Irish ‘Free State’ (or, as he called it, a ‘Free Fight’) one.

Many thanks to Peter Morgan for the Today link.

Interesting revelation by BusinessInsider (via The Daily Beast) about the NYT’s technology commentator.

Powerful New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue’s new romance with a key Silicon Valley PR executive has many buzzing about a possible conflict of interest.

David Pogue is an incredibly popular technology columnist and one of the most influential gadget gurus in the world. With a column in the New York Times, TV gigs on CNBC, CBS, and PBS, and 1.3 million Twitter followers, Pogue can drive sales of a new gizmo with a few exuberant words or crush a company’s dreams with a thumbs-down on a new product.

But Pogue in the past has landed in hot water for failing to disclose potential conflicts of interest. And he has recently attracted some notoriety after he and his wife, whom he’s divorcing, were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct following an alleged scuffle during a domestic dispute that some reports say involved him hitting his wife with an iPhone.

And now those two issues are converging: Pogue has been dating Nicki Dugan, a vice president at OutCast Agency, a San Francisco PR firm that represents top tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, Netflix, and Yahoo, since last year. (On April 24, things between them had grown serious enough that Dugan announced their relationship on her Facebook page.)

During the time they’ve been involved, Pogue has written articles about OutCast clients and their competitors without disclosing his personal connection to a senior staffer at the firm.

Hmmm… I enjoy David Pogue’s stuff and admire his video essays about new gadgets. The possiblity of conflicts of interest is, of course, worrying. But in a way what is more disturbing is the way Pogue has involved his soon-to-be-disrupted family in his work. His kids, for example, were sometimes co-opted as extras in his NYT videos, and I can think of at least one clip where his (ex?) wife also featured in a non-speaking role. I’ve always been suspicious of entertainers and authors who make a big deal of their uxoriousness and parade their happily-married status in public. (Think of Martin Amis, for example.) It makes one think that they doth protest too much, as Shakespeare would have put it. And all too often those niggling doubts have proved correct.

Today’s Irish Times feels strange: Garret Fitzgerald’s weekly column is missing. Noel Whelan has a nice tribute to him.

My favourite story, however, is one he used to tell against himself. It involved an occasion when he had to overnight in a Rosslare hotel either because he had just missed a ferry departure or because his ferry was delayed until the following morning. Unusually, he found himself in the hotel room with no reading material. Intellectually frustrated, he searched the bedside locker where, apart from the usual Gideon Bible, he could only find two telephone books. This was in the days when the entire Republic’s numbers were encompassed in two volumes.

Putting the Bible to one side, he sat and read one of the telephone books. However, there was an objective to his reading. He was anxious to prove to himself a theory he had that once people from the counties of Leinster gravitated to study or work in Dublin, very many stayed there. By cross-referencing his own detailed knowledge of the concentration of particular surnames in particular counties with a reading of the 01 phone book, he apparently confirmed his theory.

Garret’s addiction to statistics was legendary. When he worked for Aer Lingus, it was said that he knew the international airline timetable book by heart. At his funeral last Sunday, his son John addressed this remark to the staff of the Central Statistical Office:

For over half a century you have enthralled our father and provided much to stimulate him. He was your biggest fan and he probably drove you mad.

Here’s a depressing thought: two of the bloodiest current operators in the Middle East both had a good Western education. Saif Qadaffi went to the London School of Economics, and produced — or had produced for him — a respectable PhD dissertation (I’ve read some of it, and it looks academically respectable). And Bashar al-Assad, currently presiding over murder and torture in Syria, trained as a doctor in London (which means, among other things, that he subscribed to the Hippocratic Oath). So the belief that a good education civilises its recipient needs to be taken with a large helping of salt.