A rose by any other name…

Quote of the Day

“I don’t think I am any good. If I thought I was any good, I wouldn’t be”

• John Betjeman

Lovely man, though logic wasn’t his strong point. I never pass St Pancras station, though, without thinking fondly of him. Without him it’d be some ghastly modernist pile.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Claude-Michel Schonberg | Bring Him Home | The Piano Guys

Link

Long Read of the Day

Putting the Boot in

Lovely essay by Robert Hutton on British journalism, as satirised by Evelyn Waugh, and embodied by Boris Johnson.

Scoop, whatever Waugh’s intention, offered generations of unserious young journalists the hope that they might pitch up somewhere, get drunk on expenses, fail to understand what was going on, and be declared a hero.

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. As well as being Britain’s most successful politician, the prime minister has long been one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, a job he did entirely in the Scoop mould. His sympathetic biographer, Andrew Gimson, describes how, posted to Brussels, Johnson delighted in producing stories that were more entertaining than accurate. It was not that he was opposed to writing accurate stories, but he didn’t see it as in any way essential.

The Scoop character Johnson most resembles isn’t the novel’s hero, the hapless William Boot, though…

Read on to find out who’s the model.

Footnote The piece was published in The Critic in 2021 when the foolishness of the British electorate to give Johnson a mandate to screw the country was becoming obvious to even the dogs in the street.

Books, etc.

One of the nicest surprises of last week was to discover that Rick Gekoski and his wife, Belinda Kitchen, were in town. We had dinner with them on Saturday evening. Rick is a writer, a successful rare-book dealer, a publisher and a former academic. So, like me, he has a foot in several graves.

He is also a consummate storyteller, which is why his essays on the book trade (and academia) are memorable. His book, Tolkien’s Gown, a set of essays about the publishing history of 20 great works, is full of stories that most of us would kill for.

I’ve known him for years and so it was great to catch up with him and Belinda. And then, towards the end of the meal, she pulled this rabbit out of her bag — a set of yarns about his dealings — both in rare books and with their authors. I was mortified that I had missed it (it came out in 2021, in the height of the pandemic). The only consolation for the embarrassment is that I now have literary entertainment for the post-EUFA week!

My commonplace booklet

My observation on Monday about the echoes of the famous Imo Jima photograph from WW2 in Evan Vucci’s remarkable photograph of a defiant Trump in the aftermath of the shooting led Joe Dunne to see another echo — Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• DJI Drone ascends Everest Link. The kind of mountaineering any couch-potato can enjoy.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!