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A date for the diary

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Those lovely people at Monday Books are holding an event for Theodore Dalrymple's new book - Not With A Bang But A Whimper - on 23/2/10 in Kensington.


Regular Spectator readers will know Dalrymple's unmissable column on the delights of inner city medicine and so forth, others may know his work not written under his nom de plume - 'The Wilder Shores of Marx', 'Monrovia Mon Amour' inter alia.  Having read both of those books, I will happily vouch for his prose.


Anyway, Dalrymple will be doing a Q&A session chaired by Dan Hannan, and for the bagatelle of £16.50, one gets to sit at the feet of these two titans, a hardback copy of the book and wine and nibbles.  Any readers interested should e-mail me and I will pass on the more specific details.  Furthermore, any profit from event will be going to Haiti appeal.


To be updated with hyperlinks, formatted etc a bit later on.

(Full disclosure time - I'm on the guest list for this.  However, I do not promote anything I do not support, so I believe my integrity remains uncompromised). 

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posted by Croydonian

Link o' the day

Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Over at Abebooks.co.uk (who, incidentally offer a marvelous service for finding second hand books, and no - I am not being paid to write this) a collection of weird books have been listed.

To whet everyone's appetite, note the following:

  • 'How You Can Bowl Better Using Self-Hypnosis'
  • 'Jewish Chess Masters On Stamps' 
  • '50 Sad Chairs'
  • 'Oedipus In Disneyland'
  • 'Help! A Bear Is Eating Me'
  • 'Nuclear War: What's In It For You'

You can thank me later.

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posted by Croydonian

A brief observation. And an even briefer snidey aside

Sunday, June 28, 2009
I am re-reading Victor Davis Hanson's peerless 'Why the West has Won - Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam' for the umpteenth time, and fancied that this quote merited a narrower audience:

"Later the Greeks even had their triremes named Demokratia, Eleutheria and Parrhesia".

Which one might render as 'Democracy', 'Freedom' and 'Freedom of Speech'. Which I think are rather better names than HMS Ark Royal, USS Nimitz or, come to that, the Charles de Gaulle.

"Arnold Toynbee (guess whose grandfather he is)..in one of his more foolish asides suggested that a Greek loss to Xerxes might have been good for Hellenic civilization".

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posted by Croydonian

Painful lives

Monday, January 07, 2008
Mooching around a book shop yesterday in search of a late Christmas present for myself, I noted that next to the biographies was an entire section labelled 'Painful Lives'. Although I did not do much more than scan the stacked books, the category would look to be a 1001 variations on the 'Angela's Ashes' theme.

A few things spring to mind - firstly, there must be a demographic that goes out of its way to read this sort of grief / pain pornography, repeatedly. Otherwise, why would Waterstones (for it is they) have a whole section of this sort? Alternatively, and I think this is actually worse, folk will be dodging around in a bookshop wondering what to buy, and espying that section the dilemma resolves itself.

Secondly, if this is the current big thing in publishing, there must be scope for further specialisation and sub-categorising - say 'Celtic childhood, featuring unloving mother and heroin abuse', 'Sibling bullying with suggestions of incest', 'Insensitive boss who made unsisterly comments about unsuccessful diet', 'Awful school years in the North, made bearable only by faithful dog which then contracted mange and had to be put down'.

All concerned could save themselves a great deal of effort by rooting around on the internet for blues lyrics, frankly.


Meanwhile, there is the old joke about the punter seeking the self-help section, but being told that to be directed to it would defeat the object.



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posted by Croydonian

The Turks - way ahead of the curve, or way behind it?

Thursday, January 03, 2008
Istanbul has just been graced with its first feminist bookshop, some 40 odd (?) years after they debuted in London, NY and other happening places. However, the only feminist book shop in London that I can think off - Silver Moon - closed ages back.

Meanwhile, the store styles itself "Amargi...from a Sumerian word meaning freedom and "returning to mother." Having far too good a memory for the deeply unimportant, I recalled that the emblem of the Liberty Press uses the cuneiform for ama-gi, this being the first appearance of a word for freedom, apparently. And here it is, lifted from their web-site:

Wonderful though mothers in general are, going back to one does not seem to be exactly on all fours with freedom as a concept, unless it is the freedom to revert to being a child.

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posted by Croydonian