Diary
10 July. It occurs to me, that tedious though Love Island is, it has immensely respectable origins, indeed the best. It is after all Bloomsbury (though whether in the person of G.E. Moore, E.M. Forster or the sainted Virginia herself I’m not sure), whose motto was ‘personal relations for ever and ever’, which, lolling about on the sun-baked lawns, these gorgeous creatures are indeed subscribing to (and possibly finding wanting). Walberswick was always thought to be Bloomsbury on Sea, but its ultimate location could now claim to be Love Island. (World’s smallest facility: the Love Island Library.) More
Joan Didion’s Pointillism
The present literature about her is a hagiography that does not entirely trust itself; there is a vacancy at the centre of it that I call the ‘but surely’. But surely if these essays were published now, the hagiography says to itself at three in the morning, they would meet with a different reception? But surely if she wrote today, her ideas about feminism would be more in line with ours? But surely, for all her pointillism, she is failing to draw the conclusions we would most like to see? The hagiography turns the pillow over, looking for a cool spot. How much can we really rely on someone who loved The Doors? More
#Russiagate
We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal, which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war. More
Princess Margaret
Only the hardest heart would repress a twitch of sympathy. To live on the receiving end of so much gush and so much abuse, to be simultaneously spoilt rotten and hopelessly infantilised, how well would any of us stand up to it? So many functions to go to, so much dysfunction to come back to. When Princess Margaret made a guest appearance at the Borsetshire fashion show in an episode of The Archers, the producer said after the run-through: ‘That’s very good, ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?’ the princess replied. More
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