pumpkinstrokemarrow

And while we are on bloggery, there was a rash recently of blogs on the next blog button which were no more than advertisements. Some are straightforward market stalls. You get pictures of things which you can buy. Some are a pain in that they take the next blog button off the page so that moving on is slightly more tiresome than it might otherwise be. But one was very odd, appearing to be a great wadge of text, more or less gobbledegook, of obscurely dungeons and dragons flavour, but interspersed with words which, I think, when clicked, took you to an advertisement. Which was all very well but the host blog was adding no value, so why would you bother to go there in the first place? Anyway the rash seems to have melted away, so perhaps the advertised refinements to the next blog button, to take you to blogs which share your interests, prejudices and predilections, are indeed in place.

And two moans about the TLS. Firstly, they devoted over a page to a French translation of a long Browning (I think) narrative poem, published in parallel text. Being in the grip of the green fairy at the time, I thought it would be interesting to read the thing, a free and expansive prose translation of a very dense poem. One could make an interesting study into how to translate poetry. I then get onto Amazon France to find that while they know about the book it is unavailable. Abebooks know nothing of it. So what is the TLS up to, puffing books which are unobtainable to ordinary mortals? But perhaps I should not moan. While the book was quite cheap, a very good page rate in fact, not sure that I would of got my money's worth. Interesting studies would gobble up more quality time than is available.

Secondly, they have devoted about a third of this week's issue to books of the year offered by literary and literate celebrities. Now while I might be interested in the work of this or that celebrity, I am not interested in their very short views on the work of others. If I want that sort of thing I can read the Christmas book selection offered by the DT.

Then thirdly, there was the old moan about their (the TLS) sniping about Oxfam bookshops, so I thought I had better pay the branch at Kingston a visit and came away with a biography of Stalin by I. Deutscher, published by the OUP no less in 1949 and sold to me for £2.99. A snip I thought, a snip which should provide an interesting take on Stalin, being written by someone with serious lefty credentials at a time when some people might still have been thinking of the chap as the hero who won the European half of the second world war for us. Two snippets so far. On page 99 I come across the phrase 'all the cheating that oriental slyness could invent'. About on a par with the anti-Semitism of some of John Buchan's novels. While on page 89 there was an interesting discussion of terrorism, a term which to this writer included both the activities of Bolsheviks in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century, robbing banks for funds and assassinating officials for effect, and those of the resistance to German occupation in the war which had then just finished. The term does not seem to have carried then quite the same moral baggage that it has acquired since. It also seems that both Stalin and the future dictator of Poland, Pilsudski, were engaged in this sort of thing, bucking against the Tsarist rule, although the latter harked back to the heroic resistance of the Polish nobility to 19th century encroachments, rather than having any very strong connection with the branch of the social democrats to which Stalin belonged.

Which reminds of me an interesting bit of history. Prompted by an unkind review of a history of Poland by A. Zamoyski (who had previously written a successful history of Napoleon's invasion of Russia), I did some poking around on the question of Polish borders. Not making too much progress on the Internet, I turned up my trusty atlas, prepared by the topographical service of the Polish army and published by Pergamon. An atlas which conveniently includes political maps of Europe in 1914, 1937 and 1967 on the same page 79. From which I learn that while there were lots of Poles, there was no Poland in 1914. Then, at the end of the first world war, Poland is reinvented by grabbing slices of land from what had been Germany, Austria and Russia, all three places being in no position to complain. I learn subsequently that this resulted in a Poland 30% of which was not Polish. So now less of a surprise that in 1940 or so, the Germans and Russians more or less, or perhaps after a fashion, just took back what had been taken from them twenty years previously. Then, after the war, the Russians kept a chunk of what they had taken but the Poles were given back the chunk which the Germans had taken plus some more, in particular a large chunk called Silesia. Given the Holocaust and the forced population movements after the war, Poland wound up a very ethnically clean country in what had been a very messy part of Europe. The only anomaly, it seems, is a nest of ethnic Germans who speak something called Silesian and who got left behind in Poland, more or less by mistake, while those who lived in the much bigger and nearby Breslau (now Wroclaw) got chucked out.