Monday, April 11, 2011
Hard to please
Prime Minister Blair used to irritate me by staying at the houses of his rich friends in warm foreign parts. Or perhaps people who thought that doing him such a favour would be repaid in some discrete way. Whereas Prime Minister Cameron irritates me by pretending to be an ordinary joe having to sit about in the airport lounge for hours waiting for his budget airline flight. Perhaps his security detail all have to dress up as ordinary joes too.
Point one, without going to the lengths of a Sarkosy and whacking out £150m on a A330-200, I do think it would be sensible for Cameron to have access to some sort of private plane when he travels.
Point two, Wilson used to troll off to the Scilly Isles where I think he was more or less left alone. Don't recall pictures of him buying ice creams in the papers. But he did not expect to be able to go to Ibiza and to be left alone there. Don't suppose that would be his idea of a holiday anyway. Perhaps Cameron could go to St Helena for a spot of whale watching.
Point three, prime ministers don't do holidays. They don't do spare time. They are on the job the whole time; that's what they signed up for and we voters expect nothing less in these troubling times. If Cameron doesn't want the job on that basis there are plenty who do.
An irritation nearer home has been a book about Greece by one David Brewer, which came warmly recommended by someone in the TLS and published by Tauris.
Point one, bad type faces and bad page layout.
Point two, inadequate maps. Plus they don't fold out. I won't hold this last against Tauris since virtually no-one offers the reader that convenience these days, despite the onward march of technology.
Point three, the writing style of a blogger rather than that of a historian. Text larded with all kinds of slightly relevant trivia.
On the other hand, the subject matter is interesting and I have learned that Greece is yet another place which never was a state in the modern sense before it was carved out of Turkey in the 19th century. Started out as a bunch of city states spread around the western end of the Mediterranean. City states which happened to have invented culture as we know it. Then came the western Romans, then the eastern Romans, then the French, then the Venetians and then the Turks. At no point in all this was there a state called Greece and the people who spoke a version of Greek and went to Greek church were spread all over the place, a bit like the Irish or the Jews. Getting from there to the Greece we have now was a painful and bloody business.
# posted by Jim @ 12:03 AM 
