Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2022

David McCullough, RIP

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte remembers the late David McCullough:

David McCullough speaking at Emory University, 25 April, 2007.
Photo by Brett Weinstein via Wikimedia Commons.

David McCullough died August 7 at the age of 89. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman, National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas, about the building of the Panama Canal, and Mornings on Horseback, a biography of young Theodore Roosevelt, as well as two Francis Parkman prizes (The Path, Truman) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also enjoyed a prominent career as a broadcaster and several of his books were transformed into important television events, most notably HBO’s John Adams.

I read him closely over the years. Studied him, even. After finishing his major biographies — books that can’t fail to impress for their prodigious research and literary grace — I went back to his early work to trace how long it took him to develop into a master of narrative historical writing. I started at the beginning, The Johnstown Flood (1968), and was stunned to find that he was all there from page one. He had total command of his material and his story at the outset.

I wouldn’t call him a favorite writer. McCullough tended to play safe. He had a somewhat rosy view of American history: “I want to bring to life the best that can be found in the story of why we are the way we are and how we got to where we are.” He was so busy bringing the best to life that he seldom challenged his readers with the worst: truly repellant individuals or unredeemed national failure.

His subjects tended to be public-spirited men of noble character and hard-earned wisdom. He felt comfortable in their company. “It’s like picking a roommate,” he once said, explaining why he dropped the idea of a biography of Pablo Picasso. “After all, you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?”

When the abhorrent forced its way into his stories, he tended to rationalize it. His formulation that Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, was a lesser evil necessary to prevent a greater evil (heavy American troop losses) may have got it exactly backward.

His paeans to American greatness even wore on American audiences in his later years. Reviews of The Pioneers, his 2019 account of the Euro-American settlement of the Ohio River valley, accused him of “romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.”

I raise these issues not to speak ill of the dead but to say that McCullough is worth reading, and reading again, even if, like me, you’re part of the minority who can find him hard to take at times. (The majority love him: I’m not sure any historian has sold more books.)

I had the pleasure of meeting David McCullough in Toronto at an intimate lunch arranged by his publisher, Simon & Schuster. I interviewed him later for Macleans. He was a complete gentleman and an enjoyable companion, notwithstanding his many twice- and thrice-told stories (an occupational hazard for touring writers).

I was able to draw him out on various aspects of non-fiction craft, which he spoke well on. What follows are some of my favorite quotes from the interview along with several other things McCullough said about writing and one comment by another author, the great Candace Millard, about his work.

February 17, 2022

P.J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell

Filed under: Books, Europe, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Chrenkoff remembers the first of P.J. O’Rourke’s books he discovered in Australia after his family emigrated from Poland:

I haven’t heard of this O’Rourke fellow, but Holidays in Hell is a great title. I’ve always enjoyed reading about other countries, and the concept of travelling to war zones and other shitholes seems like a fertile territory for satire. Plus, as I see in the table of contents, O’Rourke had travelled to Poland a year before my family had left it. We were roughly in the same place at the same time. Now I just have to find out what this zany American thought of my homeland. I’m sold. So is the book.

It was a 50 cents well spent. I have the book next to my keyboard as I’m typing these words. It’s the first British edition, printed in in 1989 by Picador, so it would have been four or five years old when I bought it. It doesn’t look like it has aged at all since then. Maybe the paper is a tad more yellow but that’s about it. “What do they do for fun in Warsaw” is on page 83 (in the table of contents, the city is misspelled “Warshaw”, which actually makes it closer to the original Warszawa, the English “sh” being the same as the Polish “sz” sound – don’t say you didn’t learn anything new today). It was glorious, capturing with all of O’Rourke’s sardonic majesty the death rattles of the system that would collapse only three years later (not that any of us foresaw it). “I didn’t see any Evil Empire,” wrote P J, “that would have been too interesting. Communism doesn’t really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death”.

I enjoyed the rest of the book too, from civil war-torn Lebanon to divided Central America – the rightist El Salvador and the commie Nicaragua. Over the next few years I feasted on Republican Party Reptile. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance. I even managed to get to O’Rourke’s original non-political writing, Modern Manners and The Bachelor Home Companion, which I found just as funny if also less depressing than politics. Then I read all the new books as they came out. While it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, I have found P J O’Rourke after 2000 increasingly struggling to be funny. His last output over the past six or so years as this “Republican Party reptile” and arch-libertarian ended up voting for Hillary Clinton because he didn’t like Donald Trump was cringeworthy and sad to read, which is did less and less of, until I did none at all. But it doesn’t change the fact that when P J was good – in the 1980s and 90s – he was a god. There was no one and nothing like him. He singlehandedly made right-of-centre sensibilities hip and the left ridiculous, which is the best weapon against those who fancy themselves too much.

At this point in time I should probably apologise for lying – P J O’Rourke did not save my life, though that sounded a lot sexier than any other title I could think of. What P J had done for me, however, was just as important: he set me on the right path.
The line from growing up in communist Poland forty years ago to The Daily Chrenk today might seem pretty straightforward in hindsight, but for a while in the early 1990s it got somewhat twisted and crooked, as lines tend to do when you attend university. Not only was I suddenly exposed in my Arts degree (majoring in Government, or political science, with a minor in History) to 50 Shades of Left, but I had embarked on wide-ranging reading spree of my own (nothing wrong with that; I still do), involving writers and topics as diverse as Noam Chomsky, the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, Robert Anton Wilson and Edmund Burke. Being a late developer, I went through the teenage phase of hating everyone and everything while in my early 20s. I was alone and homeless; not really angry but cynical and disenchanted.

At Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce also regrets O’Rourke’s death:

I met Mr O’Rourke about a decade ago, in what was the aftermath of the 2008 financial smash. He was charming company (my wife was bowled over by him – you have to watch these silver-tongued Irishmen) and retained the fizz that I recall from his coruscating book, Republican Party Reptile. I read that, I think, in around 1989, and then got my hands on anything he wrote. When he became a traveling correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine (a fact that today strikes one as impossible, such is the tribalism of our culture), I followed his columns closely. Parliament of Whores, written in the early 1990s and on the cusp of the Bill Clinton decade, stands the test of time as a brilliantly funny takedown of Big Government. Then came classics such as Eat The Rich and All The Trouble In The World.

I don’t quite think he kept the standard of searing wit + commentary at that level into the later 90s and into the current century. He did “serious stuff” with an amusing turn, such as a fine book about Adam Smith […] and could turn on the brilliance, but I think some of the energy had fallen off. He was a Dad with all the responsibilities that brings, and younger and less funny and more aggressive voices began to dominate the noise level in the public square. (Or maybe that is a sign that I am getting old, ahem.) O’Rourke, to the anger of some, wasn’t a Trump fan, and said so. He moved quite more explicitly libertarian, having a gig at the CATO Institute think tank. By his early 70s, I did not read or hear much of his doings, and that was a shame in the age of Greta, Cancel Culture, “Save the NHS”, Great Resets, Chinese nastiness and the Keto Diet. (I am kidding slightly about the last point.)

P J O’Rourke’s death saddens me as much as did that of two other fine men whom I met over the years and who died from cancer over the past couple of years: Brian Micklethwait and Sir Roger Scruton. They were all very different men, but they shared a common love of liberty, a mischievous wit and a hatred of cant.

I think the first of his books I ever read was Republican Party Reptile, and my copy got a bit dog-eared from being lent out to many friends and acquaintances over the next few years. As I understand it, O’Rourke had children late in life, and it may have been one of the reasons that some of the character and energy of his earlier works are somewhat lacking in writings from the last fifteen years or so … there are few activities that can absorb energy like caring for young children (I love seeing my grand-nieces when they visit, but I’m totally knackered by the time we’re waving goodbye).

January 12, 2022

“You feel instantly at home when you arrive in Kenya because Kenya was once everyone’s home!”

Filed under: Africa, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When I was in middle school, my favourite teacher was a huge fan of the Leakey family’s discoveries in central Africa, and took every opportunity to show us films on the latest hominid remains uncovered (and by “latest”, it usually meant several years old, as 16mm films distributed through the county school system were rarely all that “new”). I assume she was a frustrated anthropologist herself, honestly, although I found her to be a very good teacher even if she’d “settled” for teaching as a career. In The Iconoclast, Geoffrey Clarfield remembers the late Richard Leakey, “the last Victorian scientist”, who died earlier this month in Kenya:

Richard Leakey at the WTTC Global Summit 2015.
Detail of original photo by the World Travel & Tourism Council via Wikimedia Commons.

Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey died on January 2nd at age 77, following an extraordinary career devoted to the scientific exploration of human origins. Richard was once my boss. And although we never became friends, I came to know him fairly well.

He died peacefully in his house overlooking Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where he’d made his most notable discoveries, and which occupied his imagination from an early age until his final days. It was fitting that he was buried beside his home, amid the same terrain from which he’d dug up humanity’s long-buried early ancestors. As I once heard him say to a group of visitors, “You feel instantly at home when you arrive in Kenya because Kenya was once everyone’s home!” (Essayists are supposed to shun exclamation marks, but this was simply the way the man spoke.)

To an outsider, Richard’s work history may appear to comprise a series of disconnected, sometimes testosterone-driven adventures. By turns, he was a wildlife trapper and animal trader, safari guide, bush pilot, gifted (albeit informally trained) fossil hunter, archaeological excavator, scientific autodidact, museum and civil-service administrator, member of parliament, opposition leader, cabinet minister, conservation activist, Kenyan patriot, fundraiser, public speaker, and prolific writer. The public knew him best as a television and film presenter. But those who knew him privately will also remember him as an enthusiastic team leader and mentor of young talent.

In my case, he helped advance my own project to train young Kenyan researchers to record and document traditional music in the northern part of their country, the Turkana District in particular. When I’d raised funds for this initiative, he brought it under the auspices of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), of which he was then director.

While he may have seemed like something of an (enormously) overachieving dilettante to some, there was in fact a unity to his life and work. The times being what they are, many will focus on the fact that he was a white man taking a prominent role in a largely black country. But in truth, he likely attracted more scrutiny for being a fervent admirer of Charles Darwin, and a secular atheist, in a religious part of the world. He once published his own edited and illustrated version of Origin of Species, which I read when I was working for him, and his contributions to that volume gave me insight into what I believe was his fundamentally edifying professional motivation. I still have it on my shelf.

Richard emphasized that humankind had evolved in the Great Rift Valley, and from there had spread “out of Africa”, as the saying goes. He also believed that a previously underestimated factor in human evolution had been our species’ relationship to evolving biodiversity and prehistoric climate fluctuation — “paleoenvironments” as they came to be called.

December 14, 2021

Michael Nesmith, RIP

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh paid tribute to the late Michael Nesmith:

Michael Nesmith, the Monkees’ toqued Texan, died on Friday at the age of 78. It’s probably fitting that Nesmith died at a moment when the Beatles are back in the forefront of public consciousness: being hired as a fake Beatle for a television show was the beginning, for him, of an epic American life. It’s a sequence of events that defies belief in retrospect.

The Monkees were a corporate creation — four guys pulled together in order to be vaguely Beatles-like and serve as the public face of a series of glorious hit singles written (and largely played) by others. They had a period of truly enormous stardom, but they began to attract criticism when word of their sham-like nature filtered out into a world of increasing concern with authenticity. Meanwhile, they were themselves revolting against the Monkees machine and its Svengali, Don Kirshner — a revolt of which the sharply intelligent Nesmith was the acknowledged leader.

The Monkees got control of their performing lives — and began to make distinctly inferior records. There is a reason “Last Train to Clarksville” went to number 1 on the charts, and “I’m a Believer” (written by Neil Diamond) went to number 1, and “Daydream Believer” went to number 1, and Nesmith’s “Listen to the Band” went to number 63. Nobody really had much use for authentic Monkees. By all rights they ought to have ended up as Milli Vanilli.

Yet Nesmith had one rock-‘n’-roll standard, one bright gemlike classic, in him. This was “Different Drum”, a record Nesmith had written in 1964 before anyone had invented the Monkees. He couldn’t get Kirshner and his hired tastemakers and arrangers to turn it into an actual Monkees record. It did appear on an episode of the show in 1966, but in an astonishingly humiliating way: Nesmith’s character, “Mike Nesmith”, plays a few bars of it very haltingly while pretending to be an inept country-folk singer, “Billy Roy Hodstetter”.

A country-folk singer was, of course, what Nesmith actually was when not in front of the cameras. The result is a media puzzle worthy of the brainpower of a dozen French deconstructionists. Nesmith, in this handful of seconds, is a real musician in a fake TV band pretending to be a real TV musician on a fake show-within-a-show, mangling his own genuine material.

October 5, 2021

Lars Vilks, RIP

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn remembers Swedish artist Lars Vilks, best known for his defence of free speech rights after coming under (literal) attack by Islamist terrorists enraged that he drew a cartoon of Mohammed:

Lars Vilks, 1946-2021.
Cropped from a larger image by OlofE via Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.

[…]

Lars was very funny about his newfound celebrity: He carried with him a picture of a Pakistani mob that had been whipped into a frenzy by somewhat inaccurate intelligence, so they were all jumping up and down in the streets demanding “DEATH TO LARISH”. And for a while that day in Copenhagen we all called him Larish: “Hey, Larish, another beer?”, etc.

Larish was likewise a hoot about two of the first jihadists sent to dispatch him. He came home one night to find that a couple of Kosovars had set his kitchen alight. As they escaped across the snowy field heady with the warm glow of their glorious victory over the infidel, they chanced to glance down and noticed that that warm glow was because they’d accidentally set their trousers on fire. After some effort to extinguish the blaze, they were forced to abandon their flaming pantaloons and scamper off into the chill night in their jihadist BVDs. Alas, the best-laid plans and all that: in addition to being trouserless in a Nordic winter, they had neglected to remove from their smouldering pants the charred driving licenses and other identifying documentation. Police were able to track them down rather easily, not least because they were the only two men in Scandinavia taking a late-night stroll in their Y-fronts.

When Lars told this story in Copenhagen, the whole room was roaring with laughter. Afterwards we all went to dinner. And news came to us somewhere between the soup and digestifs that a one-legged Chechen from Belgium, seething with resentment at Lars and the rest of us infidels, had prematurely self-detonated in his Copenhagen hotel room while assembling his package and preparing to hop into Paradise. And we all had a grand laugh about that, too. As I put it that day, Islamic terrorists are like Yosemite Sam, forever shoving the stick of dynamite in their own pants – until one day Yosemite Ahmed manages to get it right. After the bombing of the Conservative Party conference in 1984, the IRA taunted Mrs Thatcher: “You have to be lucky every day, we only have to be lucky once.”

Those jihad incompetents with the smoking trousers would modify the line: We only have to be competent once. Al-Qa’eda had put a six-figure bounty on Lars’ head, and there was no shortage of takers. In Ireland, the gardai arrested four men and three women from Waterford and Cork for a well-advanced plot to fly to Stockholm and kill him. At the height of the so-called “Troubles” you’d have been hard put to find five men in Waterford willing to travel to London to kill Mrs Thatcher or Willie Whitelaw. But an obscure artist in southern Sweden? Pas de problème!

As the report in the Daily Mail shows, the circumstances of Vilks’ death are at the very least, suspicious:

Swedish police investigating the car crash death of a controversial artist who had survived multiple assassination attempts after drawing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed cannot explain why his car was travelling so fast.

Lars Vilks, 75, was killed on Sunday when the police car he was travelling in veered onto the wrong side of the road and collided with a truck in Markaryd, in the Swedish province of Kronoberg.

Both vehicles caught fire and the truck driver, 45, was taken to hospital with serious injuries, while the two police protection officers and Vilks were killed.

Investigators believe there were no external influences that led to the deaths and say the crash may have been caused by a burst tyre.

However, they are unable to explain why the car was travelling at around 100mph, according to witnesses, in a 68mph zone.

September 7, 2021

L. Neil Smith, 12 May 1946 – 27 August 2021

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From what might be the penultimate issue of the Libertarian Enterprise, Neil’s daughter Rylla Smith says farewell to her father:

Lester Neil Smith III, novelist and political commentator, gunsmith and musician, visionary and futurist, passed away on Friday, August 27th at Poudre Valley Hospital after a lengthy battle with heart and kidney disease. He was 75 years old.

A long-time resident of Fort Collins, Colorado, Neil was born on May 12th, 1946 at Mercy Hospital in Denver, Colorado to Maj. Lester N. Smith II and Marie L. Coveleskie Smith.

Neil, known in the world of science fiction as L. Neil Smith or, affectionately, “El Neil”, is survived by his beloved wife, Cathy L.Z. Smith, his daughter, Rylla C. Smith, his brother Roger L. Smith, his nephews Nolan and Travis, and his aunt, Barbara Ohlwiler, as well as countless friends and brothers-in-arms. He was preceded in death by his mother and father.

Neil’s life was one spent perpetually looking forward — toward the future of freedom, of technology, of the continuation of the evolution of the human body, mind, and spirit, and toward the endless sea of stars. As a child, he wanted to be a marine biologist, to discover the unknown in the depths of the seas; this translated naturally in his young adulthood to a thirst for knowledge of the far greater unknown beyond the shores of this world.

Neil had an avid interest in the politics of personal liberty and always stood for what he believed to be right. He had a passion for friendly debate and never shied away from speaking his mind.

In the late 1970s, he wrote the first of his many novels, The Probability Broach, which began a long and prolific career in the burgeoning world of liberty-oriented science fiction, and was the creator of the Prometheus Award, as well as the recipient of the 2016 Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Memorial services will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado on a date yet to be determined; for more information, please follow Neil’s memorial page on EverLoved.com or contact Rylla Smith at ryllacat@gmail.com.

“And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.” — L. Neil Smith

August 18, 2021

QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Wednesday [May 5th] marks the 200th anniversary of the death of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, depending on who you’re listening to, either a wily Corsican bandit who rose to dominate Europe through force and terror, or a messiah of liberalism who de-medievalized the continent. Whichever view you buy, Napoleon’s unique vis viva is still felt strongly in the world today. Any strong history undergrad ought to be able to chart a path from Napoleon through his nephew and successor Napoleon III, to what A.J.P. Taylor called “the period of the German wars” (ending in 1945), to the present moment.

The French Republic still uses Napoleonic touches in its mythmaking, as do its politicians. Sweden’s crown is still worn by descendants of Bernadotte, a general who was of humble birth but proved the ultimate champion of the emperor’s bizarre game of thrones. Napoleon said of his army that every man in it carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. By the same token, every ambitious colonel who ever plotted to pull together a squadron of tanks and overthrow a president carries a little portrait of Napoleon I next to his bosom. It may not be fair to say that Napoleon bears part of the responsibility for Hitler, but if there had been no Napoleon there could not possibly have been a Hitler. It is probably one of those “necessary cause” vs. “sufficient cause” things that give people so much trouble.

The bicentenary of Napoleon’s lonely death in custody on a windblown South Atlantic island has given the English an excuse to refresh some of their most precious and whimsical tokens of victory. At Apsley House, the home of the 1st Duke of Wellington, art restorers have been giving special attention to a bronze copy of Napoleon’s death mask, which was taken in plaster after the emperor expired. It’s a mesmerizing totem: to our eyes, the face emphasizes the Italian character that the ci-devant Buonaparte struggled to elude and conceal on the way to becoming master of France. Death masks seem creepy to us today, but they speak in ways a portrait cannot.

Colby Cosh, “Will There Be Cake?”, NP Platformed, 2021-05-05.

July 20, 2021

Kurt Westergaard, RIP

Filed under: Europe, Liberty, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on the life and work of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard:

Kurt Westergaard and I were successive winners of the Danish Free Press Society’s Sappho Award. I was very flattered to find myself in his company, but couldn’t honestly say I deserved to be. Kurt was one of the bravest men of our time – not because he was inclined to bravery, but simply because, when it was required, he met the challenge and never backed down.

Sixteen years ago Flemming Rose of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten decided to conduct a thought experiment in public after an author casually revealed that he couldn’t find any Danish artist willing to illustrate his book about “the Prophet Mohammed” (as the BBC now routinely styles him). So Flemming called twelve cartoonists and invited them to depict the late Prophet. Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon was the memorable one, and the one you recall as the years roll by. It was a pithy visual jest: Mohammed’s turban as a bomb with a lit fuse. See picture at top right.

“I attempted to show that terrorists get their spiritual ammunition from parts of Islam, and with this spiritual ammunition, and with dynamite and other explosives, they kill people,” Kurt told my old newspaper The National Post a few years back. “I showed this in a cartoon and what happened? They want to kill me, so I think I was right.”

An otherwise courtly, cultured Dane, Kurt Westergaard had a somewhat arresting dress code, preferring le rouge et le noir, the colors of anarchists, although, as a practical matter, it’s hard for a man of advanced years to carry off red trousers, whatever his motivation. He would qualify his pantaloons by explaining that he was not a political anarchist but a cultural one. Still, one can gather from the garb alone that Westergaard was no “right-winger”. Like most of the men and women I have shared a stage with in Europe this century, he was an old Sixties radical sufficiently principled to think the same kind of jokes he’d applied to church, monarchy, parliament and every other societal institution should also be applied to Islam. He never wanted to be a “free speech hero”, but gamely bore the burthen once it had been dropped on him. He certainly never wanted to be world-famous, albeit more so in Mogadishu than Manhattan and Lahore than Los Angeles. It cost him a comfortable retirement, weakened his health, and an ever more craven culture denied him the consolations of monetary exploitation. When I expressed sympathy, he laughed and said he’d do the same cartoon all over again even knowing what he was in for.

The blood lust began with a trio of imams on the make shopping the twelve cartoons (plus three cruder fakes) round the Muslim world, and leaving it to the usual Islamonutters to take it from there: In nothing flat, over two hundred people were dead – which meant that CNN & Co were obliged to cover the story. They did so by modifying Westergaard’s cartoon, with Mohammed’s face pixilated, as if he’d entered the witness protection programme. If only. In reality, it was that dwindling band of people who believe in free speech – and, indeed, free speech itself – that found itself in the witness protection programme.

April 9, 2021

HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1921-2021

Filed under: Britain, Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:05

Sad, but not unexpected news this morning as His Royal Highness Prince Philip has died. Along with all of his many earthly titles and awards, he was considered divine by villagers in Vanuatu. Janet Davison reports for the CBC:

HRH Prince Philip was the Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Canadian Regiment. In April 2013, he presented the Regimental Colours to the 3rd Battalion.
Photo by Jamie McCaffrey via Wikimedia Commons.

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth, died today at 99. He was the longest-serving royal consort in British history.

His death, announced by Buckingham Palace, came more than three-and-a-half years after Philip formally stepped back from public life, a retreat that had been happening gradually for several years.

In an interview in June 2011 with the BBC, the no-nonsense Philip spoke about “winding down” and reducing his workload as a member of the Royal Family.

“I reckon I’ve done my bit so I want to enjoy myself a bit now, with less responsibility, less frantic rushing about, less preparation, less trying to think of something to say,” he said.

His final official public engagement came on Aug, 2, 2017, when he attended a parade of Royal Marines at Buckingham Palace and met servicemen who had taken part in a charity race.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement Friday calling Philip “a man of great service to others” who maintained a special relationship with the Canadian Armed Forces and was a patron to more than 40 Canadian organizations.

“Prince Philip was a man of great purpose and conviction, who was motivated by a sense of duty to others,” he said. “He will be fondly remembered as a constant in the life of our Queen – a lifelong companion who was always at her side offering unfailing support as she carried out her duties.”

Through the Queen’s 69 years on the throne, the man whom she had called her “strength and stay” carried out more than 22,000 solo engagements and made nearly 5,500 speeches. He attended events periodically with the Queen and other members of the Royal Family after stepping back from official duties.

Update: Colby Cosh recounts a story about Prince Philip’s WW2 naval career that I’d never heard before:

Socially he was entitled to the style of “royal highness” in his own right, yet he was looked down on by mere aristocrats, and even commoners, who had superior public-school credentials and polish. Marriage to a princess might have been impossible if Philip hadn’t impressed George VI personally. As a junior officer he was well-liked, but strict about shipboard order and neatness. He was said to have a natural intuition for command. If he wanted something done, his word put everything in motion at once.

The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Wallace in December, 1942.
Imperial War Museum photo FL 10546 of collection 8308-29 via Wikimedia Commons.

He performed well throughout the war, but his finest moment as an officer was not common knowledge until Harry Hargreaves, a Royal Navy yeoman who ended up in Westport, Ont., published a memoir of his own service in 1999. Hargreaves served with Philip aboard HMS Wallace, an old “flotilla leader” ship that had been finished in 1919 and modified for speed. Its original shore-bombardment hardware was pulled in favour of anti-aircraft guns and submarine-killing equipment.

Wallace’s and the prince’s great moment came in July 1943 when the ship was assigned to escort Convoy KMF18 from the Algerian harbour of Bône to the beaches of Sicily. As it happens, this convoy carried the First Canadian Division, which Mackenzie King had lobbied to put in action for the first large-scale amphibious invasion of occupied Europe. Wallace was to ward off U-boats on the trans-Mediterranean journey and then protect the landing party from German air attacks.

On the evening of July 8, Wallace was spotted on a clear, bright night and attacked by flights of Stuka dive-bombers. One damaging near-miss, Hargreaves wrote, had everybody prepared to die when the Stukas came back. Philip, the ship’s first lieutenant, quickly cooked up a plan to build a raft and set it afloat with smoke floats attached, hoping it would look enough like the wreckage of a destroyed ship to distract the returning planes.

“It had been marvellously quick thinking,” Hargreaves said, “conveyed to a willing team and put into action as if rehearsed.” But it required Wallace to steam away from the decoy and await its fate in silence and darkness. When the Stukas came back into earshot, the yeoman “screwed up (his) shoulders in anticipation of the bombs.”

The Germans took the bait and attacked the decoy. “Prince Philip,” Hargreaves concluded, “saved our lives that night.” He also saved the ship, which went on to cover the British-Canadian landing near Pachino.

Having survived the scrape, the prince was alive and intact to attend the Royal Family’s Christmas pantomime at Windsor Castle. Princess Elizabeth’s governess, Marion Crawford, found that combat had turned a “bumptious boy” into a “grave and charming man.” But the princess’s already longstanding crush on her distant cousin had not flagged, and never would.

March 16, 2021

“… because who doesn’t like to see both wine snobs and the French taken down a peg or two?”

Filed under: Books, France, History, USA, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys sadly notes the passing of Steven Spurrier, perhaps best known for organizing the “Judgement of Paris” in 1976:

The wine world lost one of its giants this week in Steven Spurrier. He’s one of the very few people who managed to put the subject on the front pages of the world’s newspapers when he organised the so-called Judgement of Paris competition in 1976.

This was a blind tasting judged by the great and good of the French wine world pitting the might of Bordeaux and Burgundy, against California, a place whose wines most Europeans had never even tasted. Surely France could not lose. But thrillingly, and deliciously, it did, with Californian wines coming top in both the white and red categories. It inspired a book and a feature film Bottle Shock starring Alan Rickman as Spurrier. In fact, the media, particularly over here and in the US, has never lost interest. Perhaps because who doesn’t like to see both wine snobs and the French taken down a peg or two?

More significantly, it marked the arrival of American and later Australian, Chilean and other New World wines. Fittingly, I first met Spurrier at a round table tasting for an upmarket Chilean wine. These tastings could be nerve-wracking affairs for new writers. They still fill me with anxiety. I never know what to say as the big beasts of the wine world opine. Sometimes, the cellar rooms where such tastings are often held seem much too small for all those jostling egos.

I was sat next to Spurrier and, much to my surprise, he asked me my opinion on the wines, something I don’t think any other writer had done up to that point. He then engaged with what I said, and said something like, “yes, I think you’ve got it there.” Or words to that effect. It’s quite hard to express how startling this experience was to someone outside the wine world. It’s like Martin Scorsese asking your opinion on film making.

March 3, 2021

QotD: Big game hunting

Filed under: Africa, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.

P.G. Wodehouse, Ring for Jeeves.

January 17, 2021

Las Vegas marks a significant loss

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Saturday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh notes the death of Siegfried Fischbacher, better known as half of the stage magic team Siegfried & Roy:

… Las Vegas, as we all know, is a special place in which ordinary moral writ and aesthetic judgment have greatly diminished force. Vegas is honouring Siegfried & Roy this week, and will recognize them forever, as city fathers. Even Penn Jillette, a fellow magician whose career has been a crusade against old-school schmaltz and glitz and other Teutonic concepts that Siegfried & Roy embraced, inscribed a small tribute to his colleague.

Siegfried & Roy were true pioneers in transforming Vegas into a full-spectrum entertainment capital. Their basic function was not to parade oppressed animals, or to do conjuring tricks. Considered as “magicians,” did they have a signature effect? Or is the truth that prop-heavy, mechanistic stage magic is just relatively easy to combine with a wildlife act that also travels poorly?

No, their mission was to extract money from the family members of degenerate gamblers and, gosh, were they good at it. When they started out at the New Frontier hotel in 1981, Las Vegas was still its postwar self — an anarchic watering hole and sybaritic paradise mostly for adult men, associated with a boozy, jocular style of entertainment that was rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror of the culture. (Siegfried & Roy were never trendy, exactly, but being unique was enough.)

Almost no one can have consciously envisioned a world in which gambling in various forms regained wide, post-Protestant social acceptance. That gambling would one day become legal everywhere at an astonishing pace would have been seen as a nuclear-grade threat to the literal existence of the city. The nightmare has arrived, but Vegas is bigger and more economically sound than ever. Siegfried & Roy helped reshape the industrial nucleus of a city you don’t even have to like gambling — or showgirls — to enjoy.

QotD: Hunter S. Thompson

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

HST killed himself. He never would have “turned his life around” — that’s a hard thing to try when the room’s been spinning for 40 years. Depression? Wouldn’t be surprising. A bad verdict from the doc? Wouldn’t be surprising. A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period. I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman — meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read Hell’s Angels. That was a man who could hit the keys right.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-02-21

November 25, 2020

Jan Morris, RIP

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

By an odd co-incidence, I began reading the third volume of Morris’s British Empire trilogy just last night and today I discovered that she recently died at age 94. The particular edition I have has Morris’s original male name on the cover, but her female name in the “note about the author”:

Jan Morris, who died last week at the age of 94, may have lived one of the more various and accomplished lives on record. She was, in turn, a soldier, a newspaper correspondent with a number of scoops to her name, a fine memoirist, and a writer of books whose scope encompassed the world.

Any dutiful obituarist must also note something else which happened fifty years ago. It is likely for ever to feature in the first paragraph, if not the first line, of everything written about Morris. She was born a man, named James by her parents, and underwent what her publishers and profilers term “a change of sexual role” in 1972 – back when such a thing was a rarity and rather dangerous to accomplish.

I hope to leave that subject aside for a moment while contemplating her place in letters. By the end of her long life, Morris had become something of a national treasure and an institution. Her quixotic obsessions – a personal, mythical interpretation of the Welsh side of her family and her home in that country, and the late First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher – became the subject of stories shared by friends, editors and admirers.

She gave wise and funny interviews to the papers about savouring mussels without dignity and why whether what one is doing is kind ought, in a good world, to be the modest test applied to action.

Other profilers note her long companionship with Elizabeth (née Tuckniss) – first through marriage, then a legally-divorced close friendship, and finally a civil partnership, with the ceremony witnessed by a local couple who afterwards invited the two for tea. Elizabeth survives Jan, but a visiting journalist or two was shown the headstone which is planned for both of them. They will lie on a Welsh island they owned in the Dwyfor, a river that runs by their home. The stone reads: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life”.

These are beautiful stories, but they should not retroactively colour in fully our impressions of Morris. Nor should a sense – repeated in some otherwise careful obituaries – that as “James”, Morris’s “written voice always sounded certain”. Whereas as Jan, her writing grew more introspective and aware of the ways that time and tide conspire to decay the facades of men as much as they do institutions and places. This was exhibited notably in her Pax Britannica trilogy, which chronicled Britain’s imperial decline.

September 21, 2020

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RIP

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren notes the passing of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at a particularly fraught moment in US political history:

US Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia.
Screencap from a report by CBS News.

The death of the prominent American jurisprude, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will be this morning’s example. I noticed that a favoured rightwing blog said, “Breaking news. Try to show some respect for the dead.” This comes more easily to a human being, if he is at least superficially decent. Self-discipline may make it possible for others.

Mrs Ginsburg was toward the left side of the Supreme Court in Washington, in her rulings and often articulate dissents, but I loved her anyway. So did the late Antonin Scalia, who when he died inspired real grief to exponents of the other side. They were notorious buddies, Ginsburg and Scalia. They were more than willing to hear each other out; neither was a hothead. Both were deeply informed about Yankee law, and human law generally, unlike most judges. They could discuss its principles at a high level; and at a low, with a sense of humour. Their mutual respect set an example in their vicinity, claquers who included other Court members. They were both utterly worth having at their stations.

One wonders if those days are gone, for the foreseeable future, when some degree of civilization was possible in legal and political debate. When I look instead at electoral campaigns, in which knowing, malicious lies are repeated by both sides, and both are trying to raise the temperature (I won’t say “equally”), I see something larger than the current political issues. We cannot have public order if this continues; only tyranny can be imposed by one side. Mistakes are being made by “my side,” when we forget that daily life requires negotiation. Or rather it doesn’t, if one prefers civil war.

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