In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…for some reason I have started reading two new books.
I am reading:
Slow Horses by Mick Herron- I’ve read a bit about Herron in the comment sections here at WAYR as well as Jill Lepore’s profile of him in The New Yorker. I have another book by Herron somewhere in my book stacks but I want to start with the Slough House series.
So far, so good; granted, I haven’t gotten very far in this tenth anniversary edition of Slow Horses, which begins with a Herron preface.
The life of spies, whether the James Bond copycats with their jetpacks and exploding wristwatches, or the down-at-heel dogs bodies of Len Deighton and John le Carré, were foreign territory to me, but I knew what went on behind ordinary doors; I knew about office life, about office politics...the larger an organization becomes, the more dysfunctional it gets. This was a truth that surely applied to the intelligence services as to any other place of work.
...Telegraph, Times, Mail, Independent, Guardian.
At one time or another, he’d written for all of these. That wasn’t so much a though that occurred to him as an awareness that nudged him most mornings, round about now: cub reporter — ridiculous term— in Peterborough, then the inevitable shift to London, and the varied tempos of the major beats, crime and politics, before he ascended, aged forty-eight, to his due: the weekly column. Two, in fact. Sundays and Wednesdays. Regular appearances on Question Time. From firebrand to the acceptable face of dissent; an admittedly long trajectory in his case, but that made arrival all the sweeter. If he could have freeze-framed life back then, he’d have little to complain about.
These days, he no longer wrote for the newspapers. And when cab drivers recognized him, it was for the wrong reasons.
Journey of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown- This is probably as close a thing to a Xmas present to myself that I bought recently. The intellectual autobiography of perhaps the finest historian of late antiquity in the world.
Brown begins with an account of his own family’s Protestant Irish origins in Dublin and it winds up being more of a wild and pleasant ride than I expected.
Altogether, I learned much from the experience of both sides of my mother’s family much that was of use to a historian of the Roman Empire in its last centuries. From the Greys, I learned about the magnetic draw of a worldwide empire in its glory days—in its Golden Age, like the Rome of the Antonines (138-180)with which Edward Gibbon began his melancholy narrative in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From the Warrens, I learned something more sad but more challenging for a historian: how to understand what it was like to face the end of empire on the ground— in the small world of the little big men of the provinces— and to do so with dignity and good nature.
The Assault on Reason by Al Gore