My Books

My Books

Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay 'On Books', disclaiming scholarship; claiming rather to be clumsy, slow-witted and forgetful, but explicitly intending to throw light on aspects of himself. Here I frankly do the same. 

I love my books as friends. Each book shares with me at least one common interest, and in many cases more than one. Sometime I discover an interest and recruit the books to share and deepen it. Sometime a book will initiate the friendship and open my eyes to a new fascination. Sometime a book will introduce me to its friends, as when I met Coleridge as a friend of Wordsworth. Then, through Coleridge, I met Hazlitt and Lamb.

Some of my books are old friends, going away back to my earliest childhood.  At that age books appeared at the whim of grown-ups. Some I retain largely by chance, for I had to share family books with six siblings. Thus, I have Father's copy of  'Household Stories from the collection of the Brothers Grimm', and Granny's 'Lives of the Hunted'. My mother must have brought to the family shelves S. R. Crockett's 'The Lilac Sunbonnet' (the first time that my pre-adolescent heart-strings had been played upon in that way). Two more books that were chosen for me, but which I dearly loved, are: 'The Secret Garden' (by F.H. Burnett, illustrated, Heinemann, 1949 printing); and a book of Irish folk tales called 'The Little Good People' (by Kathleen Foyle, illustrated, Frederick Warne, 1949 printing), given me (as I always imagined) by our Irish nanny.

When I was only eight, I was allowed to cycle by myself down from our home in Juniper Green to Colinton Library, one of the many public libraries in Scotland that benefited from Andrew Carnegie's support. I remember the excitement at seeing so many books. And borrowing Tom Brown's Schooldays, though that was read to us by Father. Mother (or Father) read to us the entire "Swallows & Amazons" series, Gone with the wind, Vanity Fair and several Scott novels; but those volumes are now on other's shelves.

        As a teenager I roamed the shelves of the two public libraries in Shrewsbury, and the dustier recesses of the town's second-hand bookshops. I owe to those dusty shelves my love of the helplessly irascible Walter Savage Landor, and his 'Imaginary Conversations'. From Landor (the first man I heard described as a 'Literary Lion') I learned what little I know of the private life of Aesop. Also his fascinatingly arrogant 4-line 'Finis'. But alas, his sun has set; his name is scarcely known today. 

Likewise to those dusty shelves I owe my transient admiration of Herbert Spencer. What heroic ambition!; his plan to summarise all knowledge in a 10-volumed 'System of Synthetic Philosophy', a work that took him forty years to compile. Knowing my limits as a slow-reader with meagre funds, I bought only his 'First Principles', intriguingly divided into two sections: (i) The Unknowable, and (ii) The Knowable. When I moved to the Biology sixth form at school, I quickly concluded that I would learn nothing about biology from Spencer, and disposed of my 'First Principles'. Like Landor, Spencer is another sad relic, passing in a hundred years from clubbing at the Athenaeum with Presidents of the Royal Society, to virtual anonymity; his fossilized remains barely discernible in the forgotten strata of second-hand bookshops. 

I may confess here my pride in owning a 1847 edition of Robert Chambers's 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'.  What a lovely conceit, that of prying into the mind of God as he fumbled his way towards the creation of man! Chambers wondering (for example) if those two small nipples were added to a man's chest "for mere appearance sake" (p. 200). This 6th edition (like the earlier ones) was anonymous, as the canny Robert Chambers did not want to bring trouble on himself or his family. This book was acknowledged (by Darwin himself) as paving the way for the acceptance of Darwin's  Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. It seems clear that Chambers was as convinced as Darwin, and Lamarck, of the long slow process of evolution, but he suggested no mechanism. If the animals and plants had been created by a divine hand, then clearly God had been at work experimenting for many thousands of years. Today it seems amazing that church leaders were still, mid-nineteenth-century, so outwardly confident in their opposition to the idea of evolution. 

I might mention one other book where my pride in ownership (such as it is) outweighs my regard for the book. The preposterous Lord Chesterfield wrote some 400 letters to his illegitimate son, trying to teach him the superficial polish that he himself valued so highly. He told his son: “I shall love you extremely, while you deserve it; but not one moment longer.” The illegitimate Phillip himself fathered two sons before secretly marrying their mother. He died before his father who, in his will, provided for the two boys, but not for their mother; whereupon she exposed the mean-spirited Earl to ridicule by selling  the accumulated letters for 1,500 guineas. I bought my copy in 1990 when my son was 12, thinking I might learn some tips in parenting; but was horrified at the advice it so earnestly advocated.

I do not know how Plato's shorter dialogues first came into my hands. Were they simply 'in the house', or was I rooting about in Shrewsbury's town library where Darwin himself had been a schoolboy? The first I read was either 'Gorgias' or 'Protagoras', which I read as an elegant routing of a pompous windbag. I soon chased up the others. I was perhaps most impressed at Socrates's demonstration (in 'Meno') that the slave boy intuitively knew Pythagoras' theorem; and was most moved by the death of Socrates (in 'Phaedo'). Socrates became one of my adolescent heroes, and for years was shoulder to shoulder with Jesus.

Yes, I love my books, deeply but not exclusively. In the spring of 1962, the family moved from the fine 18 century dower house at Dorrington that we had rented for 7 years, to a smaller, newer, house in Carding Mill Valley. I came back from college to find the family already in occupation. Instead of my old room, under the eaves on the 2nd floor, facing south over the rose-garden, where the swifts swooped and screeched as they came in to their nests, I now shared a bedroom with my older brother. But I still had my fumed oak dining table, and my mahogany chest-of-drawers; and my books. One evening, after I had retired from the drawing room, Father came up to tell me that Mother had been quite hurt by my saying, over our postprandial coffee, that "I loved coming home to my books". Oh dear! I could not un-say it.  Of course I loved my mother too. But let me return to my theme, for that was meant as a brief aside; we still have a way to go.

        We were a moderately large family; by 1958 we numbered six boys and one girl. I was in the lucky position of being born second.  By inclination and by choice I did not compete. I was a slow, but retentive, reader. And it may be for that reason that I read relatively few novels; perhaps some forty (or 100) in my entire life. I remember Father buying several copies of Sartre's La Nausea and Kafka's The Castle and handing them round, saying that this was the sort of stuff his psychiatric patients were telling him. But I think my main fascination was to learn about things; people, their ideas and their doings. Not people's fantasies ("wouldn't it be nice if" ). 

I suppose I was rather normal as a teenager, but unique for all that; at least in my reading, where I differed from my siblings. And who else might I compare myself with, for we were a rather isolated family, perpetuating perhaps our shy father's own boyhood isolation, and his insecurities. In Dorrington, we had entertained for several days a visitor from New Zealand, a Dr. Armstrong; he who had established the medical practice and built the house in Taupo that became for three years our home. He gave me a book called 'The Boy's Country Book', containing articles on camping, fishing, gliding, underwater swimming, plant hunting, beach combing, and more.  Why me? Perhaps I already showed signs that I would become a botanist. Or, perhaps my path in life was determined by the book. In either case it became a favourite. In the next few years I made myself a canoe, kept pigeons, grew carnations, caught fish with my fingers, fly-fished our stream, collected and identified wild-flowers, bought myself flippers and snorkel, camped rough-and-light, and youth-hosteled.  

Two others of my favourite teenage books may be mentioned here: E.V. Lucas' 'The Open Road' anthology, and Stephen Graham's 'The Gentle Art of Tramping'. The latter explained how to make coffee in a billycan, and advised plenty of handkerchiefs. I have since walked (sleeping rough): Edinburgh to Moffat and back, Church Stretton to Llanbister Road station, Göttingen to Kassel, and part of the way from Paris to Dieppe. 

I love my volume of Mathematical Tables: Logarithms to 7 decimal places, Trigonometrical, Nautical and other Tables. The Log(base 10) of 3 is 0.4771213. Not that I can navigate, but I like the idea that I am able to correct celestial altitude observation for refraction according to the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere. And calculate the distance (in nautical miles) to the visible horizon from my height above sea-level (in feet). And I enjoy my volume on 'Driving'  (1890) for its binding, for its haughty exclusion of the 'motor carriage'; but chiefly for its coverage of 'single-harness' and 'tandem-driving' by Lord Algernon St. Maur and Viscountess Georgiana Curzon respectively.  Even though I, myself, never drove more than a two wheeled 'governess cart'. 

My real-life heroes are mostly intellectual: Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Einstein. I have biographies and, where available, autobiographies. Regarding men of action, I have biographies of Nelson and Wellington, and bought (or was given) Slocum's 'Sailing Alone Around the World', George Bayly's Sea Life Sixty Years Ago, and Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. Yet I am amongst the least nautical members of my family;  for half of the family sail, and half do not, just as half play music and half do not. 

I have numerous books of biography, travel, history and philosophy; too many to list. And, in any case, owning, reading, and loving, are three very different things. I have several large dictionaries, and a similar number of grammars or guides to usage, poetry in collections and single authored volumes, and some hundred works of fiction ranging from Chaucer to the present. But these do not clamour to be listed. 

        However, I fear I bore my readers with this deliberate and un-called-for exhibition of my inner life.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979)

    Seeing the title of the previous post ("Six Dimensional Man") reminded me that I had a book upstairs by Herbert Marcuse called "One Dimensional Man" that I had never read; never even opened. Marcuse rocketed to world fame in the nineteen sixties, together with Hannah Arendt, as leading thinkers of the New Left. Perhaps it had belonged to my brother Peter (1944–1965). 

    This morning, while brewing my morning coffee, I brought the book down and took it out into the conservatory to read with my coffee. I could not make any sense of it. Even the title baffled me. Was it good to be one-dimensional, or bad? Did one-dimensional mean narrow, or focussed or obsessional. On page 50, half-way through a long paragraph, there was a line of type that had been carefully scored out, in ink. Had it not been scored I would have stumbled on that line, for it did not fit with the preceding line; nor did it fit with the following line. So my predecessor was right: there was a whole line of extraneous type inserted in the middle of the page. That rather knocked my confidence.

    The second-last chapter was titled "The Catastrophe of Liberation" –– and seemed oxymoronic.  I flipped through the final Conclusion, and put the book down defeated; and disappointed. My weary 83 year-old brain was not up to that sort of turgid prose writing and error-prone typography.

    Seeing my problem, the ingenious Google imp quickly found and proffered a 30 minute video [Ref.1] in which Bryan Magee interviewed the 79 year-old Marcuse, brilliantly revealing the important question raised by the Frankfurt School in 1930, two or three of the key answers they came up with in subsequent decades all carefully and cogently expounded by the aging Marcuse. I shall try to summarise [a] the question, and [b] the answers; then [c] turn to critique. (But I do recommend the video [Ref.1]). 

[a] The question raised by the Frankfurt philosophers was: "Why did Marx's proletarian revolution against capitalism not produce communism (as Marx had predicted), but produced instead the monster of fascism? And, after the (military) defeat of fascism, the present chaotic loss of values. 

[b] Obviously, society adapted.  On the one hand the proletariat changed; it was no longer true that "it had nothing to lose but its chains"; it had acquired many comforts and benefits, and it was better educated.  Capitalism also changed. It learned to manipulate the un-conscious and sub-conscious minds of its customers (the proletariat), creating false goals and selling empty dreams. But 'alienation' remained; the work of the average worker is unrewarding. The proletariat might even own shares, and thus the 'means of production', but it does not control the company; that is the role of the bosses earning grotesque salaries. 

[c] Critique. 

(i) Marcuse remained a loyal Marxist, in spite of the fact that all Marxist regimes were corrupt and brutal dictatorships, and in spite of the numerous and extensive corrections and modification that Marxism required in the mid-twentieth century. He remained a devotee of young Marx, sincerely believing that the ideal community involved sharing, co-operating and a 'subsuming of the Self'. (As, of course, did Buddha and Jesus.) Did Marcuse perhaps underestimate the strength and ubiquity of selfishness, and the role of 'Self' in concepts like liberty and libertarianism? 

(ii) Magee suggested that it is impossible to integrate individual egos into a class-based theory. Marcuse categorically disagreed. He had explicitly attempted (In "Eros and Civilization", 1955) to add Freud to Marx. But, while such an integration is highly relevant and necessary, it is a giant task. It may be that Marcuse only half succeeded. Economic theorists prefer to model individuals as motivated by rather simple forces like need, greed, fear, habit. The truth is absurdly more complex. 

(iii) Magee asked Marcuse why the philosophers of his school wrote such unreadably turgid prose. One might point out that these German philosophers all became refugees, living in the USA, writing and lecturing in a language that was not their mother tongue. Marcuse added Adorno's defence: that the Frankfurt School believed that the 'establishment' had so manipulated the language and syntax of social discourse that arguments automatically came out in their favour.  For example, people will tend to vote for 'liberty', till they eventually realise that 'regulation' better protects them from other people's liberties. To combat that deliberate manipulation, these philosophers felt driven to circumlocution and neologism. 

(iv)  Magee asked what positive benefits accrued from the Frankfurt School's updating of Marxism. Marcuse suggested that it provided, under the name of Critical Theory, a way of understanding the woes of our present post-capitalist Western society, claiming that while getting richer and more technically competent, we are getting more brutal, selfish, and dishonest. Magee suggested that this was a philosophy of disappointment.

(v) But (and this is my question, not Bryan Magee's) is Western society less happy now than in the nineteenth century?

   Anna Berry built a "constantly moving happiness machine" [Ref.2], to mimic and ridicule that created by the Techno-Military-Industrial-Complex, whereby the proletarian finds himself meaninglessly turning a handle, creating profit for someone else. 

References

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U23Ho0m_Sv0. "The Frankfurt School – Herbert Marcuse & Bryan Magee

[2] https://www.annaberry.co.uk/the-constantly-moving-happiness-machine/

Six Dimensional Man

                         The Six Dimensional Man

        Our hero, Steve, stood in front of the brown varnished door labelled 'Maker'. Under the label was one of those sliding shutters that allowed only one of two options to be seen: 'IN' or 'OUT'. It showed 'IN'. Steve hesitated a moment, took a deep breath and tapped tentatively on the door. A muffled voice called "Come in", so in he went. 

"Complaint or compliment?", asked the duty officer.

"Well, compliments obviously", said Steve "but I have been thinking, and wondered if it would be too bold of me to make a suggestion."

"We mostly get compliments, but you have a suggestion, eh? I don't see why not. Wait here till that red light goes green. You are lucky we are not too busy today."

Steve sat down on the last of a row of empty chairs, near a second varnished door and the red light, and waited while he tried to compose his thoughts.  At last the door slid open and out stumbled a young woman with outstretched hands as in a trance; or as a rabbit might if exposed to a car's headlights. A moment later the light went green and in went Steve. 

The figure before him seemed perfectly familiar; in fact very like all the pictures, though somewhat larger than he had expected; fatter, more easy-going, and more smiling. Steve bowed his head a little in unconscious modesty. 

"Well," said the Maker, "I gather you have some ideas. Are you wondering why you only have two legs, perhaps? I often get that."  And he beamed a good-natured smile down on Steve. "I really don't think you would find an extra leg any better; or two, for that matter. Think of sitting down. Where would you put them? Or typing, or playing the piano?"

"No, it wasn't more legs. I think two is just fine, thank you. Brilliant, in fact. It is just that I heard someone say it was possible to have more than three dimensions. Is that really possible?"

"Yes, of course it is. You can have almost as many as you wish. Would you like a fourth dimension; temperature perhaps?  That would perhaps make you feel more distinguished, feel you had one more degree of freedom. How would you like that?"

"That is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. Wonderful. How would it work?". 

" Just as you and the others can go forwards and backwards, or up and down, so you would be able to get hotter or colder. Not exactly like up and down, for you cannot go very far down in temperature before you get to the bottom. But you can go up without limit. "

"Very interesting," said Steve. "Up is easier than down is it? " and he glanced up for the first time to catch the trace of a blush on the Maker's face, who sat for a few moments at his desk playing with a paperknife.

"Give it a try", suggested the Maker. "I do not think you will find that to be a serious limitation; most people prefer moderately warm temperatures. You can come back next week if it does not do the trick."

Steve, overcome with a feeling of blessedness, thanked the Maker, and left. Out in the street he looked around him. Would his fellow citizens realise his distinction? He popped into a stationers and had some cards printed 'Four dimensional man' followed by his name and address. These he would give out whenever he got into conversation with somebody he judged able to appreciate the implications. 

On one such occasion the recipient, after hearing the explanation, looked at the card a second time, and said: "But I think I also have a temperature; I use this little thermometer, and can find the numerical value of my temperature in centigrade or absolute degrees, whenever I want."

Steve was back outside the brown varnished door at the same time on the following week. He was admitted again and greeted again with the same grace and genial good humour.

"Dissatisfied?" asked the Maker. 

"No, no; very satisfied" said Steve. "It is just that I find a number of people also have a temperature, and was wondering if I could have something a tad more esoteric. You said one could have almost as many dimensions as one wanted."

" Sure thing; no problem. What about 'Glow', or 'Spin'? They are a little more esoteric. ".

"Yes, those sound intriguing. Do tell me what they govern?"

"Well, 'Glow' governs happiness. You can travel from very, very unhappy to very, very happy. Once again there is a limitation, I am afraid; you cannot get away from the mean. You cannot always be happy. 'Spin' is a bit more mysterious.  You cannot have two bodies in the same place if they have the same spin; but you can if they have opposite spins. It works well in some long-term marriages."

"I shall try that one, if I may", and Steve left the presence as delighted as he had been the previous week. He asked the stationer if he could cross out the word 'Four' and over-print with 'Five', but was persuaded to scrap the old cards and start with some new ones. 

With his Spin he felt he was getting closer to his dream-world of sub-atomic mysteries. But he was still not completely satisfied. He felt he was still a long way from being able to be in two places at once.  Nor could he be alive and dead at the same time; though admittedly that was not a high priority in his dream world, except perhaps as a stunt. 

So he turned up again at the now-familiar door and, as before, was admitted to the antechamber; and there he waited as before, until the red light went green and he was allowed into the presence.

"How goes it with Spin", he was asked. 

" Oh, fine! Yes, quite fine, thank you. It turns out my wife and I do not get on all that well, so it is not as much use as it might have been. Do you know anything about alternative universes". 

" Not much" admitted the Maker. "We could try reversing 'Time' for you. Before the Big-Bang and the origin of this universe there was another universe exactly like this one, only the mirror image, as it were."

"What about the multiverse?" asked Steve. 

"Oh that's just a theory, and probably a wrong one." The Maker gave a chuckle, before modestly adding "In my opinion." 

"Oh," said Steve, in naïf admiration at the straight-forward frankness of his Maker. "Do explain –– please."

  "Well, you know how a single electron can go through two adjacent slits at once, and give an interference pattern. You might well ask how a single entity and a single instance can give a  probability pattern. One possible explanation  is that the one electron in one instant is really present simultaneously in a hundred or more parallel universes. So you can talk of an average position, or a probability. But that interpretation depends on the Quantum Theory being right,  and I am not sure it is."

  "Is there an alternative theory?" asked Steve.

"Well, yes, there are several, as a matter of fact; for example David Bohm's 'Hidden Variable' theory. If you knew the value of that hidden parameter, the electron's  initial state would not be indeterminate, and nor would any of its subsequent states. But this is very new stuff, you know. Not confirmed."

"I wouldn't mind testing out a hidden variable, if you like", Steve offered. 

"I think it would be very unwise to tinker with anything you do not fully understand", said the Maker.  But for Steve the idea of a new batch of business cards bearing the words 'Six Dimensional Man' had already seized his mind; he could think of nothing else. 

"Please", said Steve, then added "if you can", which provoked a slight frown on the previously bland face of his Maker. 

Out on the street he gave a skip of sheer delight, and hastened off to the stationer. The next day the stationer brought the neat box of new cards to Steve's house, but Steve's wife explained that she had not seen her husband since the previous evening. 

        And indeed, Steve was never seen again. Not around town and, as far as we know, not anywhere. 

 

De l'Amour

 De l'Amour

Max and I sat sipping wine in my conservatory as the light slowly faded.

"So," I asked, "what do you say when your girlfriend says she loves you and asks if you love her?'"

"Huh!" he shrugged, "Of course I murmur something about me loving her too. But in truth I am thrown into confusion."

"Even panic" I volunteered.  "What is love, anyway? I was never sure that I had ever experienced love. Fondness, liking, friendship, familiarity; I know all these. And wanting something, desperately; like a boy for a bicycle, or a girl for a pet.  I rotated my glass by its stem, tilted it and sniffed the heavy vapour. "How would I know love if I had it? Is love the same for everyone?  etc, etc."

"Is love perhaps a female thing?" Max asked.

"Now there you are!  I can see why a girl might want to know the level of her man's commitment, as it is she who might have to carry the consequences.  Fair enough, but how on earth can our merely claiming to be in love convince anyone of anything?"  

Max agreed. 

"Surely there are some reliable, visible, objective signs. Perhaps a distracted air, dilated pupils, or something in the gait, or carriage? Perhaps someone could devise a test kit; a colour-changing dip-stick. I am sure there would be a market for that."  

"You might think", continued Max, "that bringing a bunch of flowers should be enough; if they are red ones."

"Come on Max, you are being frivolous, as you often are. I am being serious about this, as I usually am. Some sixty years ago I read Stendhal's 'De l'Amour', but I never got much into it, nor much out of it. All I remember at this distance is his concept of 'Crystallisation'; the way additional virtues accrue spontaneously to the 'love-object'; as salt crystals grow in the saturated atmosphere of a salt-mine."

"All the great essayists treat of 'Friendship'; do not some also consider love?". I believe I have read Montaigne on 'Friendship', and Emerson, and Francis Bacon."

"We can soon test that idea", I said, getting up. I returned in 2 minutes with those three authors, as well at Marcus Aurelius's 'Thoughts', Stendhal's 'De l'Amour', and Plato's 'Symposium' . 

"After a quick glance of the contents of the essayists you mentioned, only Bacon explicitly treats of love. And he does not rate it very highly. He quotes someone as saying "that it is impossible to be in love and wise".  I waved Plato's 'Symposium' at Max, saying "I think Aristophanes gets as close to my understanding about love as any of them. He covered both the aspect of looking for your soul-mate, and Nature's canny trick of so positioning the genitalia that procreation is the often unintended consequence. 

"Then what is left for us to discover?" asked Max. "Stendhal covers the progressive distortion of perception as the lover succumbs to his obsession. And Aristophanes propounds the truth that the two fundamental rôles of love are to promote conception, and to improve childcare; at least for a sufficient portion of the population to maintain the species."

"I was coming to a similar conclusion myself," I said. "But, in addition, I had decided that a common characteristic of love is its lack of reason; so much so that to call an emotion 'love' almost requires the presence of folly. My friend writes to me from Colombia that she will fly back to sit at my bedside while I recover from my operation. 'No, no,' I protest, 'you were here only a month ago; when I am fit I shall come to Bogota.' What, I ask you, could be sillier than that exchange?". 

"Would you really go to Bogota?"

     "Yes I would. And that is how, for once, I feel I can honestly tell her that I love her. No need to mumble anything." 

Dear Nick Robinson

 Dear Nick Robinson, 

    Re interview with David Mencer at 08:15, 2025-7-25

    You started off quite well: "Let us agree the undeniable fact of starvation."  But then your desire to embarrass Mencer blew up in your face. Your tiff prevented us learning what is the the cause of the blockage. 

    I think there was a crucial point in David Mencer's argument that you did not address. It is a point important in understanding the Israeli attitude and in interpreting Israeli statements. It seems that the Netanyahu line is that Hamas is illegal and can be ignored because it is a terrorist organisation. They seem to regard the whole population as in support of the Hamas fighters, and therefore legitimate military targets. Hamas is, of course, also the democratically elected government of Gaza, which seems to be a point that Netanyahu does not accept.

    I think it could be argued that Israel is also a terrorist organization. They have murdered many more non-combatants than Hamas has, and with the deliberate intention of intimidating the crowd; and that comes very close to what I understand by the term 'terrorist'. (Pouring paint into an aero-engine does not terrify anyone!)  Of course, Hamas zealots started this round of violence. But there seems to have been plenty of unprovoked aggression by Israeli settlers on the Left Bank. I do not think it profitable to use the term 'terrorist' regarding either party. 

    I think we would like to know, from the relatively impartial UN operatives, what the hold-up is really due to. Perhaps UN aid workers refuse to carry food when they get shot at by Israeli soldiers; which seems understandable. Perhaps the UN authorities take the view that Hamas should be the distributors as they are the legal authority, and Israel therefore refuses to allow the UN access to the food. Also understandable, given the two mindsets.

    As I said above, you started off quite well: "Let us agree the undeniable fact of starvation."  But then your desire to embarrass Mencer blew up in your face. Your tiff prevented us learning what is the the cause of the blockage. 

    I think it is time to debate publicly and explain more fully why Britain has not recognised the state of Palestine – an area under British 'protection' until it became ungovernable in 1948. I do not think that Israel has shown itself to be a sufficiently grown-up authority to have jurisdiction over so many other human beings; beings which the rest of the world regard as human, but which the Israeli State does not accept as equal. 

Yours sincerely, Cawstein, 
Middleton Cheney,  Banbury,
OX17 2NB  

The Terrorist

The Terrorist.

"Awake, awake", the watchman cried, "fire, fire",

 As out into the night he stared with anxious eyes.

 His colleague turned to him, bade "Hush!   

 "They sleep within; and haply dream of profit; and of love."

 "You scare me, friend, your talk of fire. If, waking now, 

 They heeded well your words, abandoned jobs,  

 Laid down their tools, and started for the hills, 

 We'd starve; with five billion hungry others.

"Let us plan ahead, devise a scheme to shrink twofold 

 In twenty years our number and our wealth; 

 Shrink our cars, our appetites, our needs and wants 

 In little steps, each step being made by choice."

                                                            Ian West, Banbury, July 2025

The Passing of the Adverb

 The Passing of the Adverb

 Dear Editor of the London Review of Books,

I understand that literary prose enjoys seven kinds of ambiguity; scientific prose (in which I have schooled myself) enjoys none. Your reviewer writes of Syliva Plath,

" – the last line of her probable last poem,"

I do not think Plath's last poem was more probable than any of the others, but I understand that it was probably her last. The rule (that adjectives are qualified by adverbs) enables the reader to know what is being qualified. I regret the vanishing of the adverb. 

I also regret the passing of the conditional tense in sentences like: "Were X to participate, the Red Socks might win". I recently challenged an American editor, who thought his "may win" superior, on the grounds that victory was quite probable. But for me there must always be some doubt about future events, and the "might win" is always to be preferred, in order to make clear what is being asserted, and when. 

    (Similarly with 'can' and 'could'. "If..(whatever hypothetical)......he could win". )

In phrases like "we're convinced", or  "he'd abstain", the replacement of the verb (are?, were?, would?, could?, had?) with an apostrophe removes clarity, albeit transiently. I regret this use of the lazy apostrophe (except when reporting lazy speech). 

I accept that language evolves. But I do not think that educated people should imitate the uneducated merely because the latter are more numerous. 

Yours sincerely, Cawstein.

See also:
[1]  https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2010/06/lazy-apostrophe_7926.html
[2]  https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2016/02/slovenly-apostrophes.html 
[3]  https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-evolving-english-language.html