So Much to Blog...

Back after a week's hiatus, aka holiday, I see that there is much to blog upon.

First of all, who is A.L. Rowse? The Times Literary Supplement with that stinging review was waiting for me in my college pigeonhole when I showed up there having read the Doc's plaintive question. I have read it carefully. The Doc is right; it is stinging, and often nasty. But I don't think a lot of the facts or interpretations by Stefan Collini of Rowse's life were that far off the mark. Rowse was, it seems to me, an egomaniacal scholar who believed that he had never done anything so great as be elected to All Soul's College, Oxford, at age 25. To my mind, this makes him more to be pitied than to be censured. Of course for Signor Collini the big disappointment in Rowse's later years is that he liked Margaret Thatcher. And that he disliked paying the income tax.

My goodness. It's at moments like this that you wonder if, eventually, a majority of British intellectuals won't come to believe by 2020 that there really was not Margaret Thatcher, it never happened, it was just a bad dream caused by a spoilt Glamorgan sausage.

So...pity Rowse, don't spit on his grave. There but for the grace of God go all scholars and intellectuals, obsessed with their legacy, their rivals, their victories and defeats, the mawkish and paltry way in which Society rewards them for their brilliance. There but for the Grace of God goes Al Zambone, Doc Curmudgeon and, dare I say it, Stefan Collini.

Anyway, poor old Rowse. Let's choose choose to l