What are you reading now?

[Ian Thumwood]

Following a week staying in Thirsk, I have been reading the third compendium of James Herriot books. They are great fun to read and I think he had a brilliant knack of telling a story. This is the third volume and I really think he is a great writer. The animals are good but I think his understanding of people is even better. Every time I read his work I feel he is seriously underrated as a writer.

[french frank]

My current reading and a lot of very pertinent stuff for our times in JS Mill's Inaugural Address on being installed as rector of the University of St Andrews, 1 Feb 1867. Available on the Internet Archive (esp pp 4 and 36), should anyone be interested.

[vinteuil]

My current reading and a lot of very pertinent stuff for our times in JS Mill's Inaugural Address on being installed as rector of the University of St Andrews, 1 Feb 1867. Available on the Internet Archive (esp pp 4 and 36), should anyone be interested.

... somewhere up in the loft is a (largely unread) copy of Newman's The Idea of a University [1891]

Some time this autumn we're going up in to that loft to struggle thro' the cardboard boxes of books to see what's there (and mme v thinks : "chuck out 90%").
Perhaps I'll rescue the Newman...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/20/john-henry-newman-idea-university-soul

.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.163525/mode/2up

[french frank]

It would be interesting to know whether Mill's 48-page address influenced Newman in any way. In the Scottish (now) tradition, Mill was elected by the students (in my teaching days the Aberdeen sturdents elected people like Michael Barratt, Iain Cuthbertson and Sandy Gall). I was struck by the similarities between Mill's ideas and the ideas in my undergraduate days - and by how different from student days now:

"The proper function of an University in national education is tolerably well understood. At least there is a tolerably general agreement about what an University is not. It is not a place of professional education. Universties are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood."

And:

" Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject." Almost the definition of the Greek 'idiot'?

[EnemyoftheStoat]

I've just finished reading The Spy and the Devil ('the untold story of the MI6 agent who penetrated Hitler’s inner circle') by Tim Willasey-Wilsey (which surely has to be a pseudonym).

An interesting read, and more of a page-turner than I expected, at a point when I thought I was through with reading about spookery of that period, but one of the offspring didn't.

[Petrushka]

I've just finished reading The Spy and the Devil ('the untold story of the MI6 agent who penetrated Hitler’s inner circle') by Tim Willasey-Wilsey (which surely has to be a pseudonym).

An interesting read, and more of a page-turner than I expected, at a point when I thought I was through with reading about spookery of that period, but one of the offspring didn't.

Looks interesting. The Amazon blurb says that he infiltrated Hitler's inner circle from 1931 to 1939 providing crucial intelligence to the British authorities. One wonders how much notice they took of it or, conversely, whether the Baron might have fed the wrong intelligence and instead led to choices made by the British government that made war unavoidable.

I'm currently still reading the 'Chips' Channon diaries and have presently reached June 1939. The pro-German feeling among many in the British government and aristocracy, including Channon himself by then working in the Foreign Office, shows massive misjudgement and a staggering naivety regarding Hitler and his intentions.

Perhaps the book deals with these issues.

[EnemyoftheStoat]

Looks interesting. The Amazon blurb says that he infiltrated Hitler's inner circle from 1931 to 1939 providing crucial intelligence to the British authorities. One wonders how much notice they took of it or, conversely, whether the Baron might have fed the wrong intelligence and instead led to choices made by the British government that made war unavoidable.

I'm currently still reading the 'Chips' Channon diaries and have presently reached June 1939. The pro-German feeling among many in the British government and aristocracy, including Channon himself by then working in the Foreign Office, shows massive misjudgement and a staggering naivety regarding Hitler and his intentions.

Perhaps the book deals with these issues.

There is a strong suggestion that the Baron gave Hitler the impression that Britain and France wouldn't go to war over Poland, and that he was highlighting a disagreement over policy between government and the Air Ministry which gave support to this view. I don't recall the extent to which - if any - he conveyed Hitler's thoughts back to the British authorities. I should reread at least the Verdict chapter of the book, which comes to the conclusion that the Baron wasn't a German agent on the basis that none of those on trial at Nuremberg, or their associates, who would have tried to use that knowledge to save their own skins did so.

[richardfinegold]

Amor Towles, Table For Two, a very interesting collection of short stories, some of which are interlinked

[smittims]

Turgenev: First Love, translated by Isaiah Berlin.

What Frankie Howard would call 'a very sad story'.

[french frank]

Have moved this from the Prom 67 thread as it's probably more on topic here

Simenon / Maigret said that identifying who the murderer was was the 'most boring part' of the whole endeavour -

https://www.theguardian.com/books/bo...eorges-simenon.

Maigret et l' homme du banc has just arrived from momox.com. Thank you M. vinteuil

[vinteuil]

.
... Simenon, Les Suicidés.

We were in Nevers recently, and looked at the house where Simenon lived in the early 1930s (7 rue Creuse). On the wall plaque it noted that this novel largely took place in Nevers ...
.

... Les Suicidés [1933] is pretty bleak, as a roman dur should be.

I have subsequently been reading other Simenons with a connection to Nevers - the short story Le doigt de Barraquier [1954], and most recently the lovely le Cheval-Blanc [1938], a curiously oneiric tale, almost Virginia Woolf in its impressionist feel at times, but with appropriately Simenonian squalid touches - a petit-bourgeois family from Nevers on a walking tour calling in at the eponymous hotel in Pouilly-sur-Loire where - strange things happen... Not much of a 'plot' as such - more a frieze of images. Delicious

"Sans intrigue proprement dite, le récit se déroule à la façon d’une peinture de mœurs en plusieurs tableaux : désordres, parfois dramatiques, qui se cachent derrière la placide enseigne d’une auberge de province avec, en contrepoint, une échappée sur le conformisme familial et médiocre d’une petite bourgeoisie."

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cheval-Blanc_(roman_de_Simenon)

.

https://www.amazon.fr/cheval-blanc-Georges-Simenon/dp/B003ZUVFJC

[cria]

Blotto Twinks & the Phantom Skiers
(Jilly Cooper liked it)

[AuntDaisy]

Blotto Twinks & the Phantom Skiers
(Jilly Cooper liked it)

Not tried Blotto & Twinks, although I enjoyed Simon Brett's earlier Charles Paris & Mrs. Pargetter books, and After Henry.

The front cover reminds me of the nuns from "A Very Peculiar Practice".

[french frank]

Maigret et l' homme du banc has just arrived from momox.com. Thank you M. vinteuil

It reminds me a little of A Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd in which some inveterate solvers of detective novels indignantly considered the author had 'cheated'!

[AuntDaisy]

It reminds me a little of A Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd in which some inveterate solvers of detective novels indignantly considered the author had 'cheated'!

I enjoyed the Bruno Cremer TV version (with subtitles); haven't watched the Rupert Davies "Murder on Monday" yet.