First up, Jeremy Black reviews Charles Moore’s multi-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher: “The archival reach is impressive and so, even more, is the determination and ability to gain access to as many witnesses as possible. Moreover, Moore has ranged widely geographically, in particular drawing on American sources. His skill and effort in this field helps make his biography not only a model of its type and the best available for Thatcher, but also one that will be of great consequence for future readers, including academic historians if they can be persuaded from their obsessions with identity politics and related socio-cultural topics of supposed relevance. The only significant problem I can find in what has been several months pleasant reading in bite-sized chunks is that a work on this scale multiplies the classic difficulty for biographers and, indeed, historians of capturing the simultaneity of events while also providing narrative and explanation in particular strands. Some readers may be wearied by the pages devoted to Northern Ireland, but the subject, which nearly led to her death, was important. The section on the Falklands is excellent and recaptures the drama.”

Revisiting the French town the government said it would flood: “In the 1950s, Celles was a tiny, nondescript village in the Salagou Valley in southern France, an area known for its dark red soil and dry climate. Most of its 63 inhabitants were farmers and winegrowers whose families had lived in the area for generations. Then, local government decided the inhabitants of Celles would be evicted so the whole area could be drowned. At the time, France was facing a viticulture crisis: the wine market was saturated, and prices were low. Local authorities hoped that creating a reservoir in the area would allow farmers to diversify their crops and move away from wine production. They chose the Salagou Valley. Between 1959 and 1968, the inhabitants of Celles were pushed to sell their homes to make way for the reservoir. Those who didn’t were expropriated, their houses left empty. In 1968, the dam on the Salagou River was finally finished. The water crept up slowly, covering the red clay landscape. But just short of the village, it stopped.”

Rebecca Mead reports on the return of “wild swimming” in Britain: “Descending the rickety ladder, I pushed off into the water and breaststroked to the deepest part, at the center, to avoid entanglement with hidden weeds and roots. The cold was searing. I could feel the muscles of my upper back constricting; my clavicle and upper ribs seemed ready to shatter, and my toes and fingers started to numb, despite my high-tech gear . . . Despite the cold—and despite the two hours it took me to warm up afterward, stoking the wood-burning stove and drinking as much tea as I could handle—my brief swim in the moat was a starkly beautiful experience. I felt fantastic. Deakin swam in the moat nearly every day, except when it froze over, and it was easy to see how he’d got hooked. I was not the only reader of Deakin to have been seduced in this way. Waterlog helped spur the rise of what has become known in Britain as ‘wild swimming’: wading briefly or churning doggedly in outdoor waters, rather than doing laps in indoor pools. According to the most recent figures collected by Sport England, a group that urges physical activity, half a million people in England are engaging regularly in wild swimming—nearly twice as many as reported doing so just three years ago. Many participants claim that the activity is not only fun but also improves their mental health.”

Why we need Aristotle’s Rhetoric today: “Contemporary political speech’s most characteristic failure is its inability to construct coherent arguments. This is not just a failing of our political class, but reflects a wider cultural malaise.”

In praise of reading aloud: “With schools having largely withdrawn from the practice of making students memorize poetry, few of us today have anything approaching the interior resources of a rhapsode. You might argue that we don’t need them: books are inexpensive and widely available, and we can use the Internet to look up pieces of writing that we may have forgotten or that we want to read. The rhapsodes themselves were obsolete long before the digital age was a glimmer in the eye of the future. Still, though they’ve long since disappeared, their role in the ancient world is a reminder that in reading aloud, we are taking part in one of the oldest and grandest traditions of humankind. Indeed, the long and rich lineage of reading aloud, as a type of oral storytelling, stretches back to the days before anything was written down.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Times, Stephen Marche explains why he buys books he can’t afford:

“I own every Thomas Browne first edition now. I bought them more or less in the order in which I enjoy them, following Browne down the elaborately filigreed labyrinths of his strange obsessions, on subjects as diverse as whether elephants have knees and what species of fish Jesus ate after the Resurrection . . . Probably the most beautiful book, physically, is his “Posthumous Writings” from 1712, with its foldout plates of the Norfolk cathedral. But the unauthorized “Religio Medici” — on the faith of a doctor — was the most expensive of my purchases (about the cost of a month’s rent on a one-bedroom in Park Slope), and also the grimiest. It is the equivalent of a 400-year-old bootleg DVD.

“The affliction of the vast majority of writers is to know what everyone in the world should buy and never to have any money. To be a writer is to be able to stride into a billionaire’s home and critique the gauche fussiness of an ormolu clock over the mantelpiece when you couldn’t afford the cut flowers in the powder room. But every writer I know owns at least one object he or she cannot afford but has to have — a vintage YSL jacket, a Linn LP12 turntable, a collection of prisoner-made demon sculptures. For me, it’s Thomas Browne. These books are not conspicuous consumption. I don’t show them to anybody. They sit in a safe place in my office, where I rarely go. I need them for myself, not others.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Celles

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