Don't ask.

The Fortnightly Review draw attention to a interesting interview with Paul Fussell, who died the other day. Fussell makes a case for the disillusion of the Great War as a major impulse towards the ironic mode in literature:

It protects one from emotional openness which might destroy or just weaken one, and it turns the experience toward intellect and away from emotion. I learned that by my long immersion in eighteenth-century literature, where the urge is constantly outward from oneself; that is, not to try to undertake deep voyages into the self, but, rather, to escape the self, look out at society, see what’s going on, and then comment on it. Irony is a great help there, to protect oneself from self-regarding emotion, which has always been an enemy of mine from the start.

The article also contains a link to the whole interview.

Paul Fussell, literary critic and author of the influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, has died, aged 88.

That's what the energy minister Ed Davey has warned. Not really a surprise when you close down coal-fired stations with nothing to replace them.

Alan Massie in The Telegraph: "Why shouldn't we call it Peking?"

To which I would add: why not inches, feet, yards and miles, and all those other things some people are changing for us?

From The Lincolnite.

Tom Chivers - "Another chapter in the rise of the e-book".

The answer? Both.

As to the future of the traditional bookshop I judge it from my own experience: I buy most of my books via Amazon (mainly Marketplace sellers), although I shall be going into my local Waterstones to order a copy of Marked for Death by Geert Wilders, which for some reason is not available on Amazon UK except in audio format.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg delivered a speech to the Sutton Trust on social mobility. This gave him plenty of opportunity to display the utter pointlessness of his own expensive education.

Using the "reference to popular media to prove how in touch I am with ordinary folk" ploy, he refers to the Up series: "There can be few more powerful illustrations of just how divided our society can be..." he says sorrowfully, "And what hits you hardest is that in the half century since the series began, little has changed." Which proves he hasn't watched them at all, because one thing that is striking is that they show just how much has changed.

But let that pass; we have to take it for granted that our professional politicos never watch tv except when they're on it.

Talking about access to higher education he comes out with a belter: "the Coalition Government is encouraging universities to recruit on the basis of objective potential, on the basis of an ability to excel, not purely on previous attainment." Now how you can have a potential that is objective is beyond me, since potential is by its very nature unmeasurable (because it's notional) and is therefore entirely subjective. And as the comedian Dylan Moran once quipped, potential is like your bank account - you always think it's bigger than it really is.

This particular idiocy has already been pronounced by others, but Clegg merely reinforces his own dunderheadedness by repeating it. The only objective thing you have when choosing somebody for a university course is "previous attainment". Isn't that the point of having exams and assessments? Aren't they the best single indicator of the "ability to excel"?

The rest of the speech is the usual blather about social mobility and fairness, blah, blah, blah. The reversal of increasing social mobility in Britain dates from the abolition of the grammar schools. All of their reforms and meddling since then have made the situation worse. The political classes know this but daren't admit it.

How did we come to be governed by such idiots?

George Monbiot seems to be having a little crisis of faith with regard to one of his heroes, Noam Chomsky, over the subject of genocide. The original exchange between them is on Monbiot's website.