ReadySteadyBook - a literary site

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Reading poetically

I'm enjoying the BBC poetry season in a fairly uncommitted, pretty kneejerk and vague kinda way. I'm glad that they are doing it, I suppose, and I've been happy to see Owen Sheers talking about Sylvia Plath and (some of) Simon Schama talking about John Donne, and I'm looking forward to Armando Iannucci's progamme on Milton. But I'm afraid that the opinons of Griff Rhys Jones, Michelle Ryan, Alex James, John Sergeant and Cerys Matthews on matters poetical are not something I can bring myself to care very much about, and the whole event has the kind of middlebrow, middle class feel that always seems to surround poetry and will put off as many people as it will, doubtless, inspire. GRJ's wide-eyed enthusiasms and his constant gurning particularly annoy me; is there no room at all, across the whole network, for some serious academics to talk seriously about serious poetry? No? Just the gurning? Right, there you are then!

Nonetheless, poetry is in the air, and my current re-reading of Plath, Eliot, Wallace Stevens and naughty Ruth Padel's useful 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem has, I'm sure, been stimulated by the Beeb's propaganda. Whilst it is right for the Beeb to remind us that poetry can be fun and that poems aren't difficult and dense puzzles that only initiates can fathom and unlock, the programmes have also correctly highlighted the fact that poets pay especial care to and with the language they use, how they place one word against another, and how they go about achieving, in such a concentrated form, a maximum of meaning and emotional punch. Whilst it is good, then, to remember how enjoyable and entertaining poetry can be, we're also being reminded that to get the most out of a poem you need to read it carefully.

This has led me to think: what does it mean to read carefully, to read with care? And what would it mean to read prose is such a way? What would we gain from reading prose as we should read poetry, from reading prose poetically?

The word care comes from the Old English caru or cearu meaning "sorrow, anxiety, grief", but to care for someone or something is to shield them from such, or to accept that they are in such a state, in their "bed of sickness" afflicted by "mental suffering" and requiring our solicitous "protection, preservation or guidance." Being full of cares has morphed, in the word carefully, to being full of care for (care for those who are themselves full of cares). To read carefully is, then, to read solicitously, painstakingly (taking on board the pain, taking on its weight, taking it away from the poem and into our own care), slowly, anxiously desirous of understanding the full weight of meaning of each word. It is the opposite of reading instrumentally, as a means to an end, as merely the means to get to the end of the book, to find the answer but not to observe, to respect, to hold in view and to care for the question that the text always is and is always posing.

Reading carefully is awareness of the cares of words; our habitual carelessness, when reading, shows us that reading's ethical dimension is one that poetry's own intricacy can help to highlight. Reading poetry can help us become better readers especially, perhaps, when and if we remember to read prose poetically. Maybe, then, it is just about worth enduring Gryf's gormless gurning to be reminded of this.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: philosophy, poetry

PermalinkComments (5)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Tuesday 26 May 2009

Find me some academics!

I'm reading Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy which is very fine indeed. It has got me to thinking, again, about who are the other interesting academics writing about literature today (I'm thinking about those academics who manage to retain their rigour, but speak beyond the academy, if only to a quite self-selecting and small audience). As Steve said, when he mentioned Mulhall the other day, it isn't Jonathan Gottschall!

The work of Gabriel Josipovici, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, Terry Eagleton, Paul West, A.D. Nuttall (to mention just a few critics, off the top of my head, who are important to me) will always be challenging and relevant, but I'm thinking about newer kids on the block: Franco Moretti, Nancy Armstrong, Derek Attridge, Sharon Cameron, Asja Szafraniec and the Nietzsche scholar Jill Marsden are all helping to help me think about literature afresh -- who is doing it for you!?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, literary criticism

PermalinkComments (19)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Monday 25 May 2009

Like what you like

The comedian David Mitchell once told a joke about how the neutral, in their neutrality, can never understand the passion of e.g. football fans and, indeed, that their very common sense neutrality (oh, it doesn't matter who wins, just jolly nice to see two teams having such a jolly good time) was far more absurd than the passion of the fans that they so ignorantly lampooned. Of course, when he told it, it was funny. (And he is equally funny laughing at fans too -- this YouTube video is wonderful.)

Criticising someone for their taste is plainly silly. Liking one particular cultural artifact over another does not and cannot make you a better human being than anyone else. We like what we like. Doesn't criticism takes that for granted? In the same way, we accept that e.g. football isn't the be all and end all of everything... and then we enter the fray regardless; and, on entering, at that point we believe with Bill Shankly that football is not a matter of life or death, but actually much more important than that. We cast off our neutrality because engagement is life. This is not too far from the view held by Alain Badiou when he argues that it is only through passionate allegiance to an event that we become authentic subjects...

If you were to come to tea at my house, you'd no doubt be bombarded by some weird music (György Kurtág anyone? Machinefabriek? Keith Fullerton Whitman?) and then we could settle down to a Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr film. Or, just as likely, we could kick back with some Friends repeats on E4, grab a pizza, and then watch a RomCom: Notting Hill or Four Weddings anyone? You decide! If the former happened, would you think me pretentious? If the latter happened, well, how would you judge me then?

Regardless of this pastel-coloured relativism, however, evaluative practices are inevitably part of how we talk about the arts and how we try to understand them. Not understanding that is a little like being one of the neutrals that David Mitchell poked fun at at. In What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey is right to argue that liking opera does not, and cannot, make you a good person. As I've said, that is surely a given. Further, it'd be a difficult task to argue that opera, say, was better (or worse) than rock 'n' roll. But it would be interesting, informative, educative, and possibly surprising and entertaining to know why a particular critic thought Schoenberg's Moses und Aron was better or worse than Berg's Lulu. If we were lucky enough to read two critics evaluating both we'd inevitably make judgements on which critic most persuavely persuaded us of the case for which of the works we should make sure to seek out.

And so to fiction... If it needs repeating: like and enjoy whatever you like! But evaluating, judgement, is part of what we do as soon as we (try to) engage with something. And engaging with something can be one way of deepening and extending our enjoyment of it. If we want to make an evaluative move, to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of one text against another, first we need some common ground. Genre fiction -- except when Ian Rankin starts his especially specious pleading -- is normally content to evaluate itself againt other books in its field, so a new crime novel might say that it is pacier, gritter, knottier, more honest, more gripping, more realistic, more harrowing, the denoument more startling than another in its field. And, if we accepted that, we'd be a good way to being able to say that the new crime novel was better than the old one. The trouble with the genre of Literary Fiction, however, is that it puts itself up against literature. And, if it does that, then it must be expected to be judged against it. Literature -- like art itself, as Carey found -- might be treacherously hard to define, but if we triangulate Proust, Beckett and Dante or, say, Shakespeare, Kafka and Blanchot we might get somewhere near to being able to think about what something we call literature just might be. Rankin can go head to head with Agatha Christie and we can make sound comparisons between their writing and their plots (and we can, regardless, enjoy either, neither or both) but if he suggests he writes literary fiction, and by doing that makes claims to be writing literature, then he is going to be going up against Proust and so he needn't be surprised when he comes off looking decidedly worse for wear!

However, beyond the evaluative move, a move that inevitably happens as soon as we engage with any artform (even if that evaluation leads us to say nothing more exceptional than e.g. they are both good, but in different ways) there is the question -- and it is fiction here that is my concern -- that is much too rarely asked: what does literary actually mean? The question can only be answered from within literature itself: not when literature is arch and awkwardly self-ironising (the postmodern gesture), but when the existential question of literature's being is revealed to be the internal secret, and heartbeat, of the text itself. "Literature begins," as Blanchot famously says in Literature and the Right to Death, "at the moment when literature becomes a question." And so reading begins not when we mark books out of ten, but when we let them mark us; not when we question how good they are, but when they themselves question what they are and, simultaneously, undermine the certainty we feel when we make those inevitable evaluative moves.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: literary criticism, personal

PermalinkComments (14)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Friday 22 May 2009

Book Depository offer

This Bank Holiday weekend (you've got until Tuesday 26th May), we're running a Friends and Family discount over on The Book Depository.

Just use my personal promotional code (MTRSCP) and you'll save an additional 10% on our already really rather fab prices (free delivery to over 90 countries around the world too, don't forget!)

You need to go via this link on The Book Depository, enter my code, and you'll be away!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: the book depository

PermalinkComments (2)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Wednesday 20 May 2009

Brookner and me

Anita Brookner's first novel's first line is rightly celebrated. Her debut, A Start in Life, begins, "Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." It is a glorious, show-stopping opener, a one-line paragraph which resounds, epigrammatically, throughout the whole of her novel. It is, however, judging by its reception and repetition, perhaps too cute. When Brookner comes up in literary conversation -- not enough, in my book -- the line is often quoted. Its irony is plain to see, but it has a great melancholy weight that it is too easy easily to sidestep. Brookner is a fine comic writer, but the brutal truth is that, for Dr Weiss, that line is brutally true. Dr Weiss is an academic, the author of Women in Balzac's Novels, and her life really has been ruined by literature. She has read and read, but she has hardly lived; and the life that she has lived as been lived according to a moral code she has, quite unwisely, gleaned from fiction. Of course, we are reading about her, and she is merely the creation of a writer, so this hall of mirrors incorporates us too, and nor can we ever be out of it. The irony, then, is that when we read it ironically we miss the both the self-reflectivity and accusatory potency of Brookner's opening line.

I was introduced to Anita Brookner 12 or more years ago by a friend who suggested to me that she was seen by some as the embodiment of all that was wrong in British letters, but that he found something profoundly moving in her work. Her crime, he thought, was in producing novels that were so buttoned-up that they almost immediately seemed like a parody of themselves (and, presumably too, a parody of the certain class of English women of a certain age who populate her novels). I was undeterred: what others saw as a one-trick pony, I quickly warmed to. I saw something troubled and troubling in Brookner's pathological repetitions. Yes, all her books are the same, I thought, that's the bloody point! Brookner has never been fashionable (the Booker win for Hotel du Lac, not her best work, did little subsequently to push her on to the bestseller lists) and I know of only a few people who share my enthusiasm for her writing. A Start in Life, A Friend from England and Lewis Percy are distinct in my mind, but distinct is the wrong word here. Those books are, simply, a little fuller in mind than her other writings, like a bas relief in a room of trompe l'oeil. Distinctiveness is not, I'd argue, the point. Or, better, what distinguishes Brookner from her many contemporaries is far more important to me than what distinguishes any one of her books from the rest.

Brookner was interviewed earlier in the year by Mick Brown for the Telegraph newspaper. The occassion was her latest novel, Strangers. A Start in Life had appeared in 1981 when Brookner was 53. For more than a decade she published a book a year, but her pace is slowing now and, at 80, it is anyone's guess how long she will keep writing for. Brown's interview with her is startling -- and, for me, strangely reassuring -- because Brookner proves, I think, by what she says, that she is as singular and strange as I'd always held her to be.

Witness this exchange:

"The first sentence is easy, and so is the last. What comes between is 'terrifying'.

'It is actually quite a dynamic process, and very absorbing when you're doing it. But when you've done it, you're rather disgusted.'

Disgusted?

'Yes. Because it's all over, and you must do it all over again.'"

No sense of exhiliration, no triumphalism here. Brookner knows that she has, by writing another book, achieved nothing. Surely, those are the words of an artist? A genre writer would have, for certain, achieved something: another commodity, another object, another notch on the bedpost. But, with Brookner, it is Beckett's "I can't go on. I'll go on" that is in the air. The attitude is akin to what Eliot writes, despondently, in The Waste Land: "Well now that's done, and I'm glad its over." (And this recall, in the poem, after a sexual encounter; Brookner's word -- disgust -- is, it is worth noting, extremely visceral.)

A Start in Life has a famous opening; it's last line is never quoted. Dr Weiss's Women in Balzac's Novels is a multi-volume affair, a life's work. (Balzac's La Comédie humaine was his own life's work, so it makes perfect sense for any critical work, to do that encyclopedic oeuvre any justice, to be an equally committed business.) She writes to her publisher: "The section [in the forthcoming volume] on Eugénie Grandet has turned out rather longer than expected. Do you think anyone will notice?" The comic touch is as light and assured and pleasing as ever, but for a writer who, following A Start in Life, kept knocking novels out on an annual basis, despite the disgust, despite the lack of consolation felt, and merely because of a monomaniacal need to keep on keeping on, it is bracingly honest too. The critics noticed that she went on producing books, year after year, presumably longer and more often than anyone expected her too, but even here, in her first novel, she intuited not only the lack of fulfillment in that startling productivity (one wonders if, for instance, Joyce Carol Oates has ever paused to pause?) but the idea that such could ever come by writing. Dr Weiss knew that her life had been ruined by literature because, for too long, she misunderstood the relationship of one to the other. Laughing at her innocence is surely a very comforting way of not realising that that same mistake is so often our very own.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, personal

PermalinkComments (6)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Tuesday 19 May 2009

Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution

I'm reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution at the moment and enjoying it enormously. First Things has this below; I'll review the book here on ReadySteadyBook next week:

Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate is an engaging, witty, and largely successful critique of the new atheists, especially Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great) and Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion), whose delusional grandiosity earns them the hybrid nickname Ditchkens. The text of his Terry Lectures at Yale, Eagleton’s book has received smart, generally warm reviews in recent days from Andrew O’Hehir at Salon and from Stanley Fish on his NY Times blog, Think Again. The book certainly merits our attention both for its hilarious send-up of the pompous Ditchkens and for its less successful attempt to infuse revolutionary politics with the spirit of the gospel (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: philosophy

PermalinkComments (3)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Monday 18 May 2009

Synecdoche, Stockport

Whilst Bridget Riley's Op Art looks to be utterly abstract it was, for Riley, grounded in real life. Following John Lancaster, Wikipedia defines Optical Art as "a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing", but for Riley the first "picture plane" was the eye and it was immediately offered illusions by the world itself. Bend close to -- and concentrate hard on -- grass bending in the wind and, to be honest to reality, to paint what you actually see, you'll have to create something that looks a bit like Orphean Elegy I. It would be merely an amusing taxonomical gesture to rebrand Op Art as Realism, but it would perhaps be a useful reminder that the concomitant gesture, that of refusing to see Realism merely as Ideology, is an absurd taxonomical rigidity we'd do best to overturn. To think Realism is real -- or even a particularly good representation of it -- is a very major category error.

All art, sometimes despite itself, is symbolic, but mistaking the real for Realism is madness. In Wallace Stevens' Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself a sound is heard, "a scrawny cry from outside / Seemed like a sound in his mind." There is a dialectic between inside and outside, a dialogue, a tension: art negotiates that, plays with it. What a piece of artwork is, or represents, always ends up representing something more than itself: a picture of lines is really a picture of grass is really about nature or the world or perhaps something more political like "women and nature" or "women and nature and the world" -- this is an almost inevitable critical drift, one that we should be aware of and very cautious about. Note the way the drift occurs: seamlessly, what a picture is, or could be, becomes what it is about; representation is always already symbolism (as they'd no doubt say in the University seminar room). The smallest part -- that blade of grass, Whitman's or Riley's -- can refer to, can stand for, the whole; but, in truth, the pressure is too much to bear: it can't be the whole, and the whole itself can never be represented, so the urge to create is the certainty of failure, but also the very reason to carry on creating.

Writing in the Guardian, Damon Wise called Charlie Kaufman's new film, Synecdoche, New York, "an epic, wilfully obscure, splurge of surrealism." Central to the film is its meditation on art. After winning a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, playwright Caden Cotard hires a huge, empty warehouse and begins to recreate in the minutest detail his own life (fans of Tom McCarthy's Remainder will, of course, be struck by how close Kaufmann's film is to that novel). What we are shown is that, taken too literally, mimetic realism slides fairly quickly into the surrealism that Wise bemoans. Indeed, what is noteworthy is that Cotard's re-creative drive, by being so devoted to Realism, loses all realism and cannot ever satisfy him of its truth. His attempt to get at the raw truth of things (too much Kant, not enough Nietzsche; arguably the opposite of the film's director!) by staging as event what happens to him in his life as accident makes his art -- and this film -- peculiarly preoccupied with death. Cotard's Realism produces non-realistic art that ruins his increasing unreal life. In the film, Samantha Morton's plays Hazel, the most important woman in his life. She lives in a house which is perpetually on fire. The symbolism is heavy-handed, but ambiguous -- like the film itself.

Coincidentally, Morton's directorial debut, The Unloved (a "film that gives a child's eye view of the U.K.'s government-run care system for orphans and children in danger") was on the television last night. It is a wonderfully moving drama (and great to see the gorgeous music of Colleen used to such brilliant effect) set, mostly, in the realist mode. Indeed, at times it was filmed to look like a fly-on-the-wall documentary. What made the film far more affecting than the usual "bleak, powerful, truthful, brave" (insert adjective of choice) drama of this type, and such programmes have a history going back forty years to the landmark screening of Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home, was its willingness regularly to slow the pace of the narrative right down and focus on a face, a tacky statuette of the virgin Mary, dust motes shining in a shaft of sunlight. (Morton is surely taking a directorial lead here from Lynne Ramsay in whose film of Morvern Callar she appeared in 2002.) The narrative of The Unloved was itself wilfully told only from the central character Lucy's perspective, so that much of what happened -- as it would have been to 11-year-old Lucy herself -- was ambiguous, odd, inexplicable. The film, then, was at its strongest when its realism was at its weakest and thus when the Real, in all its strangeness, was allowed room to show itself for what it was.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, film, philosophy

PermalinkComments (6)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Friday 15 May 2009

Wee weekly round-up

Before I rest up for the weekend, a coupla things to draw your attention to:

• Steve provides us with "a selection that might be called The Best of This Space"
• The Armies by Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (as you know, I was judge, and I'm still scratching my head as to how come Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 wasn't even shortlisted!)
• interviews over on The Book Depository site with historian Andy Beckett ("The British 70s are full of political surprisess if you make yourself look at them with fresh eyes... the Labour vote in the 1979 election actually went up, especially among wealthier voters -- the idea that the behaviour of the unions sent the electorate running screaming away from Labour is a myth...") and Thomas Traherne expert Denise Inge ("Readers with imagination fall for Traherne. He takes you on unexpected interior journeys into desire and lack, infinity, time and eternity. Reading him isn't always easy since the language of his day is so different from ours and his world view sometimes challenges the assumptions of our time, but he will thrill, surprise and exhaust you...")
• a brief interview with Béla Tarr
• trailer for new Godard film Socialisme

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere, film, IFFP09, personal, politics

PermalinkComments (1)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Thursday 14 May 2009

Musical interlude

At the weekend, my dogs were "jumped" by a rather enthusiastic Black Russian Terrier (imagine a schnauzer the size of a Great Dane and you're almost there). Sadly, Silus, who was quite a lovely thing actually, was far too much of a beast for the elderly lady who was looking after him. She lost control of Silus as we walked past them and was almost dragged to the ground. Consequently, I had to grab our manic mutt before he did himself, or my dogs, any damage. Rather painfully, Silus pulled my shoulder half out of its socket. At the moment, then, typing, as you can well imagine, is not my favourite activity!

Despite this, I manfully took myself of to the badlands of Salford on Monday night to see the excellent Machinefabriek. This evening brings Jóhann Jóhannsson. I commend both to you for your listening pleasure.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, personal

PermalinkComments (4)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Wednesday 06 May 2009

Catholic capitalism

It is a parody of Catholicism to suggest that you can sin all your life, but as long as you get a final confession in before the final curtain is drawn for the last time you'll be alright, and then the Big Guy will let St. P let you in through the Pearly gates. But, saying that, it's not that much of a parody! The basic pattern here is: sin - repentance - forgiveness (... and repeat). The assurance, of course, is there that you will always be forgiven (if your piety is genuine). I've always thought, however, that the certainty of forgiveness, in this scenario, rather cedes power to the sin and to the sinner: they are both considered to be given, presumed as a constant, elemental, essential, even vital. We are the Fallen, after all, so sin is what we do, what we are mired in, what we are. Asking for forgiveness, then, is something of a PR stunt: future sins are in the pipeline, probably already being planned and certain to happen, forgiveness for them will be asked at the appropriate time, after the sin has been enacted and, no doubt, thoroughly enjoyed.

Now, that might all be rather slipshod theology, but it seems to me to be a pretty useful analogy for what is going on in our society right now. Saying sorry has reached epidemic (or should that be pandemic) proportions. Politicians do it all the time: bomb a country because of a lie they've concocted, then say sorry for the lie once it has done the work required of it. Journalists keep pressing those in the City whose greed and stupidity precipitated the credit crunc at least to beg pardon for what they have done. And now even the London Evening Standard is getting in on the act: "Buses and tubes will carry a series of messages throughout the week that begin with the word "sorry." The first says "Sorry for losing touch". Subsequent slogans say sorry for being negative, for taking you for granted, for being complacent and for being predictable."

This then, I portentously proclaim, is the era of Catholic capitalism: just as nasty as capitalism has ever been, but now with deathbed confessions, pious apologies and the desperate need for absolution. "Forgive us our sins," say the politicians, the bankers, the media and the generals, for, in some dreadful parody of Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, "we shall certainly commit them again and again and again."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, philosophy

PermalinkComments (4)Related PostsEmail to Friend

Monday 04 May 2009

Aaronovitch on conspiracy theories

David Aaronovitch was on Radio 4's Start the Week this morning. Each week, I nonsensically start my own working week by getting worked-up by the nonsense so often spouted by the facile contributions of the blathering contributors to said radio programme; I really need carefully to look within and work out why I regularly put myself though this unhappy ritual. Some Maoist self-criticism is obviously required!

Anyway, Aaronovitch has just written a book called Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History a part of the publisher blurb to which reads:

Our age is obsessed by the idea of conspiracy. We see it everywhere - from Pearl Harbour to 9/11, from the assassination of Kennedy to the death of Diana... For David Aaronovitch, there came a time when he started to see a pattern. These theories used similar dodgy methods with which to insinuate their claims: they linked themselves to the supposed conspiracies of the past (it happened then so it can happen now); they carefully manipulated their evidence to hide its holes; they relied on the authority of dubious academic sources. Most importantly, they elevated their believers to membership of an elite - a group of people able to see beyond lies to a higher reality... Aaronovitch... looks at why people believe them, and makes an argument for a true scepticism: one based on a thorough knowledge of history and a strong dose of common sense.

Ah, common sense! Well, we do like common sense around here, for sure. I'm always happy to see "conspiracy theories" debunked, but I'm equally intrigued by which theories are deemed to be conspiratorial and which historical theses are deemed to be sensible and sound. For example, why isn't the suggestion that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD a "conspiracy theory"? Belief in the lie that Saddam had such weapons was linked "to the supposed conspiracies of the past" (he bombed the working class stronghold of Halabja so therefore, it was asserted, he'll certainly do something as heinous again) and was based on "carefully manipulated... evidence" which "relied on the authority of dubious academic sources". Most importantly, this "elevated their believers to membership of an elite" -- those who saw the huge, looming threat had seen the truth and those of us who thought this huge "threat" was merely a manipulation of the Anglo-American ruling class were blind, naive or worse.

It is, indeed, interesting and important to debunk "conspiracy theories" -- there are a lot of them out there. Recent official history contains its fair share of such dangerous lies, too, so I wonder why Aaronovitch doesn't seem very keen on debunking them. Was it because there are certain conspiracy theories he fell hook, line and sinker for?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, politics

PermalinkComments (9)Related PostsEmail to Friend