First published in 1926. And has been drawn from ever since. The Great Gatsby This is a good start. Chapter 1 "In my younger and more vulnerable years myFirst published in 1926. And has been drawn from ever since. The Great Gatsby This is a good start. Chapter 1 "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.' "
And this is a good ending. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . " "And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."...more
I wondered while reading Amerika if America would have changed Franz Kafka's writing had he travelled there himself. He did a convincing job using traI wondered while reading Amerika if America would have changed Franz Kafka's writing had he travelled there himself. He did a convincing job using travel brochures for reference. Still, this was a frustrating book. Karl, thwarted at every turn. I recommend reading American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers; Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. Also: America Day by Day, by Simone de Beauvoir, 'A great living document of America in the Forties'.
If only Kafka could disembark in New York in 2025....more
LORDS OF FINANCE The Bankers Who Broke the World Synopsis 'It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluLORDS OF FINANCE The Bankers Who Broke the World Synopsis 'It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades. In Lords of Finance, we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England; the xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France; the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank; and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose facade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man. After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite all their differences, they were united by a common fear - that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation - and a common vision - that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard. For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world's currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boomtown prosperity, cracks began to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral into what is known as the Great Depression. As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmarks for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, their fallibility, and the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.'
It will be interesting to compare this account of that history with the brilliant John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929: The Classic Study of That Disaster.
I just read that Winston Churchill had lost most of his savings in the 1929 Wall Street crash.
Prologue: "In February 1912, the committee (of Imperial Defense) conducted hearings on issues related to trade in time of war. Much of the German merchant marine was then insured through Lloyds of London, and the committee was dumbfounded to hear the chairman of Lloyds testify that in the event of war, were German ships to be sunk by the Royal Navy, Lloyds would be both honourbound and, according to its lawyers, legally obliged to cover the losses. The possibility that while Britain and Germany were at war, British insurance companies would be required to compensate the Kaiser for his sunken tonnage made it hard even to conceive of a European conflict."
6. Money Generals Central Banks: 1914 -19 'Turning to the Bank of England for money was not as unprecedented a policy as City bankers reared on nineteenth-century principles of finance liked to think. For the Bank had been originally created, in fact, not to regulate the currency but to help pay for a war.' 'Like so many British institutions of those days, the Bank was run like a club. Control was vested in twenty-six directors of what was quaintly known as the Court of the Bank of England. Its membership was largely drawn from a closed inner circle of City bankers and merchants. They had all gone to the same small selection of schools, preferably Eton or Harrow. Some of them had even attended Oxford or Cambridge.' 'Directors were generally invited to join in their late thirties and were appointed for life, or at least until the onset of senility; many were in their seventies or eighties, and some had been on the Court for over half a century.' 'These arrangements, according to Walter Bagehot, (the great nineteenth-century editor of the Economist) put the financial stability of London, and as a consequence, the world in the hands of "a shifting executive; a board of directors chosen too young for it to be known whether they are able; a committee in which seniority is the necessary qualification, and old age the common result." It was a strange, even eccentric way of doing things - for the most important financial institution in Britain, in fact the world, to be in the hands of a group of amateurs, men who generally would have preferred to be doing something else but who viewed the years they devoted to steering the Bank as a form of civic duty.' * *That same ethos seems to have extended to the senior employees. Kenneth Grahame, the children's author, joined the Bank of England in 1879 and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming secretary. In 1895, he published The Golden Age, a book not about bullion but children. In 1907 he retired, after having been shot during an unsuccessful robbery attempt at the Bank, and the following year published The Wind in the Willows.'...more
I read a Pan Books 1986 edition, (without an Introduction by another writer,) just a Preface by Maugham. This account of Maugham's travels in the lateI read a Pan Books 1986 edition, (without an Introduction by another writer,) just a Preface by Maugham. This account of Maugham's travels in the late 1920s is a valuable record of the place and time. All material for future novels. This is a good document detailing Maugham's travels, a rich source of experience to draw on. The book covers Maugham's travels between Rangoon in Burma, and Haiphong in Annam by various means of transport. Rangoon, now known as Yangon, Burma now Myanmar. Haiphong is still Haiphong, Annam was a French protectorate encompassing Central Vietnam. Before the protectorate's establishment, the name Annam was used in the West to refer to Vietnam as a whole, the Vietnamese people were referred to as Annamites.
There are many episodes worth covering here, but one will suffice. 'While riding a mule through the country in caravan - 'I could not put two thoughts together. I resigned myself at least for that day to make no attempt at serious meditation and instead, to pass the time, invented Blenkinsop.' About an invented author of no talent, writing a book quite unreadably boring but of purity and purpose became a best seller that nobody read. 'There can be nothing so gratifying to an author as to arouse the respect and esteem of the reader. Make him laugh and he think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.'...more
What a History book. Always good to look through and reread the text which relates to each iconic graphic cover and images that span the twentieth cenWhat a History book. Always good to look through and reread the text which relates to each iconic graphic cover and images that span the twentieth century to early 2000s. There's the LIFE magazine cover May 1970 of the Tragedy at Kent State. The TIME cover of a multiple identical photo of Richard Nixon interspersed with images of the Vietnam War, the headline asks the question, "What if we just pull out?". There is the 1965 Sunday Times Magazine cover image of Dunkirk in 1940, the photo by German photographer Hugo Jaeger. His colour pictures lay buried for years in a tin box in Baveria, published for the first time in 1965. So, so much history in this book....more
As I read towards the last page of The Reprieve, the timing has echoes of the present machinations in Europe. Europe is historically a bad neighbourhoAs I read towards the last page of The Reprieve, the timing has echoes of the present machinations in Europe. Europe is historically a bad neighbourhood. They can't smell their own bad breath.
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