Browsing Archive: June, 2011

Two Papas on Father's Day

Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, June 19, 2011,
For Father's Day, I dug this out of the family archives: a picture, from 1963, of two fathers. Mine is second from the right, looking decidedly uncomfortable in his tux; the holier of the two, the Holy Father himself, Pope John XXIII, is of course the old chap in white robes, third from the left. My dad was for some years an itinerant radio engineer and electrician specializing in bells. On this occasion he was in the Vatican installing electronic carillons with his two colleagues, the other ...
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More on Leigh Fermor

Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 15, 2011,
It seems to be dawning on the intelligentsia what a remarkable man we've lost in Patrick Leigh Fermor (see previous post). Here's Hitchens on the subject. And Jan Morris said," One must not gush, but like Venice, Château d'Yquem or a Rolls-Royce of the 1930s, he really was beyond competition; and since so far as I know everybody liked him, everyone enjoyed his mastery." As I said somewhere else, if I had a second go at life, I'd try to live a life as much like Patrick Leigh Fermor's as possi...
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Ave atque vale

Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, June 10, 2011,
Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, a dashing figure from a more heroic age, died yesterday at the improbable age of 96. The Daily Telegraph, as usual, had the best obituary, highlighting his accomplishments as a war commando and scholar while granting a certain skepticism as to the overall veracity of his superb travel memoirs A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, in which he recounted, many years later, his long walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul in 1934. "Though he at first kept to his a...
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1984 Forever

Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 8, 2011,

“’Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re qui...


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6/6/44

Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, June 6, 2011,

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourse...


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The VNs contra mundum

Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, June 2, 2011,
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has stirred up the hornets' nest again, this time with some choice and crusty Old World comments about women, women writers in particular. They are inferior to him, he says, because of their "sentimentality" and "narrow view of the world," and cites Jane Austen. Nonsense, of course; one has only to think only of Marguerite Yourcenar, George Eliot, Edna O'Brien, Edith Wharton, Beryl Bainbridge, Anna Akhmatova, et j'en passe. But this is standard Naipaulese. He...
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