Farmelo, Roberts, Lamotte, Howard, Hughes, France, Ahamed

I read a biography of an important physicist, Farmelo's The Strangest Man, i.e. Paul Dignac. What I noticed the most was how people snickered behind his back when, as an old man, he was passed by by developments, even though to his face, he was still the guy who won a Nobel Prize in his early 30s. Then I read Roberts' Masters and Commanders, about the quartet of PM, President and respective generals, and all the turmoil of their various decisions during World War II. They did some great things and did it the hard way. It also sounds like war was run by committee, always a problem. Then I read Lamotte's translation of L'enseignement de Vilamakirti, a Buddhist text. There were some interesting thoughts about human nature, I think. I also read Angela Howard's Imagery of the Cosmological Buddha, a detailed deciphering of the etchings on an ancient, damaged statue of Buddha in Washington's Freer Gallery. She refers repeated to a number of other representations of Buddha which astoundingly, I had seen. Wow. I read Atonement by Hughes, a disappointment since it only covers theologians from the UK over a couple of decades. I finished reading Lords of Finance by Ahamed this morning. I also really did read the 10th volume of the complete works of Anatole France. I was charmed by the nostalgic novel Pierre Nozieres, which gave me an idea what it was like to grow up in France's Second Empire. I am now reading Perrottet's Napoleon's Privates, about the quirky and the obscene in historical figures.