Garner, Carlyle, McFarquhar

Since my last post I've read one issue of The New Yorker, one issue of The Globe, one issue of Hello Canada, one issue of The Economist, two issues of Eclectic Reading, and two issues of The New Scientist.

I also read the two latter volumes of McFarqhuar's Origins of the Cultural Revolution, in which I discovered not just the terrible, sad, wrong-headed decisions of the Communist leadership leading to the terrible famine death toll in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I also read a biography of Hugh Garner, another alcoholic writer, and a biography of Carlyle. I also finished Trevor Roper's Last Days of Hitler. The moment I found the most memorable in that book, apart from upper-class condemnation of Hitler's bourgeois habits -- a strange accusation given everything else there is to criticize about him -- was the fact that after Hitler's body was removed from the bunker, everyone immediately lit up. The smoking ban enforced in his lifetime was now, at last, at an end. Extraordinary picture it dredges up.