Hugh Trevor-Roper
What Would Have Happened If It Had Worked
The fifth of November is, I suppose, after Christmas Day and St George’s Day, the holiest fixed date in our national calendar. For centuries it has been celebrated annually with comminatory sermons, feux de joie, and (at least in robuster times) with the ceremonial burning (or, in Lewes, drowning) of combustible (or submersible) popes. And why not? For it commemorates our ‘great deliverance’ from that devilish popish attempt, in 1605, to blow up the Royal Family, the House of Lords and the whole Palace of Westminster: national institutions which, though we may criticise them in particular, we still cherish in general as part of our national myth.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.