what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label reappraisals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reappraisals. Show all posts

Thursday, June 24, 2010

weather for reading


gloomy mist all around the house at my 1,300 metre level. At 07.00 the light is so poor that I need the lamp to read Andrew Robert's The Story of war - a new history of the second world war. I'm also dipping into one of the early Le Carre novels - and staring Tony Judt's Reappraisals. An earlier blog referred to historian Judt's latest book (Ill fares the Land). This one is a collection of the trenchant essays he has written on various European figures such as Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Eric Hobsbawm, Kennedy, Kissinger, Arthur Koestler and Edward Said. His theme is the role of ideas - and our forgetfulness....A wonderful writer - and his Post-war Europe remains not only one of the few treatments of this subject which includes central europe (Garton Ash is the only other historian who has done central europe justice) but the most eloquent and passionate.
So far this morning, the find has been a prolific EU Think Tank which focusses on the neglected field of the EU's democracy programme. Ive downloaded interesting papers on its strategy in Central Asia, for exampe.