We'll win in the end as Winnie knows full well!

Non-fiction Blog

The Conspiracy Theorist's Christmas Gift is here!! - Backstabbing for Beginners: A Crash Course in International Diplomacy by Michael Soussan

Here we have it, fact more intriguing than fiction! Corruption in the UN - Never!

This is the eyewitness account of an idealistic young man who - after contemplating suicide following his disgust with a former employer - a crooked Washington lobbyist - joined the UN instead! He did so at about the time their humanitarian Oil-for-Food programme was kicking-in - in Saddam Hussain's Iraq. It was a programme intended to allow monitored sales of embargoed Iraqi oil under UN supervision - with the proceeds paying for much-needed medicines and other humanitarian items that could not be obtained without hard currency. It ended up, as we all know now, being hijacked by Saddam, his henchmen, and a bunch of Western, Russian and other UN officials and politicians to ensure that the regime in Baghdad got the dollars they wanted through price-rigging, over-invoicing, illicitly fronted Swiss bank accounts and all the usual baggage that one associates with corrupt disctatorships preserving their lifestyles and pension prospects - with handouts for services rendered to those in a position to assist!

Backstabbing for Beginners: A Crash Course in International Diplomacy by Michael Soussan is published by Nation (Hardcover 13 November 2008) ISBN:1568583974 - 352 pages. List Price £15.99. Available from Amazon at £10.55.

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'Inglorious excess', shouts The Sunday Times...!

'A nation on the make' is how the Guardian describes it...!

Anything Goes: a Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore

Kathryn Hughes's review in the Guardian goes on to say (and we would agree, when all about us are finally comparing the last decade and a half with the Roaring Twenties) that 'Lucy Moore could not have timed her new book better'. Indeed!... 'Out-of-control consumer spending? Unregulated banking system? Feverish need to drink and drug the jumpy self into oblivion?' ... ' If this book has a moral it is that, in the words of that balladeer of bad times Al Johnson, "you ain't seen nothing yet"'.

Anything Goes is described by the publisher as 'an exhilerating portrait of the era of invention, glamour and excess from one of the brightest young stars of history writing' ...'1920s America was a place of drama, tension and hedonism' ... 'wild all-night parties, the birth of Hollywood and a glamourous gangster-led crime scene flourished under prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events' ... 'and it produced a glittering array of writers, musicians and film stars from F Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin'.

While The Sunday Times reminds us that 'Along with all the frivolity, the decade had seen mortgage indebtedness more than doubled between 1922 and 1929, and on the eve of the Great Crash, 75% of all cars were bought on hire purchase. "Wealth is the chief aim of man," said President Calvin Coolidge. But most people were keener on credit, or making easy money on ludicrously overvalued stocks and shares. When things fell apart, Andrew Mellon, the austere secretary of the Treasury, said simply, "People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted." In 1932, a Republican president was voted out in favour of a democrat - Roosevelt and his New Deal. Change had come to America. Plus ca change.' !!

Anything Goes: a Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore is published by Atlantic Books in Hardcover (1 Nov 2008) ISBN:1843547775 , 304 pages. List Price £19.99. Available new from Amazon at £14.99.

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New, Notable and Topical: The American Future: A History by Simon Schama

You can watch the series on BBC 2 - but if you want to delve deeper, you really should treat yourself to the book!

Simon Schama lived in America for some twenty years and taught history at Harvard and Colombia University, so he should know what he's writing about when he turns out a four-hundred page tome like The American Future: A History to coincide with what must be the most intriguing , if not bitter-and-twisted, presidential election campaign to have been fought under the spotlight of the international media!

We like the comments Simon Jenkins makes in his review of The American Future: A History for The Sunday Times - that 'Schama's America is built on four abstract nouns - belligerence, fervour, ethnicity and plenty - each viewed as part history, part anecdote and part research for a television series'. Well, yes, I'm not sure that we can really argue with this!

As well as recounting the recent rapid rise of Barack Obama and the demise of the Republican Party under George W Bush and friends, we have here the stories, amongst many others, of General Montgomery Meigs, and snippits of information about several other members of the Meigs Dynasty - whose ancestors first set foot on American shores in 1636 - along with a piece about an Islamic American of part-Lebanese extraction, called Chuck. All part of the rich tapestry of ethenicity and fervour - to say nothing of belligerence and plenty - that have -as a melting-pot of immigrants from colonial times to the present - set out to conquer half a continent and leave an indelible mark on the rest of the world - lead to the shaping of The American Future: A History !

The American Future: A History by Simon Schama is published in Hardback by The Bodley Head (1 Oct 2008) ISBN:1847920004. List Price £20.00. Available new from Amazon for £12.00 - or from one of their Marketplace sellers from £8.94 (see box to the right above)!

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New, Notable and Historic - as well as Biographical!

Henry: Virtuous Prince by David Starkey

Well, he WAS virtuous when he was younger, wasn't he? Before absolute power corrupted absolutely!

You have to give it to the populist TV historian David Starkey, he does know his Tudors, intimately, by all accounts, considering they were the subject matter of his first undergraduate essay dating back to the 1960s - and have comprised much of his 'subject matter' since!

Prince Henry, it seems, was very different from the later King Henry VIII as Starkey is keen to point out. Indeed Henry: Virtuous Prince is described as a somewhat pious, scholarly type, given to participation in the odd round of jousting (among friends, and at the 'safer' kind of tournament) - a 'young, handsome prince, slim, athletic, musical and learned.' A very different person indeed to the more familiar ill-tempered, gout-and-syphillis-ridden middle-aged monarch who generally couldn't keep his wives for very long - for one reason or another!

We are told that there will be a second volume in due course covering Henry's kingship. In the meantime we commend you to this well-researched tome about the 'other' Henry!          

Henry: Virtuous Monarch by David Starkey is published by HarperCollins (01 Oct 2008) ISBN:9780007247714. List Price £25.00. Available new from Amazon for £12.50.