Dan Sumption > Recent Status Updates

Some of the dialogue reminds me of Paul Whitehouse & Harry Enfield's "cultured fisherman".e.g:

"He told me that we've yet to find a system of education that isn't also a system of indoctrination - whatever the fuck that means".

"Aldrovandi's account [of octopuses] ... is at least an attempt to relay facts rather than symbolic meanings"

I wish that the same applied to the Book of Barely Imagined Beings. There are very few facts about the creatures described, and a surfeit of symbolism.

"Cyrion advanced, the taper held before him. The dark toyed with the taper, surrendering a miniature oasis of half-seen things such as trunks of rock soaring up towards the ceiling. The dark mouthed Cyrion. It licked him, rolled him around on its tongue. The little taper was just a garnish to its palate; it liked the light with Cyrion, as a man might like salt with his meat."

Some very dodgy opinions in this book. Can it really be that, scarcely 20 years after the Holocaust, Norwich writes of the Normans as "so energetic and gifted a race". A master race, perhaps? Or that "among other, less commendable motives, there was certainly a spark of the crusader spirit" in attempts to exterminate the"infidel" Saracens of Sicily? Because killing people for religious reasons is commendable, right?

"the crucial factor is money's ability to turn morality into a matter of simple arithmetic - and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. ... When one looks closer, one discovers that the violence and the quantification are intimately linked."

"Ther was stronge stour and fell and dolerouse, for ther sholde ye have sein knyghtes and sergeauntes falle as thikke as it hadde be reyn."

The book (or rather, series of books) that I have read more than any other. Now revisiting it as an audiobook. Simon Vance's voice is occasionally grating, but mostly great.

"He sees London from every vantage point and can barely make sense of the juxtapositions it throws forward, especially regarding poverty and wealth. For anyone who's spent any time living in the capital and isn't the Queen, this is a deeply relatable concern."

The Germans are now about 40 km from Moscow, which is to be defended ‘to the death’. Today's story: Stalin sends a telegram to Hitler, ‘if these irritating border incidents don't stop, then I shall mobilise.’

the really strange thing is that one has to back Germany now. It would be too awkward, of course, to side with Germany against Russia and with Britain against Germany. It's all such a mess.

There is no doubt that large scale immigration changes the shape, texture and potentially the identity of a nation, but so do out-of-town retail parks, coffee chains, theme pubs, second homes, gentrified cities and privatised streets. If you don't want the population movement, you don't get the cheap, easy consumer lifestyle it facilitates. Which will you choose?

"you can't approach the numinous with discursive thought, any more than you can solve an algebraic equation through the use of metaphor. “Sell your cleverness”, advises the Persian mystic poet Rumi, “and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion; bewilderment is intuition.” It seems like good advice, and when I try to follow it I see these things appear in a subtly different light.

"A function of poetry is to give words to intuitions that, if expressed in prose, would fall apart under their own flimsiness; to see what is coming and try to express it and not to have it understood until everybody else can also see it, at which point they will claim that they saw it all along."

"I used to long to be on Newsnight every week, offering up my Very Important Opinions on the world. This was in my twenties, back when I didn't know anything. Only people who don't know anything want to be noticed for offering up their opinions as if they were facts."

The European Union has unilaterally declared itself closed to outsiders against international and European law. … The survival of the idea of Europe depends upon the Union's response to the greatest humanitarian crisis since its inception. If Fortress Europe continues, with its violation of international law and basic principles of humanity, the EU does not deserve to survive.

In September 2015, an EU council reluctantly agreed a relocation plan for 160,000 refugees from Italy and Greece. The were to be distributed to the twenty-eight EU states, according to size and population. At the time of writing, only four thousand refugees have been reolcated to the rest of Europe.

"When a local cuisine or a religious festival becomes part of the heritage industry, their connection with a living community is loosened. Something celebrated and sold as part of ‘tradition’ has stopped being a form of life."

"the sale of the port of Piraeus to the Chinese company Cosco ‘had the interesting postmodern twist of a left-wing government in a capitalist society imposing labour standards on a right-wing company from a communist country’"

"I retreated to writing the journal in an attempt first to understand the scene around me and then to uncover the deeper meanings behind the often offensive words exchanged. It soon became clear to me that my professional deformation was turning me into an ethnographer of a strange and powerful tribe."

"Did they tell you I can floak?" I said. "I wish I'd never told them that fucking word. They think I can do anything now. Except they don't, really: they just want the opportunity to say 'floak'."

"They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer."