The Political Page, T+29 -- March 29, 2018

One of Vic Hanson's best replies to an "angry reader." In one or two short paragraphs, Vic Hanson has completely encapsulated the political history of the Obama administration and the campaign of 2016.

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The Library Page

• A Night to Remember, Walter Lord, c. 1955

In 1898 a struggling author named Morgan Robertson concocted a novel about a fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any that had ever been built. Robertson loaded his ship with rich and complacent people and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg. This somehow showed the futility of everything, and in fact, the book was called Futility when it appeared that year, published by the firm of M. F. Mansfield.

Fourteen years later a British shipping company named the White Star Line built a steamer remarkably like the one in Robertson's novel. The new liner was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson's was 70,000 tons. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple screw and could make 24 - 25 knots. Both could carry about 3,000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number. But, then, this didn't seem to matter because both were labeled "unsinkable." 

On April 10, 1912, the real ship left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York. Her cargo included a priceless copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a list of passengers collectively worth $250 million dollars. On her way over she too struck an iceberg and went down on a cold April night.

Robertson called his ship the Titan; the White Star Line called its ship the Titanic. This is the story of her last night.

Nobel Peace Prize, 2019 (posted at 11:06 a.m. Central Time, March 29, 2018):

• shared: Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and DJT 

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The Book For Today

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome

Roland Chambers

c. 2009

Arthur Ransome: among the handful of writers who make up the British children's canon which includes AA Milne, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis

• Ransome, today, is best known for Swallows and Amazons and eleven further stories written one after another on an almost yearly basis between 1930 and 1947; twelve "immortal" books; wrote them on his return from Russia in 1928
• 1917 - 1924: the Russian correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian
• Bolshevik sympathizer
• lover, and later the husband, of Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky's private secretary
• friends included Karl Radek, the Bolshevik's Chief of Propaganda, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police
• denied the horrors that the followed the Russian revolution; became the bane of the British establishment
• his name, and by extension his character, have become identified with a particular vision of England: a pastoral, old-fashioned utopia set in the Lake District sometime between the wars, with its roots in the Edwardian heyday of the British empire

Chapter 21: Swallows and Amazons

• the Great War was directly responsible for a greater number of future conflicts than any previous war in history
• think of the books published directly after the Great War
• TS Elit's The Waste Land
• James Joyce's Ulysses
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Philosophicus, revolutions in poetry, the novel and philosophy
• Hermann Hess, Demian: "Whoever wants to be born must first destroy the world."
• PG Wodehouse: My Man Jeeves; enchanted his readers by forgetting the war altogether, or rather, by perfecting the art of ignoring what could not be forgotten
• some had foreshadowed the Great War: Thomas Hardy; Rudyard Kipling; Joseph Conrad
• others stepped out of the Great War, fully Grown: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald
• others: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen
• returns to England, 1924
• August: first fishing article in the Guardian; earned him a place in angling history; on-going column, "Rod and Line"
• Racundra earnings help pay for his barn he constructed as a study
• 1924: spent Christmas in Egypt, covering the assassination of Lee Stack
• 1925: back to Russia to write a brief history of Revolution commissioned by the Encyclopedia Brittanica
• final political pamphlet: The Chinese Puzzle, November, 1927 
• February, 1928: back to Russia; "the end of an epoch"
• Stalin's victory over Trotsky, Ransome noted sadly, was essentially a bureaucratic coup de main
• 1929: Ransome describes it as a "year of crisis"
• Jonathan Cape approached him; Cape was then the foremost publisher of the day, who asked Ransome to put together a collection of political essays, the first of a series which Cape suggested might support him in old age
• what Cape got was a selection from "Rod and Line" and a synopsis of The Swallows and the Amazons
• 1930, returned to England; determined to devote himself entirely to his book
• book dropped the The (s)
• sold slowly at first but by third adventure, Peter Duck, a book set in the West Indies, the tide turned; he put all journalism other than literary reviews behind him
• by 1948, shortly after the appearance of the twelfth and final book in the series, Great Northerns?, Cape had sold their millionth copy
• died 1967, two years before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon
• the majority of Ransome's papers can be found in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, where Ann Farr, one of the talented few capable of deciphering his handwriting, began to catalogue them in the 1980s