.jpg?w=799)
Yesterday was busy. I spent nearly the entire day in meetings, managed to teach a class, and used the few gaps in my schedule to keep my inbox from getting completely out of control. Ah, the life of the mind. I’m not writing this to complain (OK, maybe a little) but to say this: One thing I like about this column (when I’m not cursing it) is that it forces me to read more than I otherwise would. The first thing I read this morning—a delight—was Dominic Green on Evelyn Waugh’s war years. Here’s a snippet: “A brave death was Waugh’s ideal. His fearless comportment under fire suggests that he wished to meet it: ‘May I share your trench?,’ he asked a covering Australian private before taking cover from a Stuka raid… But Layforce’s two battalions retreated up the road to Hora Sfakion before they were hard pressed. On May 28, Waugh established Layforce’s headquarters at an inn by a shaded spring at the village of Babali Hani (now Agii Pantes), close to the junction of the coastal road and the mountain road to Hora Sfakion. From this bucolic vantage, Waugh spent the day watching German dive bombers at work to his east: ‘It was like everything German—overdone.’”
Colin Greenwood reviews Michael Palin’s “poignant” Erebus: The Story of a Ship: “Months stretched into years, as the ships, just 102 feet long and each crammed with 60-odd men and supplies, became mired in the ice. The perpetual darkness and cold of the Arctic winter seem scarcely endurable. Palin draws together recent research to explain just how the men could have ended up in such a desperate state, weakened by scurvy, possibly lead poisoning too from poorly made tinned food, or the water system on board the ships.”
