No comments about Frank Lloyd Wright and George Mann Niedecken: Prairie School Collaborators.

No comments about Robert Owen: A Biography.

No comments about Byron: The Image of the Poet.

5 comments about The Nemesis File: The True Story of an Sas Execution Squad.

1. Bruce was arrested by N. Ireland police and charged with "obstructing police" after they investigated his claims and found
   absolutly no evidence to support them. But give him credit, he wrote a great yarn. Shame on all you left wing, anti gov. types that fell for it.



2. For those of you loyalists to the british crown, I say remember the "Guildford Four" and the fraudulent quack investigation that widgery used to force troopers to lie about the Bloody Sunday terrorist attack by british soldiers on unarmed Catholic protestors. These soldiers now say they never came under gunfire on January 30, 1972. If you keep those blatant miscarriages of justice in mind you will enjoy this book and believe it is quite possibly true.



3. I have just arrived halfway into this book and decided to check it out on the net, and found out its a load of fiction its a pity i was starting to enjoy it. I was a bit suspicious when on page 96 he states he was issued with a SMG which is the STERLING L2A3 9MM so taking 2 magazines of 7.62mm rounds would be pointless.I now have read that Paul Bruce has since been arrested by the RUC and charged with wasting police time and they cant find any truth in his story.I also believe that if the British Gov intended to assasinate terrorists they would use the sercurity services and not the high profile SAS.I will continue to read on and just enjoy it as a piece of fiction.



4. 
   http://www.nics.gov.uk/press/ruc/nemesis.htm
   
   QUOTE: "THE NEMESIS FILE: A TRUE STORY OF AN EXECUTION SQUAD
   The Royal Ulster Constabulary has for some time been making enquiries into alleged serious criminal offences, primarily as a result of allegations made in the book "The Nemisis File: the true story of an Execution Squad" which is published by Blake Publishing.
   
   As part of our continuing enquiries, and having regard to the seriousness of the allegations made in the book, the book's author was arrested by RUC officers under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and was interviewed at Castlereagh Police Station, Belfast.
   
   Enquiries into the matter have now been completed and we are satisfied that the allegations contained in the book are not true in fact or substance and this includes an assertion that the author was at some time a member of the Special Air Services Regiment. The RUC is satisfied that the author has not been concerned, either directly or indirectly, in the commission of any serious criminal offence whilst serving in the Province during the period February _ June 1972 when he served as a vehicle mechanic with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. The RUC considers the book "The Nemesis File: the true story of an Execution Squad" as a work of fiction and accordingly the investigation is now closed". UNQUOTE



5. Of course I have read his book. Also, knew some of his fellow S.A.S. friends. DO NOT listen to the RUBBISH of some reviewers who only knew half the story. Like anyone else who is controversial, there are many who have an investment in putting his true story down. I speak unbiasedly about Paul, as we are divorced and I'm married again.
   
   But this man has not lied. He was out the army and passed the time of the silence word keeping. The Government heard of him exposing them and so they tried to quiet him. Paul was not treated very well and accidently found himself lying on floors and grounds, He does not take to threats and so the story came out. He was arrested, for them to obtain his written apology which came out in a newspaper, his family would have suffered otherwise.
   
   Luckily some other S.A.S. from British Execution Squads, had been speaking to a Colonel, who wrote his review on the back cover of the second publication. Paul Bruce was vindicated and acclaimed one of the bravest men ever. Which of course he was, the deal he did with the publisher was criminal as the percentage of such a best selling book, has been extremely low. I even hawked it around booksellers and helped for extra sales.
   
   Because of the way Paul had been treated by the British Army and the Government, he began to drink very heavily again. Paul was angry that he had written a book which could have cost him his life, and still no help with the trauma he suffered for doing the nasty jobs. No thank you, housing, pension, or mental help.Rehab he got for himself eventually, but he was already ruined.
   
   Paul is killing himself with drink and he does not care. He's been through hell and can not handle life. His children, boy and a girl, suffer from seeing their father like this. I think Paul Bruce deserved something for trying to stop the lies and killings in Ireland. He may not have developed his self-destruct button.
   
   The book was not well written, mistakes and sentences running to long. But it was the typist at the publisher who wrote it whilst Paul was talking the story to him. This man is mentioned on the book and got good remuneration for it too. As much as Paul got. What do you think of that. And Paul can not take the book and have that movie made, as John Blake has kept all the rights for ever. Paul found even at the end his trust was misplaced. Story of his life.

5 comments about Orwell: The Life.

1. I have read many biographies of Orwell before encountering this one, but have learned more about Orwell the person in this book than in all of the others combined. Taylor's insight into the man and sparkling prose style make this a must read.



2. This is a difficult book to categorize. It is well written, contains many interesting anecdotes, but it misses the essential Orwell.
   
   Taylor's gloomy, otherwordly, ex-Etonian, ex-imperial policeman simply does not add up to Orwell. The sum of the parts is much less than the man. Taylor's book is a bit like an autopsy, the pathologist clearly never being able to comprehend the stiff, dead flesh and bottled samples before him as the full human being they were. Nevertheless, autopsies do tell interesting tales.
   
   Orwell's gloomy temperament puts him not outside the mainstream of writers but exactly in the company of so many important writers. The list of writers with some form of depression, whether alcoholism or gloominess, is so huge - Greene, Swift, Hemingway, Le Carré, Dickens, Gissing, O'Neill, Twain, Faulkner, etc, etc. - one comes to think of the quality almost as a job requirement. It provides one of the special lens through which critical writers see the world. One has to believe Taylor understands this, but his book conveys only clinical observations of gloominess snipped from letters, diaries, and conversations.
   
   As far as Orwell's otherworldliness, Orwell was clearly in the great tradition of English eccentrics, and that is an important component of his appeal. There is a long and glorious line of them from Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen down to Alec Guinness, Margaret Rutherford, and Vanessa Redgrave. Yet Taylor only offers clinical observations and never puts them in their proper context.
   
   Orwell was not an important novelist, so it seems a bit gratuitous to say so as Taylor does. In fact, he wasn't even a very good novelist. Yet books like Keep the Aspadistra Flying do provide a keen sense of his Englishness. Missing entirely from Taylor's autopsy is a sense of Orwell's quintessential Englishness. When Orwell writes of getting back to the feel of heavy English coins and having mahogany tea, readers get a sense of pure distilled Englishness. This comes through also in quasi-journalistic books like The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London - important early efforts at what today might be called investigative journalism - books which Taylor rather disparages both in terms of Orwell's re-arranging actual events and being an observer mentally wearing an Eton tie.
   
   What Orwell was is a critic, and a rather magnificent one. I am reminded of Degas' description of Monet as "Only an eye, but what an eye!"
   
   Orwell had an exquisite sense of justice and a very sensitive barometer for tyranny plus he had the words to convey vividly his sensibilities. Taylor virtually misses this in his examination of bile and stool samples. Taylor too often puts Orwell's political criticism down to miss-directed, soft-Left thinking of an ex-Etonian. Orwell himself recognized the simpering nature of much of the Left's views, yet he struggled bravely with finding a vocabulary to accommodate his sympathies. He possibly did not come to recognize himself for what he was, a scorching critic of both Left and Right. After all, his time was short. That is how it is when you die in your forties.
   
   He was also an important literary critic, and while Taylor recognizes this, I don't believe he gives it a full enough examination.
   
   Taylor sadly drags out the subject of anti-Semitism, perhaps the most overly-used epithet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If Orwell was anti-Semitic - and I do not believe this for a second - it was in the same vague sense of virtually all Englishmen of his time. The English have always had a degree of xenophobia, a quality whose obverse side is the very set of qualities defining Englishness. I am tired of discussions of whether Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice makes the greatest playwright in human history anti-Semitic, discussions which always ignore the human qualities and sense of justice Shakespeare gives his character, and just so, Orwell, overall a truly decent man.
   
   There has been a good deal of writing in recent years about Orwell, much of it wrong-headed, from claims being made that he would have supported Bush's invasion of Iraq (!) to sentimentality. Little of it captures Orwell the independent and remarkably clear-thinking critic. Taylor gives us no sense of what it was that animated Orwell, other than some almost silly stuff about getting back at people like the headmistress of his school. There is almost a sense in this book of a high-class hatchet job done on Orwell, but I don't want to push that point. What makes Orwell truly important is minimized, and what wasn't important is given a good deal of weight. Perhaps that is the fate of great critics who support no one's ideologies and preconceptions.
   
   This book should be read only with an awareness of its limited approach to the subject. This is not Orwell, but a somewhat interesting display of bits and memorabilia in museum cabinets.
   
   Please see my review of Gordon Bowker's Orwell biography, a superior work (published in the same year) in most respects to Taylor's.



3. Well, I guess idols routinely crumble under scrutiny, so I shouldn't really be surprised that I came away from D.J. Taylor's biography of George Orwell viewing the famous author more as a man than as a hero. That is how it must be, however. When we study our fellow humans their flaws become discernible regardless of their greatness. As a man, Eric Blair was far from grand. He appeared to have the same faults present in many writers (all-be-they to a lesser extent). I now have a better appreciation of the author, and for the suffering he went through along with the challenges of his life. My one complaint is that Taylor did not treat his subject with the respect to which he was entitled. More empathy and less Thackeray would have been immensely appreciated. As for me, I'll always treasure 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitchens was right; Orwell remains relevant. This biography heightens our awareness of the man even though it comes at the cost of his no longer seeming transcendent. Orwell's creative genius is not something undermined by these pages, but I do think that it's hard to appreciate his political outlook after closely examining it. His animosity towards Marxism is rather comical when one considers his continuing, quasi-religious belief in socialism. His time at the BBC taught him a little bit about the way in which bureaucracies function and we can only hopefully speculate that, if he had lived longer, he would have eventually renounced his love for statism and seen the light.



4. Well, I guess idols routinely crumble under scrutiny, so I shouldn't really be surprised that I came away from D.J. Taylor's biography of George Orwell viewing the famous author more as a man than as a hero. That is how it must be, however. When we study our fellow humans their flaws become discernible regardless of their greatness. As a man, Eric Blair was far from grand. He appeared to have the same faults present in many writers (all-be-they to a lesser extent). I now have a better appreciation of the author, and for the suffering he went through along with the challenges of his life. My one complaint is that Taylor did not treat his subject with the respect to which he was entitled. More empathy and less Thackeray would have been immensely appreciated. As for me, I'll always treasure 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitchens was right; Orwell remains relevant. This biography heightens our awareness of the man even though it comes at the cost of his no longer seeming transcendent. Orwell's creative genius is not something undermined by these pages, but I do think that it's hard to appreciate his political outlook after closely examining it. His animosity towards Marxism is rather comical when one considers his continuing, quasi-religious belief in socialism. His time at the BBC taught him a little bit about the way in which bureaucracies function and we can only hopefully speculate that, if he had lived longer, he would have eventually renounced his love for statism and seen the light.



5. To be quite frank, I did not enjoy this book.
   
   Not only did I not like the way it's written, but I didn't like what I was reading either.
   
   Firstly, his research is impeccable, but it was so hard to know who anybody was in this book, he just pops up random characters left and right, and he'll just casually mention cousins and neighbours and you are expected to remember them all.
   
   I think it's because he spent so long researching the stuff that he just has everybody memorized, but for a reader remembering casual friends and stuff like that by last name when they haven't been mentioned for 150 pages is hard.
   
   He also mentions Orwell's father's death as an afterthought.
   He has chapters about the most mundane stuff, and he mentions Orwell's father being sick many times.
   But then he changes the subject and you are wondering whatever happened to his father.
   Then you read another 20 pages and he mentions it while talking about something else.
   
   Furthermore, after reading nearly 500 pages on this man's life, you begin to view the book as written for the purpose of revealing his dark nature.
   Orwell's eccentricity and lack of social tact are basically what the book is about.
   
   The back of the book jacket reads, "Taylor's magisterial assessment cuts through Orwell's iconic status to reveal a bitter critic who concealed a profound totalitarian streak and whose progress through the literary world of the 30s and 40s was characterized by the myths he built around himself."
   
   Taylor writes the book to convince us that Orwell was a creepy poor man with an unhappy marriage, a womanizer and pitifully helpless father.
   Then you remember the magisterial books that the man produced, and you realize that nothing in this portrayal of the man gives any indication of greatness or of the material he ended up producing.
   The sole convincing argument was that 1984 was so gloomy because of the tortuous state the author himself was in when he wrote it.
   I would give it 2 stars if I felt that the research was poor, but the author does display his knowledge of Orwell's works several times.
   Towards the end he even mentions a few specific scenes and passages from the 1984 that appeared in Orwell's earlier writing. He has clearly pored over the hordes of work Orwell produced.
   
   Pros:
   
   Very well researched.
   The photographs included are a great help in visualizing the people in his life.
   
   Cons:
   
   Disjointed, disorganized, haphazard writing. More than once he is making an argument, only to digress and be sidetracked for several pages. Then he continues his argument out of the blue and you are reminded, "Ah, that's what he was talking about."
   
   Seems to write for the purpose of debunking Orwell's mythological status, which would be fine, but it makes for a very poor first read into the man's life.
   
   So, if you are not an Orwell fan, and would like to read a dissertation on the man's darker side, then this book is for you.
   However, if you are looking for your first biography on the man who produced utter genius like 1984 and Animal Farm, then I would suggest you start with something else.
   
   B-

No comments about Tempestuous Petticoat: The Story of an Invincible Edwardian.

2 comments about In The Footsteps of Churchill: A Study in Character.

1. Professor Holmes is a British military historian and it shows in this interesting attempt at describing Winston Churchill's character. He decidedly has an opinion, usually conservative, on most political and social issues of the last century and is happy to share them with the reader. He also spends more time on battle issues in the two world wars than would most authors of a character study of this type. This book is best for readers who have some prior knowledge of the life of Winston Churchill. The professor points out many of the faults and warts of his subject but the ultimate verdict is in recognition of his genius.



2. British military historian Richard Holmes' "In The Footsteps Of Churchill: A Study In Character", is a book that, inspite of its brevity, offers a most penetrating, thoughtful analysis of Winston Churchill as a politician and statesman. While he is obviously someone favorably disposed to Churchill for some intriguing personal reasons, Holmes does offer a surprisingly nuanced portrayal of Great Britain's greatest 20th Century prime minister, which veers from a self-indulgent narcissist to a deliberative, often profound, observer of his fellow British politicians and of foreign affairs, especially in the 1930s, with respect to Hitler's Nazi Germany. Understandably Holmes, as a military historian, emphasizes Churchill's military service, his celebrated exploits as a military journalist and finally, his service as First Sea Lord in both world wars, as a means of exploring Churchill's personal character, and demonstrating how his military experience played an important part in defining it. Holmes may be the first historian I know of who does consider simultaneously Churchill's service as First Sea Lord, ultimately portraying a less than flattering portrait of someone who was too "wedded" to the interests of charismatic, flamboyant leaders like Admirals Fisher and Beatty (For example, Churchill seriously underestimated the crucial need of smaller escort vessels for the Royal Navy in both world wars, relying more on the advice of his admirals interested in big gun warships like ballecruisers and battleships.). And yet, inspite of a detailed exploration of Churchill's personal and leadership flaws, Holmes does conclude that ultimately, his strong, decisive leadership during World War II was necessary for ensuring Great Britain's survival. Those who think they know well Winston Churchill's biography will ultimately be as surprised and intrigued as I was while reading Professor Holmes' superb study of Churchill's character. Without question, it is among the finest books on Churchill's life that I've come across.

1 comments about The Last Letters of Thomas More.

1. Here is the man in his own words in letters to his daughter, his king and his friends. Much from A Man for All Seasons is taken from these letters. Wonderful!

No comments about Winston Churchill by his Personal Secretary: Recollections of The Great Man by A Woman Who Worked for Him.

No comments about Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women.