Category: Access

I fear I may be becoming a kind of Mumsnet figure, jettisoning a past of decadence and dissolution, shelving a present of geopolitical awareness and acumen, and at last becoming more or less competent to answer young mothers’ anxious questions about which talcum powder is best value for money.

What are you doing, I would ask my father towards the end of his life, telephoning him in New York from a succession of tramontane regions that were, to him, as inconsequential as they were exotic.  Invariably he would give the same answer: “I am lying in bed waiting for world fame.”  World fame never did fall to his share, yet this does not mean that his methodology was flawed.

Some cynical fellow out there has argued that all conversation between people is nothing but power play, with one interlocutor necessarily dominating the other even if the subject of discussion is as inconsequential as what one of them had for breakfast.