A Time of Gifts
Leigh Fermor walked from London to Budapest when he was 18. Sometimes called England's greatest travel writer.
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- For the value of ‘best’ that includes (a) had a deep and long lasting impact on how I think about the world and (b) I consider beautiful pieces of writing in their own right, here are some in no particular order: The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein (These you might want to approach via a gentle introduction if you did not study Philosophy to degree level) The Rediscovery of the Mind, John R Searle Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh Diaries, Samuel Pepys Falling Off the Map, Pico Iyer A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor The Lonely Sea and the Sky, Francis Chichester The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope Bevis, Richard Jeffries The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon GrossSmith The Inimitable Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
Hitch-22, essaysChristopher Hitchens Collected Essays, William Hazlitt Venice, Martin Gayford
The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch
Too obvious a list, perhaps, but some gems for all that! Happy reading.
- Aargh, Formatting! Try 2 :
For the value of ‘best’ that includes
(a) had a deep and long lasting impact on how I think about the world and
(b) I consider beautiful pieces of writing in their own right,
here are some in no particular order:
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke
Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
(These you might want to approach via a gentle introduction if you did not study Philosophy to degree level)
The Rediscovery of the Mind, John R Searle
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
Diaries, Samuel Pepys
Falling Off the Map, Pico Iyer
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Lonely Sea and the Sky, Francis Chichester
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
Bevis, Richard Jeffries
The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon GrossSmith
The Inimitable Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
Hitch-22, essays, Christopher Hitchens
Collected Essays, William Hazlitt
Venice, Martin Gayford
The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski
The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch
Too obvious a list, perhaps, but some gems for all that! Happy reading.
- Argh!!!!
"The assassination of an Austrian dictator in 1934 as part of a putsch did little to shake the slain leader’s newly established political system."
They're talking about the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss. [0].
The system they're talking about lasted only four more years before the backers of his assassins took over the country, and it's possible that he might have been able to continue Austria's independence if he had lived.
For background, I'd like to suggest Patrick Leigh Fermor's memoir of travelling in Austria during this time period, _A Time of Gifts_ [1], [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbert_Dollfuss
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_of_Gifts
[2] https://www.amazon.com/A-Time-of-Gifts-audiobook/dp/B00JXQQ3...
- This reminds me: One of the best books about a long walk is Patrick Leigh Fermor's "Time of Gifts" (and the subsequent books). Memoirs of his time before WW2 literally walking from one side of Europe to the other.
His cultural insights, historical perspective, and witty language are all exquisite.
- If you went to a sufficiently posh school you could still be taught "classics" - Latin, Greek and their history - to give a direct cultural link to that time. Not for nothing did Enoch Powell reference the river Tiber. But that's also the problem; all this referencing of the ancient world culminated in Fascism (named from the Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe that symbolises judicial power). Since the smashing of Italian and German Fascism in the 1940s, it has become ... unfashionable.
The challenge remains to reconnect with the past without using it to justify atrocities in the present. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not limited to European history! China does historicist propaganda films too! As do a lot of places, right down to warring caucasian microstates)
(I would reccomend Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time Of Gifts", which is nominally a walking tour but has an incredible connection to the history of Europe and the places he's walking through. Everything from Charlemagne to Esterházy to Roland to Homer)
- The future is not evenly distributed. That might work with 1920s New Yorkers, but for many other places round the world the change has been huge, dramatic, and somewhat traumatic. Heck, even if you take someone who isn't a white guy from 1920s New York, you'll find the world looks very different to them.
1920 was at the beginning of the wave of post-1914 turmoil of the end of empires. Europe had been swept by war and revolution, and nobody would have known how that was going to turn out. Poland was still about 10% Jewish. China was still in the "warlord era" before the rise and fall of the KMT. India (and much of the rest of the world) was still British.
For a sense of the quasi-feudal pre-war Europe, I will always reccomend A Time Of Gifts, Patrick Fermor's walk across Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s.
