Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
BELL
Sweet taste of political pontification HARRY Starkey’s Monarchy is worth a look
Daniel Hamilton, that marvellous egg of an Old Langtonian, brought my attention to the video doing the rounds on social media of schoolgirls chiding Daily Politics host Andrew Neil because he questioned their support for the sugar tax.
On the face of it, it looked like some sweet kids cleverly pointing out the health benefits of eating less sugar.
But look deeper and you’ll see it really wasn’t about sugar at all.
It was about the children of today swallowing whole the government line, submitting thoughtlessly to authority and castigating Neil for daring to question orthodoxy.
After watching the video, Daniel told me: “The spectacle of these brainwashed, primary school automatons pontificating on national television was unnerving, unsettling and unedifying.
“The spirit of rebellious youth has, it seems, given way to a meek adherence to whatever bien pensant guff is handed out by the public health lobby. That wouldn’t happen at the Langton Boys.”
A friend’s three-yearold son started at a district nursery school last week. As part of his induction, he was asked a series of questions, to which they recorded his answers verbatim. What is your name? James and Daddy. What colour is your hair? Blue. Where do you live? 1-2-3-9. Who lives with you? People. Do you have any pets? Two pigs. When you grow up what do you want to be? Big.
Quote of the week comes from newsman Michael Buerk: “As a superannuated war reporter, I’m a little sniffy about celebs pratting around among the world’s victims.
“I hate it when featherbedded thesps pay flying visits to the desperate to parade their bleeding hearts and trumpet their infantile ideas on what ‘must be done’.” The Yesterday TV channel is showing David Starkey’s series Monarchy.
The historian, who lives in Barham, has an absorbing style which contains the necessary gravitas while avoiding over-dramatics.
Our monarchy is the sun around which these isles rotate and I would recommend this series to anyone with an interest in understanding what Britain is.
Last week, I mentioned the pure pleasure of going book shopping in Canterbury, coming across something quite by accident and taking a punt on it.
And so it proved a few months back when I bought Inventing the Individual, by Prof Larry Siedentop, from Waterstone’s in St Margaret’s Street.
If you’re after a fascinating and broad survey of the development of the western mind, then this is for you.
But don’t just take my word for it. This is former Labour MP David Marquand’s 2014 review in The New Statesman: “Inventing the Individual is a magnificent work of intellectual, psychological and spiritual history.
“It is hard to decide which is more remarkable: The breadth of learning displayed on almost every page, the infectious enthusiasm that suffuses the whole book.
“Siedentop takes us on a 2,000-year journey that starts with the almost inconceivably remote city states of the ancient world and ends with the Renaissance.
“In the course of this journey, he explodes many (perhaps even most) of the preconceptions that run through the public culture of our day – and that I took for granted before reading his book.”
While we have happily retained our decent bookshops, it was pointed out to me that the last of Canterbury’s Morelli’s cafes has disappeared. The newly opened Citi Terrace at the Longmarket replaced the only one remaining with the famous name.