Please comment. Comments are moderated, so it may take a day or two for your comment to appear. Or send a mail to wolfmac@sympatico.ca If you quote, please also link to this blog. If you like this blog, please follow it. Highest review rating is four stars ****
Her wartime marriage to Archie Christie meant more to her than him. As Mary Westmacott, she wrote love romances. I think she needed to write them to work out her feelings of abandonment and betrayal by Archie Christie.
A good summary of Christie’s life and work, but not a keeper. **
Mike Glover. The Big Lonely (2009) Glover took a trip across the country (one of many), and self-published this book of sketches. They are notes for his paintings. He likes old buildings, old machines, boats, lonely rocks and trees. The cover image shows his taste. The drawings are accurate records of the subjects, seen from an angle that creates a pleasing composition. The objects look self-sufficient, as though they existed apart from the humans that made them, or the human that sees and records them. In his paintings, this self-sufficiency creates a kind of solitary, elegiac mood. Glover gave me this book in exchange for a few items for his model railroad. I’m glad to have it. ****
In 1980 or thereabouts the second round of inflation began. Central banks everywhere raised interest rates into the double digits. Ordinary folk like us faced mortgages offered at above 20%. We paid 23% on the line of credit we used to build our house. The bank manager asked his central office to approve a mortgage in the high teens. As that rate came down year-by-year, we maintained the high mortgage payment, and so paid it off in less than half the originally calculated time.
Smith has managed to turn his tale of accounting, interest rates, monetary policy and such into a page turner. That’s the effect of both the large number of stories about his interviews with bankers, economists, money market gurus etc, and of his style. He tells the story of his investigations, which reveals the story of the two huge rounds of inflation and the restructuring of the global banking system. He writes high journalism: Factually as accurate as he can make it, larded with analysis and theory, all conveyed as his personal experience and thinking.
A side effect of reading this book is a better understanding of why Trump’s tariffs (if sustained) will lead to another round of inflation, and probably another restructuring of the global banking system. Another effect is a clearer insight into international trade: Basically, it’s bartering, with the values of the goods in the contracts and account books denominated in US dollars. A possible (and based on Smith’s explanations IMO a likely) outcome of the tariffs will be the loss of the US dollar’s status as the global currency.
Highly recommended. ****
Footnote: As of this posting, Trump has rolled back tariffs on several types of food. It seems the tariffs have begun to bite, and the voters are unhappy.
Mike Higgs, compiler. Dan Dare: Operation Saturn (1989). Originally Eagle V3-47, February 1953, to V5-31, May 1954.
Granny Morgan subscribed to the Eagle for us. The cover comic on every issue was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. He wore a very 1950-ish uniform, he had a batman who was loveable working-class clown, and he showed proper deference to his commanding officer, a grey-mustachioed figure of probity. His sidekicks were a Yank and a Frenchman, but of course Dan the Englishman was the leader of this multi-national space force. The space ships were technically impossible. The first trip was to Venus, home of two antagonistic tribes separated by a fiery equator. All very simplistic, but it satisfied our desire for space opera.
This story begins with “black cats”, robot ships that attack and destroy inner-planet space ships. Their origin is Saturn. An evil scientist-entrepreneur offers to help the space force on their mission. He is of course a traitor who will deliver Earth to the evil emperor who wants to rule the solar system. And so on. Dare and the oppressed races who inhabit Saturn’s moons win, of course, and the would-be emperor dissolves into glittery stuff, maybe gas or maybe dust.
Rereading this story, I see what I didn’t see at the time: the jingoistic assumption that Britain would rule the space-waves, that English daring would solve all problems, that the lesser races needed the leadership of Dare, that the other powers would happily cede leadership to Britain, etc. Eagle was founded by an Anglican clergyman who wanted to counter-act the influence of Beano and other English comics, and the increasing influence of American comics. Eagle was printed on slick paper, with lots of wholesome content, such as centre-spreads illustrating and describing interesting technical achievements. Dan Dare served as the hero-model that would raise a generation of wholesome and upright English boys to wholesome and upright English manhood, ready to take their wholesome and rightful places in the post-war utopia. Or something like that.
We collected our copies. Before we came to Canada, I cut out the centre-spreads dealing with railways. I kept them for years. When the Dan Dare comics were compiled into books, my brother subscribed. This one was an extra copy that he offered to me. I was glad to have it. Rereading it triggered nostalgic memories of 11 Broad Walk, Sunday walks with our uncle and the dog, and listening to radio comedy shows with Grandpa that Granny disapproved of. The Dan Dare story is a slap-dash creation; no publisher would waste ink on it nowadays. It could have been done more carefully, with more plausible physics, fully developed characters, and aliens that were more than funny coloured humans. As it is, it was a nostalgia trip for me. **
This copy of Death in Ecstasy was printed in 1943, and contains a note requesting the reader to forward it to the armed forces for the enter...
