Category: Leadership

Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (2005)  by Roger Pearson.

GoodReads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.86 by 140 litizens.  

Genre: Biography

Verdict:  As irreverent as the man himself.  

No one can say nothing about Voltaire (1694-1778), good or bad, that he did not say himself.  Everything about the man was fiction, starting with his name, and that is a fact. Born François-Marie Arouet he later took the name we know him by, and PhDs since have tried to figure out why he needed a nom de plume since he bragged no end about what he wrote, and why that name and not something grander, say, like Almighty.

The obvious answers do not lead to tenure: He wanted to be different so he made up his own name. And why that one?  He was a wilful brat, the youngest and last child, much indulged, and called, as a result, le petit volontaire. Translate it this way:  petit means small, of course, and volontaire means will, so the little wilful one, i.e., brat. See: volontaire becomes Voltaire by striking out the middle letters ‘on.’  Instead the PhDs have become anagramalogists and offer a host of convoluted reasoning to arrive at tenure via the obscure. Occasionally he ennobled himself with a ‘de’ in front of Voltaire. This jeu has likewise kindled a blaze of academic gibberish.    

From this start he became, like an air-headed celebrity today on morning television, famous for being fatuous.  Many people today will recognise the name but be unable — I have asked a few on trains bound for Wynyard — to name any of his accomplishments.  Start here: he published about ten million words in every literary form, plays, poems, odes, essays, novels, history, and science in two thousand pamphlets, plays, histories, novels, essays, and books. In addition he conducted empirical scientific research into optics, chemistry, and more. Put that in the Research Quality Framework!  Then there are the letters, thousands of them, most composed to last.  

All of this in an age of control through censorship that a modern McKinsey manager can only dream of.  He was twice convicted of naughtiness and did porridge for eleven months the first time. That lesson was learned. The second time he arranged for a bribe, er, a Florida campaign donation to the jailer. On other occasions when the McKinsey managers of the day were intent on KPI-ing him he found it best to absent himself to the countryside where few Parisians ventured, and then to England and Switzerland. Then there were at least two beatings he suffered, arranged by people who felt offended by his words.  It is all theatrical enough to make Orson Welles jealous.  

How’s this for a story.  When he needed money, on the advice of a mathematician, he borrowed money to buy enough tickets in a state lottery to win a packet while paying back the loan and to be rich thereafter.  He used this wealth to claim his father’s inheritance which had been tied up in Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. Again a well-placed campaign contribution to the Florida attorney-general freed up his inheritance and he was set for life. Others might then have retired to the bottom of a bottle, or to an estate to kill defenceless creatures.  Not so for Voltaire who went for bigger game that could fight back and did – mainly the corrupt Church.  He also thereafter remained a lifelong investor and an avid follower of financial news.

He liked to claim at dinner parties, offering many details, that he had been sexually abused as an altar boy. (Is such a thing possible in the age of Enlightenment, one asks, putting down the newspaper.) This experience, he went on to say, explained all of his failings, and none of his successes. Noel Coward was a bore in comparison.  

He admired the intellectual freedom and social atmosphere in the Netherlands and later in England, but hated the weather and the food in those northern reaches.  Chief of his inspirations were William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton. Some say that the story of the apple falling on Newtown started with Voltaire’s quill.  

He often published books anonymously or with pseudonyms to escape the wraith of royal and ecclesiastical censors. Let’s remember how serious that is:  The royal censor had an axe and the ecclesiastical censor had a bonfire.

Thereafter some printers would blackmail him with threats of exposure unless he paid up! That was bad. What was stupid was that he could not help but brag about these anonymous publications in letters which blew his cover.  What a windbag he was. Though there seems to be no evidence that he reviewed his own pseudonymous works as Anthony Burgess did. That is a trick he missed, one of few.

Polymath he was and spent weeks and many francs doing experiments in physics the better to understand Newtown so as to explain him to Francophones in the baleful grip of René Descartes’s metaphysics.  

This frail and anaemic looking man never lacked for energy or wit.  While often ill and always complaining of bad health he could never sit still, not even for painting and sculpture to immortalise him.  He grew wealthy with his endless negotiations and investments, and at about sixty, persona non grata from France, Prussia, Saxony, Austria, and elsewhere he took up residence in the semi-autonomous canton of Gex across the lake from Geneva to continue his war on ignorance and corruption central, namely the Church.  

He was free; he was rich; he was old; he could say what he wanted without trying duck and cover.  He let loose with a barrage of invective, took up lost causes of individual victims of the Church, besieged officialdom in five countries with petitions and letters. An avalanche of pamphlets, plays, essays ridiculing, admonishing, mocking the high and mighty came forth. More than once he double-tracked: dictating one essay to a secretary, while with quill in hand he was writing another.

He was a Euro celebrity and the world came to him.  He held court with hundreds come to catch a glimpse of him.  To handle the crowd and to give the locals a show, he hired a dozen retired dragoons as an honour guard and decked them out in silk and ermine. He invested heavily in watchmaking and gave clocks to anyone and everyone to develop a market. He even gave one to the Pope, which was accepted, much to his delight, since it was made by a Huguenot protestant.  That somewhere in the interstices of the Vatican time was regulated by a protestant technology amused him no end, and of course he could not keep this to himself so he spread the word, which eventually got to Rome and the clock came back. That amused him even more. The Church giving back loot rather than taking it, as it usually did.

As an aged, valetudinarian, ectomorph, celebrity he bought property and was a fearsome negotiator.  Vendors liked the idea of selling to this celebrity, so he first beat the best price down, then quibbled about the timing and currency of payments, then wanted complicated buyback provisions, and more. At first he did this to ensure that his de facto wife would have a cash settlement if and when he died before the descent of distant relatives, blackmailing printers, tax famers, Church vultures, and other shysters. But then she died, and he kept doing it as sport.  He outlived most of the people who agreed to his terms and got richer and richer.  Yet he argued the margin with publishers, pursued plagiarised editions with vigour, and pinched every sou, while spending freely.

He likewise negotiated with the local priest, bishop, and archbishop the terms under which Easter would be celebrated in Gex, and he was so persistent, dogged, and slick that he always got his way though in one instance Easter was delayed while he pressed his case. God had to wait for Voltaire!  He loved that. 

Like Thomas Jefferson he was a deist, that is, one who believed god, an intelligent being, made the world.  It was then up to us to make the most of it.  This deity did not expect to be worshipped and did not intervene in the world.  The Church that promoted those beliefs was an elaborate hoax to control the unwary to the benefit of the Pat Robertson wannabes.  Jefferson’s deism is ignored by all those small government types who quote him, yet it is there on the walls of the memorial in DC for those that have eyes to read.  

While he combatted the Inquisition at every turn, seeing it to be the logical conclusion of The Roman Catholic Church, he was an incorrigible and unpleasant anti-semite.  

While he and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were contemporaries with Volatire the senior who encouraged the young Rousseau, but….  There are several ‘buts.’  Though they cohabited in Paris and later in Geneva, but never met face-to-face.  Voltaire criticised some of Rousseau’s essays and the thin-skinned Rousseau bristled and never forgave or forgot.  (Check out Jacq’s autobiographical Confessions, which surely take a prize for pettiness.)

In heady early days of the French Revolution its leaders legitimated themselves by gathering to Paris its intellectual precedents.  Huh?  Yes, well, they dug up Rousseau and Voltaire and installed them in the Panthéon.  They have since been across the aisle from each other.  I rather think whoever did that got the joke.  The Panthéon was one the first places I went to on my first visit to Paris, and there they were, and still are. 

I had no ambition to read a biography of Voltaire but the stars aligned to direct me to it, and I — weak reed that I am — bent. When harvesting titles from tripfiction.com for our 2019 sojourn in Mitteleuropa links led me from Austria to Switzerland (because I have found virtually no interesting krimis set in the land of cuckoo clock I looked*).  One of the titles listed there was ‘A Visit from Voltaire’ by Dinah Lee Küng (2004).  I asked for a sample (and will get to it).  And once I did that the Amazon mechanical Turk spat out other suggestions, including this title.   

Earlier in the week when dog walking we encountered Rousseau the poodle whose predecessor, we recalled, was Voltaire. See the alignment of the stars is apparent in retrospect.  It’s that kind of neighbourhood. 

All of this was confirmed on our travels when I noticed a picture of Voltaire in the reception lobby of the hotel in Venice, though I forgot to ask why it was there. Still it meant Voltaire expected me to do the homework.

*Before the pedants strike, let me add I have read Friedrich Dürrenmatt, but his stories are generic, not rooted in Switzerland, and Friedrich Glauser of whom the less said, the better.  I started Tracee de Hahn’s ‘Swiss Vendetta’ but how can I read anything written by a Tracee?  ‘Night Train to Lisbon’ starts in Zurich but, well, the train left.  Maybe it was Geneva, and that is the point.  The origin was just a rainy day anywhere. 

GoodReads meta-data is 302 pages, rated 3.64 by 85,062 litizens.
Genre: Biography, leadership

Verdict: How little we know. The cover above rather implies that ignorance with the head turned away. The fascination is evident in the number of ratings and reviews on GoodReads. The name entered into Goodle produced about 87,000,000 results.
Cleopatra (BC 69 to BC 30) has been immortalised by slot machines, board games, dry cleaners, exotic dancers, an EU pollution study, asteroid 216 Kleopatra, a perfume, the best selling cigarette in the Middle East, and many male fantasies — some acted out in film. In Sydney there is the Cleopatra Gentlemen’s Club in Wetherill Park, Cleopatra’s Body and Nails in the City, and Cleopatra Hair Design in Bondi Junction. By one estimate there are more than a thousand books with her name in the title to go with five ballets, forty-five operas, and seventy-seven plays, as well as at least seven Hollywood films. And that list only scratches the surface. See the piece by Chip Brown in the National Geographic pictured below.

Cleo has inspired a lot and since her name is out of copyright free use has been made. Very free use indeed because we know very little about her. As nature abhors a vacuum imagination – often puerile, usually male – has flowed in to that void.

That other well-known Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, lived and died nearly a thousand years before Cleopatra. Yet we know more about her, what she looked like, wore, and did from surviving records, many long buried in tombs and sand, than about Cleopatra. Most of the records made in Cleo’s time were destroyed in the endless conflicts before they could be gathered, preserved, and archived.
As the author makes clear, writing a biography of someone of whom hardly any contemporary records remain is a challenge. The only evidence of Cleopatra as a person is one signature on a routine order shown below.

There are also stylised images on some coins.

Otherwise, she is but a name on lists of pharaohs over which the encrustations of myth have grown gradually substituting for and then replacing the reality.
It was a hundred years after her death that the stories we still have in whole or in fragment were composed. They may have been based on earlier sources that are now lost to us in the convulsions of the Roman world and the ages that followed, or in the absence of evidence they may have been spun out of whole cloth. We will most likely never know.

The result is a lot of speculation between the historic facts that Egypt’s Ptolemaic rulers had paid a huge tribute (most in wheat) to Rome for a protective alliance, that Pompey fled to Egypt, that Julius Caesar followed, that he liked Egypt… The account is peppered with ‘may have,’ ‘must have.’ ‘could have,’ and other tentative subjunctives.
The book is a pastiche selecting from a variety of sources, some perhaps more reliable than others, though there is no indication of which is which and why one is better than another. Rather credit seems to be given to text insofar as they affirm Cleopatra as an intelligent and resourceful ruler, rather than those that treat her as Eve with apple and Kohl eye makeup. That is my sympathy, too, but I would like some reasoning or evidence to confirm the supposition.
To have ruled Egypt for more than twenty years surrounded by enemies in court, in the country, and beyond its borders certainly suggests that she had more than sex appeal. True. But the book barely mentions anything she did as ruler, apart from fending off members of her own family out to depose and replace her. Did she make alliances with some of the lords of the land? Did she enrich priests so that they would sing her praises? Did she distribute free lunches? The author does say that she learned to speak Egyptian unlike the others in her Greek family. That is a nice touch but what did she do with it I wonder.
According to Wikipedia she did indeed offer free lunches at least once by distributing grain during a famine, and tried to impose price controls at another point. But like those later authors whom she reviles, this writer is much more interested in her liaisons with the Romans than with her rule.
Plutarch wrote a biography of Marcus Antony in which Cleopatra appears and in this as in many other instances he is probably the most accurate sources available.

He wrote in Greek, her maternal tongue, about a hundred years after her death, using the accounts of Philotas of Amphissa who had lived in the Ptolemaic court and seen and heard some of the people and events with his own eyes and ears. Philotas’s work has been lost to time.
This book is certainly well written, and the recitation I listened to via Audible is excellent, but the substance did not quite deliver the account I wanted of the ruler. Perhaps Duane Roller, ‘Cleopatra’ (2016) might be more to my taste if and when I want to try again.
Though I cannot close without remarking that the Brown piece in the National Geographic reads like Brown went to Egypt and saw the sun, the sand, the monuments, the vestiges with his own eyes, however little of it remains from Cleopatra’s world, and this book has no such tactile emanations.
Cleopatra has been a character in a number of Roman krimis I have read. There she is treated at times as a clever strategist, as a hormonal fiend, as a self-serving schemer, and more. Each version seems to have only one dimension.

GoodReads meta-data is 560 pages, rated 4.03 by 262 litizens.
Genre: Biography

Verdict: He returned to the stardust from whence he came.
First an anecdote to create a climate of expectation:
In the 1930s a journalist telephoned a dispatch back to a Paris newspaper to an experienced secretary who was typing his report as he spoke, and …. then she stopped. The editor supervising the exchange asked if the line had been cut. No, she said, sobbing, she could not bear to go on, so moving, so simple, so powerful, so emotional, so direct was the prose of Saint Ex describing the workers with whom he had ridden in Moscow subway car.* You and I, Reader, would have seen a shabby and no doubt odoriferous collection of tired men and women going about their dreary business. But Saint Ex saw the essence and put it into words. (This secretary, by the way, was no ingenue, but rather a crusty veteran who had seen and heard it all, she thought, and that is why she was assigned this transcription.)
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry (1900-1944) was born to be the poet of the air, and he succeeded in that, if in little else.
He was a dreamy, undisciplined man-child born to impoverished nobles, who fell further with the death of his father when the boy was four. The family thereafter lived on the largesse of others. He was the only surviving male, and much indulged by mother and sisters, who called him, as the heir, St Ex (he himself later added the hyphen (- [for those who are uneducated]) to make clear that his last name (say, on publisher’s cheques) was Saint Exupéry.
The death of his younger brother in 1915 is frequently cited as the origin of ’Le Petit Prince’ that he wrote nearly three decades later. Perhaps, but…. in this book and elsewhere he is far too readily reduced to that little book, as if his life was merely its gestation.
In that reduction are forgotten:
Courrier sud (1929) – Southern Mail
Vol de nuit (1931) – Night Flight
Terre des hommes (1939) – Wind, Sand and Stars **
Pilote de guerre (1942) – Flight to Arras
Lettre à un otage (1944) – Letter to a Prisoner
That list leaves aside the journalism during the 1930s which he found more lucrative and less arduous than novels. After ‘Le Petit Prince‘ made him famous, every scrape of paper with his writing on it was published and that is an even longer list of material he did not publish, did not write for publication, and did not intended to publish.
In the same mercenary vein, nearly everywhere this peripatetic man roamed now has a museum dedicated to him from Morocco to Rwanda to Québec to Senegal.
The boy grew up as aviation grew up. Nearly every month a new aviation feat was attempted, and some achieved. An airfield opened nearby where an industrialist tried to get into the airplane business, and the boy on his battered bicycle became an habitué. When he was not quizzing mechanics and flyers about the machines they were making and flying, he devoured the technical drawings, manuals, and reports scattered around. Thereafter this poet read technical manuals for relaxation and recreation as much as for information.
He was dreamy, inconsistent, and remained dependent on his mother for years for monetary and emotional support, and seems to have been a charming wastrel. He borrowed money constantly rather than trying to earn any, and seldom repaid the loans from friends and never to his mother though he often said he would. Finally, she had to sell the family home to pay the debts. Destitute he often bunked with pals who found he was untidy, forgetful, and a stranger to some matters of personal hygiene. Not an ideal roommate.
The sky always beckoned him and he seems only to have been himself in the air.
He was a comte and that counted for a lot, impoverished or not, in the time and place, and though his clothes were well worn, they had been of the first quality. Accordingly Monsieur le comte was often invited to society parties, dinners, dances, receptions, weddings, and he sometimes went, encouraged by his mother who perhaps thought a wife might find him there. He was by the standards of the time a bear of man, who shambled and was shy in company and that was sometimes taken as aristocratic hauteur and that added to his attraction for some. But what no one in the haut monde could abide was the broken fingernails and the oil ingrained in this finger tips from working on airplanes engines. Picture this hulk arriving in a threadbare tuxedo, announced by Monsieur le comte de Saint Exupéry shambling in with dirty fingernails and an oily handshake who would then retreat to a corner to watch.
He failed many examinations, never learned to spell (did he need glasses?), and got his lowest marks, and that is against a low tide, in French. He parlayed his military service into pilot’s wings, stationed first in Casablanca before Rick got there. In 1926 he went to to work for Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar in Senegal and later in Patagonia. Much of this work was solitary and he wrote a blog in the form of letters and notebooks, and out of these emerged the books listed above. There were crashes, there were adventures, there were mistakes, there was camaraderie among the airmen, who alone knew what it was like to fly in those nearly paper planes.
He was a station manager and one-man, one-plane rescuer of downed airmen in the Western Sahara. He loved that flat sand and slept outside to watch the stars, while encased in all the clothing to be had against the cold as round as the Michelin man to come.
These are the kind of matchstick and canvas biplanes he flew.
Much as he loved flying, he was not especially good at it. Much as he loved tinkering with engines, he was clumsy. He forgot to turn on switches, close doors, or pump oil. He dropped screws into the interstices of machinery, and simply forgot what he was doing when a daydream came by.
When he published Courrier sud he was ostracised by both the literary establishment and the aerial fraternity. In France, then as now, writing is a profession. One starts the apprenticeship in high school and continues slowly thereafter through the ranks. One does not just publish a book at twenty-nine and expect reviewers to take it seriously. Still less does one lionise the bus drivers of airplanes, as one wit put it. Apart from the publisher, Gaston Gallimard, no one took it seriously, but André Gide did, and he was a a heavy hitter in the world of letters though as ever an odd man out.
Members of the air fraternity resented him because he had retailed secret comrades’ business to an unworthy and uncomprehending public. Some also resented the fact that he made money in doing so. He was snubbed by many of his one-time colleagues and found himself shut out of flying opportunities as a result.
The result was that he was in a limbo, neither a writer, nor an aviator. That was when Gallimard and Gide promoted him as a journalist as a way for him to earn, what was always, a meagre living.
When the second war came, he returned to the air force and flew reconnaissance for l’Armee de l’Air, a thankless task with a high mortality rate. To see German troop movements the unarmed reconnaissance planes had to get low enough to be in range of small arms fire. He saw one after another of his comrades leave on missions not to return. He himself flew six such missions in combat and by some miracle survived. Much to his own surprise he became a patriot who put aside all the prejudices with which he had been born, and respected, admired, and esteemed among the pilots, mechanics, and ground staff Jews, communists, trade unionists, and black Africans and he said so. ‘Flight to Arras’ describes these days in flat and detached tone, while ‘Letter to a Hostage’ indicates his ecumenical patriotism.
As a born in the bone aristocrat, suckled on anti-semitism, and Catholic-insulated from the perfidious Revolution and its embodiment, the Republic, he had misgivings about Charles de Gaulle, principally because De Gaulle broke hard with Philippe Pétain, and to Saint Ex and many other Frenchmen Pétain was, and remained for far too long, the hero of Verdun. Moreover, and this is my interpretation, De Gaulle and Saint Exupéry were very alike, wilful, independent, obsessed, and, well, likes can repel one another. De Gaulle called everyone to duty in service of a higher cause, which is what Saint Ex had always celebrated in the abstract but not when it meant he had to get up at 5 am himself to do that duty. Or so it seems.
Later in the war he moved heaven and earth to get back into the air, flying reconnaissance, which he preferred in a P -39 Lightning which had a long range, was capable of high altitudes, and could outrun almost anything. But it was a far cry from the Breguet pictured above. It had dials, levers, switches, pumps, warning lights, none familiar to Saint Ex, but he insisted on flying. One day he took off and never came back to earth.

He was four inches over the height restriction on the pilot’s seat and took great effort to push him into it.
Finally, St Ex was mentally, morally, and philosophically neutral in politics. He did not want to see individuals reduced to political labels. Admirable that is, but how then do individuals submerge themselves in the higher cause, but to accept a part, a temporary loss of individuality? And what higher cause had Saint Ex served, after all, but the mail.
In 1944 General de Gaulle signed the award to Saint Exupéry of the Croix de guerre avec Palme.
In 1948 with Prime Minister de Gaulle in office, Saint Exupéry was recorded as Mort pour la France, a singular honour and one with material benefits for his estate by extending the copyrights on his work by thirty years.
Likewise in 1967 with President de Gaulle in office a plaque commemorating him was added to the Panthéon. Any misgivings Exupéry had were not reciprocated.
Saint Exupéry could be personally charming, and in small groups a wit and raconteur, though he had an only-child’s need always to be the centre of attention. He was, on the downside, throughout his life hungry for approbation, careless, thoughtless, heedless, and a crashing bore. He woke friends up at 3 am so that they could tell him he was genius. He knocked on the door at ridiculous hours and asked for a place to sleep, a meal, a drink and outstayed his welcome. He was the kind of guest who left half full glasses of precious whiskey on the floor for someone else accidentally to kick over. He told the same stories over and over again without a thought to how many times those around him had heard them before. Even when book sales success in the States made him rich, he seldom repaid the constant stream of loans he exacted from friends, acquaintances, publishers, editors, typists, and elevator operators. This in a man who preached human solidarity, duty, and the bond of all. For a man whose religion was duty, St Ex was astoundingly irresponsible. For a man given to hero worship he was blind to accomplishments of many around him.
It is hard to believe that this is the first book by this writer, so accomplished is it. This biography is one of the best I have ever read. It captures the subject and almost speaks with his voice in a blended of autobiography cum biography, yet retains critical distance so that the reader can see all the way around the man, and back.

She has several other biographies in print and I will go shopping for more.
The 1997 film ‘Saint-Ex’ cast Bruno Ganz, and he is perfect in mien (though not in size or shape), but everything else is a loss. The screenplay ranges through cryptic, incoherent, and juvenile, the characterisations are cardboard, the direction play school. The film gets a going over elsewhere on this blog.
* This anecdote is — consciously a homage or not — played out beautifully in ‘Der Himmel über Berlin’ (1987) with the aforementioned Bruno Ganz riding in a U-Bahn carriage.
** There are many differences between the French and English version of this book. Saint Exupéry was in New York when it was being prepared for publication and inserted material not in the earlier French edition.

GoodReads Meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.96 by 95 litizens
Genre: biography, leadership

Verdict: One of kind.
When the BBC ran its ‘Greatest Briton’ contest in 2002, it started a trend quickly aped by other broadcasters looking for a ready-made audience to offer advertisers. In Portugal the contest led to António Salazar and in Finland to Carl Mannerheim. In Canada, the CBC version yielded Tommy Douglas (1904-1986). Tommy who? He was neither a founder nor a general nor a wartime leader. But he certainly was a great man. Intrigued? Read on.
The BBC exercise yielded the obvious: Winston Churchill. A few readers will recognise Salazar as the long-serving dictator of Portugal, and fewer still will recognise Mannerheim as the Russian-speaker who created and re-created Finland. (Books about both of these Greats are discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking.) But will any but Canucks recognise Tommy Douglas. Read on and be informed.
Scots-born Douglas was brought to Canada by his immigrant parents. His father, a soldier in the Boer War, wanted a better life for his children. Young Tommy contracted osteomyelitis and doctors prepared to amputate his right leg. However, an orthopaedic surgeon who happened to be visiting the hospital offered to treat the boy experimentally with a new technique at no charge. He did and the leg was saved, and an apostle of universal, free medical care stood up. However, the bad leg cut short his pugnacious boxing career.
He became a Baptist preacher and worked hard at caring for the flock, his own and more. He saw many social evils and injustices that others took for granted as challenges to be overcome. His church was in Weyburn Saskatchewan (near Dog River). He burned with energy and went here and there, as preacher, hockey coach, social worker, advocate, visitor, volunteer fire fighter, fund-raiser, confidant, snow shoveler, carer, friend in need, and more.
Douglas enlisted for World War II in 1939 and worked his way up to Captain but when overseas deployment came, so did a rigorous physical examination, which found that leg deficient and he was discharged. His unit, by the way, went to Hong Kong and was obliterated by the Japanese attack.
He was a bright boy and a bright man and he had gone to Chicago to do a Masters Degree. How that was funded I am not sure. He returned and transferred to McMaster University where he completed a thesis endorsing eugenics. At the time the Swedish Labor Party was putting into practice a national program of eugenics that today no one wants to remember. Indeed I have seen efforts to blame others for this clearly enunciated program.
Douglas is quoted as dismissing the intellectuals he met in Chicago as airheads of sorts. Too bad he did not make it to Hull House on the near West Side to meet Jane Addams. I suspect Douglas was a small fish out of water in Chicago and left before he settled. On this point, as on many others, the author takes Douglas’s own words as complete and final. Not everyone else will.
His personal experiences and observations of his parishioners drove him into politics. First he advocated their causes individually but soon he saw patterns and quickly became a founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Farmer-Labour-Socialist) or CCF for short, which entered Canadian politics as a third force between the Liberals of McKenzie King and the Conservatives of Robert Bennet. He was one of seven in the first class of CCF members of the Federal parliament in distant Ottawa and went at things headlong. He was a stemwinder at the dais (pulpit) and the author quotes from his many speeches.

Douglas at the podium.
We get less sense of what Douglas contributed to the grind of parliament in committees. The world then as now is full of people parading their virtues, but it is always short of grinds to get anything done. Why do I think of Bernie Sanders?
On the stump Douglas was a mercury, here, there, everywhere. He could make himself heard in a crowd, match wits with hecklers, and undo opponents’ argument, while maintaining a common touch. It is no wonder that McKenzie King tried several times, perhaps on the advice of his long-dead mother, to recruit him to the Liberals. No wonder John Diefenbaker, a Conservative Prime Minister, emphasised their commonalities.
He shifted from Ottawa to Regina, from federal to provincial, and to one of the poorest provinces at that. Needless to say Pox News and the opposition castigated the CCF as Reds and ran endless scare campaigns, but since the vast majority of voters in Saskatchewan had little to lose, they had little to fear from the wild accusations. That fatalism made the CCF and Douglas a better bet than the status quo. In 1944 the CCF won in a landslide, wining 47 of the 52 seats with 53% of the vote, and Premier Douglas set to work. The author suggests that the voters understood and accepted Douglas but I rather think there was some of the fatalism mentioned above at work, too.
For the Douglas government the solution to every problem was a crown corporation to supply rural electrification, school buses, cross walk safety, and so on. The size of the Saskatchewan government grew, but Douglas, unlike so many others of like mind, was conscious that before money was spent it had to be earned, and the priority was always economic development to generate that income to spend on the social programs.
Douglas was the visionary leader with the rare sense to have deputies who were excellent managers to finance and direct work toward the goals he articulated, chiefly George Cadbury, C. M. Fines, and Clarence Gillis.
He continued in office until 1961, during which time his major achievement was a single-payer, universal hospital and health care program. One of the things that made medical care easier to develop in Saskatchewan was the tradition of town doctors there, as in some American states. A town doctor was employed by the town and paid in cash, as a way to recruit and retain a doctor in what was otherwise a local barter economy and a poor one at that, unlikely to attract a young medical school graduate with a family to support. A doctor choosing such a community could be assured of a monetary income and a client base. There were thirty of forty of these in Saskatchewan when Douglas became premier.
Saskatchewan also introduced no-fault automobile insurance, enhanced and enforced pension laws, nationalised electricity companies to provide rural electrification, allowed public sector unions, and passed a bill of rights that protected Inuits, native Indians, and Francophones. The New Eden was in the endless flatlands of Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan became a political laboratory in which new practices and programs were tested. By 1958 a Conservative government in Ottawa began to create a national health insurance program derived in good part from the province’s example. Yes, a conservative government adopted a program pioneered by a socialist government. That is the way reality works.
The Murdoch press of the Pox News of the time and place saw the sky falling every day in these measures.
While all this was going on the provincial government ran a budget surplus. Read that twice. Ran a financial surplus. In fact, the Douglas government paid off the considerable deficit left by the previous Liberal government which had thrown money around to buy votes.
He resigned as premier in 1961 to head the rebranded CCF in Federal politics as the New Democratic Party (NDP) which he did until 1971 when he stepped aside as leader in one of the most gracious such moves ever to be made. He remained in parliament, a dutiful backbencher until 1979 when he retired. His successor was a long-time collaborator, the Francophone Jew from Montreal, David Lewis who set a few records of his own.
The role of the NDP in Federal politics was largely symbolic. The substantive efforts of the Party were always in the programmatic politics of the provinces, and over the years it has governed in Saskatchewan long after Douglas left, as well as Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Yukon Territory.
Politics makes strange bed fellows. True. In the 2011 Canadian federal election the NDP won a record 103 seats nationally to make it the offical opposition to the Conservative government. Strangely none of those seats were in Saskatchewan. Stranger still, 59 of those seats came from Quebec. Yep, though Quebec had never been fertile ground for the NDP in provincial politics, largely because its policy space has been occupied by the Parti Québecois. Indeed it barely existed on that side of the Ottawa River Valley. In the previous 50 years only two NDP MPs (one of them David Lewis as above) had ever been elected from Quebec’s 70+ federal constituencies. That 2011 result in Quebec was due to an odd combination of local factors and it was not sustained in the next election in 2015. Nor did it invigorate a Quebec provincial branch of the NDP. The NDP wave in Quebec went as fast as it came.
In October 1970 Douglas spoke and voted against the declaration of the War Measures Act. Just as he had spoken and voted against the same act used to intern Japanese-Canadians in 1942. Liberty should not be sacrificed to maintain liberty. His was virtually the solitary voice of reason in a time of unreason.
Douglas’s achievements were many, real, and enduring. All hail! Yet it is also true that big and bigger government is not always the answer. What Douglas did not confront and what the author seems to be unaware of is that big government can be the problem just like big business, big religion, and big labour. When there is a single supplier of a public good, it can be held hostage in a number of ways.
In Australia for a generation labour unions used the monopoly suppliers as cash cows. State owned train and bus services were locked in an endless round of strikes, usually arising out of disputes among unions, not bargaining with the employers who really gave in to avert strikes and passed the cost on to the taxpayer. Likewise the big single supplier presents many opportunities for corruption from within. Again the examples are local when contracting is so lucrative because of the scale, the temptation to exploit loop holes is great. NSW State Rail had an unenviable record of such shenanigans. A giant single supplier like Telecom had become an independent country in which users were not tolerated. It existed to serve its employees and no one else.
Nor does free health care relate directly to his own experience. In fact, one might argue the reverse. The surgeon who operated on him devised techniques on his own and used Douglas as an experiment. In a centralised and controlled health service there could well be no opportunity for a surgeon to think outside the conventions, and still less to use a patient as an experiment.
Time to dismount the high horse. (Until next time.)
*****
The book certainly conveys the man but this reader wished the author had put a little more distance between himself and the subject. It is all too much Tommy said it and that made it so. When others opposed a suggestion of Tommy’s the author can only conclude the motivation is bad will. What other reason could there be? Well, I don’t know and I did not find out by reading this book. But I am pretty sure that not all his opponents were the selfish malcontents they appear to be in these pages.

Still it is fitting that Vincent Lam is a medical doctor who works in the system Douglas was instrumental in creating.
A personal note, I had been in Canada less than a month when on campus I walked by an auditorium full of people. I peered in a back door and stood there to see Tommy Douglas holding forth. I knew not who he was but I recognised the Baptist preacher in him.
Later in the early 1970s I sat through a few NDP meetings out of zoological interest, and one, I think it was in Ottawa, was memorable. This was the time when the so-called Waffle Faction was destroying the NDP from within. No sewer socialism with practical gains for citizens satisfied the lefter-than-thou purist of the Waffle. A speaker who believed in decision-making by attrition at the branch meeting had been haranguing we few sitting on the floor for at least an hour (believe me when I say it seemed like much more) when a fellow scientist broke cover to ask if Canada was so bad (corrupt, capitalist, racist), as the speaker had been saying, what was the model to follow? ‘Albania!’ said the orator without missing a beat or batting an eye. Albania!
Coda: These surveys of the greatest individual often end with a political leader despite the lazy five-cent cynicism that the media promotes about politicians and that most of the public seems to imbibe. Though I expect done in Australia, and so far as I know it has not been done, despite the desperate efforts of broadcasters to latch on to superficial ideas and do them to death, Don Bradman would surely pip Robert Menzies and Gough Whitlam along with Victor Chang, Alfred Deakin, Howard Florey, Cathy Freeman, Percy Grainger, Shirley Hazzard, Xavier Herbert, Frank Lowy, Eddie Mabo, David Malouf, Douglas Mawson, Gustav Nossal, Mark Olphant, Albert Namatjira, Charles Perkins, Joan Sutherland, and Nancy Wake.

Good Reads meta-data is 424 pages, rated 3.84 by 632 litizens.

Liliuokalani (1838–1917) became the last royal sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands. In this autobiography she refers to them and the people as Hawaiian. Captain James Cook had called them the Sandwich Islands to honour the First Lord of the Admiralty who had commissioned the voyage.
Most of the book consists of reminiscences about the good old days, and repeated assertions that every native Hawaiian loved the monarchy, the monarchs, and the numerous members of the several royal families. There is a brief, early reference to the bloody wars among the peoples of these islands, long before the arrival of Captain Cook, to establish the monarchy, and political compromises that produces the plurality of royal families.
Absent from these recollections is the reality of the sui generis native conquest, genocide, and compromise. The name Hawaii was the name of one of the islands from which came the victorious tribe which then planted its name on the whole group, after conquering Molokai, Maui, and Oahu. The Nuʻuanu Pali lookout north of Honolulu was the scene of the final massacre. More blood was shed in the conquest of Hawaiians by Hawaiians than in the American annexation.
Only from Chapter 39 on does the story become interesting as annexation to the United States draws near and finally occurs. The focus is on Hawaii and Hawaiians as victims. Though earlier much is made of the relationship of the Hawaiian monarchy to Great Britain, there is no reference to a British role in permitting, encouraging, tolerating this American appropriation. Too bad, because I wondered about that. Nor do we hear anything about those natives who preferred Americans to an indolent, unresponsive, tribal, and taxing monarchy.
Annexation was indeed a sorry story, even if the telling here is one-eyed, which occurred during the administration of one of most inept and lazy American presidents, Grover Cleveland. His name is much mentioned in these pages. A biography of this man-mountain is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Mark Twain, a frequent visitor to the islands, opposed annexation virulently. There is much name-dropping in the book but his is not among those dropped in my hearing. Try his ‘Letters from Hawaii,’ a collection of 25 letters that he wrote from Hawaii in 1866. He was there four months as a correspondent for the ‘Sacramento Bee.’ The letters were only published in 1947.
I listened to it in on Audible. The reading is superb, though the content is seldom interesting and rarely convincing. Autobiographies are like that.
In our many visits to Hawaii we have been some of the places mentioned in this book, and I listened to it in anticipation of another visit in 2019.
Her entry in Wikipedia is a battleground in Wiki wars, being edited, and re-edited almost daily. I checked as I was listening to the book. History is constantly rewritten on Wikipedia.

Genre: fiction and biography.

GoodReads meta-data is 368 pages, rated 3.7 by 4,857 litizens.
This book is a novel about the life and times of Varina Howell (1826–1906). Who? Varina Davis. Huh? Mrs Jefferson Davis. If it is still a ‘Huh’ go back to Angry Birds on the Smartphone. I read it as a biography of this First Lady. First Lady? Read on.
As a girl Varina was too tall, too serious, too dark, too talkative, too well read, too interested in the wider world, too big, too judgemental, too…. At seventeen her family was only too glad to see her wed Jefferson Davis, more than twice her age.

Jefferson came with baggage. He had married for love years before. It was a match not sanctioned by either family and the couple eloped. She was the daughter of a future president, Zachery Taylor. It was the time of the anti-vaxxers. On the honeymoon she died. Jefferson went into mourning and stayed there for seven years. N.B. Her parents did not want her to marry a soldier as Davis then was, not that there was any objection to him personally. They did not blame him for her death.
His family was an older brother, Joseph, who by primogeniture owned and ruled the family plantation with a whip in hand. The much younger brother, Jefferson, had nothing but the sufferance of Joseph. There was little of that. To get Jefferson out of the way, Joseph gave him a property to manage, but he retained ownership.
He pushed Jeff into the army to get him out from underfoot, and later pushed him into politics for the same reason. He disapproved of the first marriage because he wanted a dowry out of it, and when the couple eloped there was no dowry. The later marriage to Varina was arranged to suit Joe. Jeff had been moping around for seven years after his first wife’s death. In this telling Joe simply wanted to get Jeff settled. Not that he felt sorry for him, more annoyed with his constant gloom.
Old Joe had met Robert Owen, when the latter was on a tour in the United States, and Joe tried to realise some of Owen’s philosophy on his planation, adapting it to the slavery that — in Old Joe’s terms — united capital and labour. His descriptions of this arrangement are ridiculous but have the sort of inner logic that appeals to an autodidact. He had the words but not the substance of Owen’s practice per New Lanark, which we have visited.
Davis served first in the Black Hawk War in which few shots were fired in anger (where he may have crossed paths with Abraham Lincoln) and then in the Mexican War with distinction, and traded on that record to enter politics, pushed at every step by Old Joe. He become a Senator and then Secretary of War. He and Varina lived for years in Washington on the D.C. and no doubt he had a case of Potomac Fever. She liked the life there, entertaining and being entertained. The soupçon of Europe ambassadors brought. The access to northern merchandise unknown in Mississippi. The aura of history made and in the making. All of this appealed to this very young woman.
In ‘Varina’ there are several accounts of close personal relationships between owners and slaves. These are very nicely done. Jefferson had a body slave named Pemberton who went with him everywhere and who came to run the planation in all but name. They drank from the same cup; talked each morning and evening of the work. Yet occasionally when Jefferson was irritated a sting came into his voice, and Pemberton went quiet. Master and Slave were well aware of each other’s place.
In another instance there was a young women who grew up with a slave companion. They gossiped together; giggled together; picked out clothes together. They were like sisters, but not quite. Then one day when the white woman needed money she sold the slave’s ten year old child for the money to buy a new dress. The slave woman was heartbroken. When she wailed and cried, she was beaten…into submission.
Getting back to the book at hand, the story is told in flashback. Varina is interviewed long after the war. Much of her story concerned April 1865 and after. The evacuation of Richmond and the long flight south toward the El Dorado of Havana. In the course of this flight she observed the ruination visited on the Carolinas, and Georgia.
More often then than not doctors prescribed morphine for women, and Varina mixed hers with red wine, a lot. Doped up and docile seems to have been one goal. The name ‘Varina’ is a variant from the Greek for Barbara, referring to those who do not speak Greek.
Toward the end of her time, she edited and finished the memoirs that Jefferson could not complete. This seems an act of financial necessity in these pages and nothing more. The memoirs were an asset to be realised in difficult times.

There are vivid descriptions time of life along the Mississippi, sometimes easy going and at other times deadly.
It starts slowly and is written in the present tense. This latter is enough to put me off but one night for the lack of an obvious alternative on the Kindle I persevered, and it got more interesting and the present tense faded. Equally irritating is the absence of conventional punctuation, like quotation marks to set off and identify statements by the characters. Grrr!
After reading much about Jefferson Davis I wondered how anyone, wife included, could put up with him – pompous, prickly, proud, and worse. In both Allen Tate’s ‘Jefferson Davis: His Rise and His Fall’ (1929) reviewed elsewhere on this blog and Eli Evans’s ‘Judah Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate’ (1988), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, Variana figures as a player in the tragedy of the Confederacy.
Benjamin was one of the very few Richmond politicians who got along with Davis and he did so in good part by working with and through Varina, but none of that figures in this account, which is weighted to her life before and after the Confederacy, not during. That is too bad because my impression is that she exercised a moderating influence on the generally intractable Davis.
Which parts of the story are fact and which are fiction? I cannot say but the author seems scrupulous and includes a short bibliography.
Charles Frazier
Side Bar: Fanny Wright likewise tried to apply Owen at Nashoba Community in the 1820s Tennessee. Her aim was to teach slaves to earn their freedom through work so that emancipation would come at no cost to owners. While the rhetoric was high, the reality was not. I visited the locale in Memphis and did some library work on this community in Nashville a time ago. It was celebrity vanity at work.

GoodReads meta-data is 296 pages rated 3.8 by 28 litizens
Genre: Biography with lots of natural science and some history.

Karl von Frisch (1886 – 1982) made a lifelong study of honey bees. He was cursed to live in interesting times and his story is as fascinating as the lives of the bees he observed until the week before his death. In 1973 he was awarded a Nobel Prize.
He was born to the comfortable circumstances into a Viennese family of learned and cultured cosmopolitans. He proved to be a naturalist even as a lad, collecting creatures, plants, objects galore, and he kept doing it thereafter. Some specialise in beetles or butterflies but not young Karl. Some grew out of this interest, not Karl.
He was a good student and went into medicine but the natural world called to him.
He answered the call first by studying fish in tanks to determine sensory perceptions. The experiments are ingenious, and that became a hallmark of his work. The experiments were also meticulous in execution. Another hallmark that continued. But the fishtanks were in the basement of laboratory and he found that boring, though he was never bored.
Then conversations with others led him to the perceptions of colour and scent in bees, and that led him to the waggle dance. The waggle dance? Yup. Why do honey bees engage in this dance. It had been observed since Aristotle without any interpretation. It takes time and energy and serves no apparent purpose. Yet it must.
This dance became an obsession to Frisch and from 1922 on he joined the dance. He trained bees and studied how they related to other bees. Trained bees? He would capture some scout bees, those that leave the hive first, and then put them in the presence of a shallow dish with sugar syrup. Yum, yum. This was all done in a meadow on a card-table. Many details and permutations follow, including draping dyed sheets over poles to make the bees easier to track.
In time he installed glass walls in hives to observe the inner workings of the hive.
He was an early adapter of movie films and began to record the experiments and observations which he used in teaching and at conferences. There emerged another hallmark of his work – the clear and simple expositions. He was glad to teach anyone and everyone about bees from school children to Nobel winning scientists. He attracted battalions of graduate students who carried the word of Karl far and wide.
Karl von Frisch doing what he always did.
He needed them, because in 1940, much to his surprise the Naziis declared him Jewish. By then he was at Munich University where the Rockefeller Foundation had funded an institute for him. As a state employee he had to register with the regime and he did. In that time and place, nothing was ever done and in time the Registry Office found a marriage certificate of a Great Grand Mother that indicated that he had converted to Catholicism. That was enough. The inference was that she had been Jewish and converted. Nazi racism, perhaps it has to be said, was not about religious faith but race, and someone born Jewish never can stop being Jewish.
This discovery was a surprise to him and to his brothers. Frisch was classified Quarter Jew, and put on lists, forcibly retired from his university position, and denied the pension due to him. He was also suspect because to the Nazis the Rockefeller Foundation was a Jewish front. Hard to believe but there it is.
Many scientists came to support him, including a panoply of German Nobel scientists to no avail. An ideological hack replaced him.
Among his host of students many had gone into agriculture and apiary. Frisch’s supporters turned to these applied scientists to write letters and make representations about the practical and applied value of Frisch’s work to the agricultural authorities. They did and because agriculture was regarded as crucial to the Nazi war effort, these authorities advocated his case. The compromise was to make him emeritus and allow him after hours access to the laboratory facilities that Rockefeller money had built for him.
During the war he continued his research with bees. Munich was bombed flat. His home was destroyed and with it his personal library and all possessions. The Rockefeller laboratory was likewise flattened. He and wife moved to a meadow in the uplands of Austria and he continued studying bees.
When Nazi greed imported the Nosema virus by stealing tons of beehives from Russia and railroading them back to the Reich. Among the bees in those hives were carriers of this virus. In no time, millions of bees died. One of J. Robert Janes’s krimis concerns this plague, ‘Beekeeper’ (2001 ).
Bee research now became a priority. In that meadow he had a group of about twenty, students, assistants, and colleagues. Most of them had been in the war in one way or another. Most of the men were invalided out of the war, many with amputations. The women were often also carrying injuries from bombing. Yet there they were in the meadow with sheets, nets, saucers of sugar syrup, and the like.
As the war ground to an end, Patton’s army got to them before the Russians. After a day of watching tanks roll by, there cam a knock at the door. Gulp! At the door the American officer took off his hat and asked politely in German for Professor Frisch. He was on a list of German scientists to be located, identified, and recruited.
In time he became a good German, and rehabilitated and the Rockefeller Foundation once again supported him. The irony is that this good German was regarded as essential to the Nazi war effort and the Nazi regime funded his search during the war. He had only one interest and that was bees. He was not a German nationalist, or a Nazi. He lived for, in, and through science.
He found that bees communicated through the waggle dance, that they used polarised light in the sky as a reference point, and that they evolved. The scouts reported on the location and distance of food. There are videos on You Tube, including one by Frisch himself from 1926. The link is:


Tania Munz weighs and measures all of this with care, pulling no punches and glosses over nothing. It is an exemplary study of the man and his work.
Interspersed within Frisch’s story are vignettes about bees and other bee-obsessives that are delightful, and are integrated into the larger fabric. They add a dimension to the story.
The bees are almost always referred to as animals, not insects. Frisch is consistently called von Frisch though the Nazi regime stripped the von from names in the name of equality, breaking with the aristocratic past. Technically he lost his von.
In retrospect I cannot recall why he escaped Word War I. One of the limitations of the Kindle is flipping pages to find something like this.
I heard a reference to this book in ‘Exact Thinking in Demented Times’ (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) and found it intriguing.

GoodReads meta-data is 780 pages, rated 4.17 by 115 litizens
Genre: Biography, Leadership

Verdict: a good book but so much detail that the man is obscured.
William Morris (1834-1896) was a poet, essayist, novelist, and more who was and is best known as a decorative artist. (He is not the William Morris [1877-1963] of the Morris automobile.)

Morris was born into comfortable circumstances in Essex. One of six children, his father was a broker who invested in mining (copper and coal). As a boy young Morris played at knights and lords, and that made the man. Most of us grow out of children fantasies, whereas Morris grew into them.
Medieval Europe was Eden before the fall of industrialism in his mind. He found the remnants of this past in cathedrals in England and France, and also in other ancient, rude buildings. That they were rough hewn showed they were made by human hands, and this he always preferred. He found continuity with this time of yore in the rough and barren landscape of Iceland, where every rock, tree, and crag has a name, and a role in an edda.
Two overarching themes dominated his creative life. One was to bring the past into the present, and the other was to bring nature into the home. The past and nature are unsullied and so they refresh the soul. To drink their elixirs we must drill back through industrialism, through the Enlightenment, and through the Renaissance to El Dorado.

At Oxford he came into the company of friends who stayed with them for the rest of his life, like the English poet with an Italian name Dante Rossetti, painter Edward Burne-Jones, and architect Philip Webb. This the germ of the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, reaching back past Raphael to an earlier tradition, and it was a brotherhood. Male companions were an essential in his life though there is not hint of an erotic element.

Influenced by John Ruskin, as later was the singular Marcel Proust, Morris began to look closely at buildings. Thereafter he treated them as repositories of human creativity, imagination, ingenuity, and history. Well, some of them. Those made by hand with tools made by hand, and so on. He founded a society with some of his inherited wealth to preserve historic buildings, which was one of the precursors of the National Trust.

Morris began as painter of murals, and gouache works, migrating into interior design. Today to refer to Morris evokes a response about wallpaper with flowers and vines. Leaving aside many details, Morris was a cantankerous genius who made decoration into a fine art.

He threw himself into one thing after another, and mastered each from the ground up. To make wallpaper, first Morris made the paper. To make the paper he first made the presses and vats to make the paper. Only then did he devise the means to transfer his designs to the paper.
A Morris wallpaper.
Tapestry is the same story. First he made the loom, then he made the tapestry. Later in life when he took up bookbinding. He once again made his own ink, paper, and presses so that the results looked medieval, free from the corrupting influences of modernity.

He was sure that the product that results from such wholistic labour was more authentic and superior, i.e., closer to nature and to the past, but he could never articulate that. Indeed, one theme in the book is that Morris, despite the endless flow of words from him in essays, novels, poems running to twenty-four hefty volumes in the University library, was unable to communicate. He could talk, he could write, but he seldom got across his essential meanings. The weight of his verbiage drowned himself out. This was especially true in his private life.

He married Jane Burden. She was not his social equal in Victorian England, and to prepare her for marriage they had a year-long betrothal during which she was tutored to upper middle class ways. They had two children, girls. The tittle-tattle about Jane is endless, and MacCarthy shifts it all judiciously. What is obvious is that when Morris proposed, it was an offer too good (socially and financially) for her (and her parents) to refuse, so she took it. Rossetti circled her for years like a moth to a flame; MacCarthy concludes that is all it was. Later she did have a paramour, and Morris knew this in all but word. He hated it and accepted it.

Morris had a volcanic temper and he gave vent to it often. I first tried to read this biography years ago, after reading his ‘News from Nowhere’ (1890), about which more below. After a time, I quit because I found him an unpleasant companion, with his tirades, self-indulgent jags, and perpetual spoiled child approach to life. Having persevered this time I find that only in his sixties did he seem to grow up.

The author handles this well and leaves it to the reader to decide. I did. Many speculate that he suffered from this syndrome or that. As if giving the pattern of actions a name absolves him of responsibility. Hardly. That syndrome was Jerkism. Often encountered for which no treatment has ever been devised.

In the 1880s the priest found his vocation, and Morris became an evangelical vicar for socialism. What that word meant to him is elusive. Overtly it put him in the company of Frederich Engels, Edward Aveling (and his wife, Eleanor Marx), Henry Hyndman, and others. These early English socialists were so uncompromising that if five were in a room there were seven factions claiming the Truth. They were only united on two points. (1) The current order is corrupt and unjust. (2) It is so corrupt and unjust that it cannot be reformed but must be destroyed. Thus they shunned the Chartists, the Liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill, and later the Fabians and the early stirrings of the Labour Party with their sewer socialism that offered practical improvement to the lives of millions but did not promise a city on the hill.

Socialism meant everyone had sufficient wherewithal to live a dignified and meaningful life. That honest work was the highest value. These are the basics of Morris’s socialism. His commitment was, in any event, not intellectual but emotional and he went at it for ten years like a man possessed. He funded socialist publications. He traveled the length and breadth of Great Britain extolling it by preaching on street corners, and so on. He exhausted himself. He also outspent the firm, the running of which he left to others: alienated clients, exasperated his wife, mystified many longterm associates, and perplexed his employees.

The jockeying for position among the socialist factions came to a point where he was turfed from the socialist organisation he had founded and funded. The plotters assumed he would continue to fund it since the cause was righteous. Naiveté has many names. He did for a time just as he put up with Rossetti’s years of attendance on Jane, but even he had a stop button. Much of the Wikipedia entry charts the torturous evolutions and convolutions of these folks.

After a decade of public proselytizing Morris retired from the field and returned to his workshops. Age caught up with him quickly and by the later fifties he looked much older and frailer, partly the result of untreated diabetes, and the long term effect of gout. Daughter May became even more important in keeping a Morris involved in the business.

There is a matter not resolved in this copious volume. May did not inherit the business or any part of it, though she was instrumental in it. One wonders why. There was no estrangement, and she began compiling his collected works shortly after his death and edited twenty-four volumes.
He seldom practiced what he preached, it has to be said. The workmen he employed were paid just enough to attract and keep them. There was no profit sharing. They called him ‘Sir’ though he often worked side-by-side with him. Peter the Great did that, too, but his workmates often called him Pete. He made no effort to contribute to their social or home life, or to educate their children. Robert Owen, George Pullman, the Rowntrees, and many other entrepreneurs did those things, while engaging in the industrialism he detested, but Morris did not. When confronted by the gap between his words and deeds his response was that one man’s actions were insignificant in the bigger picture. Immediate, practical, incremental amelioration did not interest him. It would only prop up the dreaded system. Never mind that such palliatives might enrich and save lives in the here and now. Rapture not relief was his ambition.

It is well to remember that he is not the only man to have inherited wealth. Unlike so many others he did something constructive with it and in so doing he also led others to do constructive work, too. In 2004 we visited Cardiff Castle in Wales, a lavish home, one of eighteen owned by the the Bute family who furnished it. Eighteen. The family spent no more than a week there in a year. Such riches, and yet not a day’s work done by any member of the family. That might be the comparison to keep Morris in perspective.
The book abounds in details. Sometimes more than enough is piled on for this reader. It is subtle in its interpretations with insight and clarity. The prose is supple. The book is a better companion than the subject.
Fiona MacCarthy
We saw a superb exhibit on the Arts and Crafts Movement in Barcelona in April 2018 and that inspired us to do a William Morris tour of Adelaide in August 2018. This book was my assigned reading for the Adelaide sojourn. By coincidence I also heard an ‘In Our Time’ program on Morris, which is recommended.

Post Script
His ‘News from Nowhere’ (1890 has a place in the canon of utopia theory. He was moved to write it in refutation of Edward Bellamy’s ode to industrialism in ‘Looking Backward’ (1888). The two books have been since forever wed.

Bellamy celebrated the creative capacity of industrialism in the United States. Labor is organised like the armies of the Civil War and production was so great that there came abundance for all in return for a minimum service in the Industrial Army, which waged and won the war on want. Several innovations dot the story, like music piped into the home, like the credit card. It is a Rip van Wrinkle story in which a sleeper awakes to find this new order in full swing.

Bellamy’s book had an enormous impact, and it was this influence that drove Morris once again to his pen. His socialism was millennial. The old order had to be destroyed and only then could we find our way to the New Jerusalem. Gradual improvements were illusory sops, not change. Abundance would be destructive rather than liberating. Of course, only someone who already has all the creature comforts can dismiss them so easily.

Morris recoiled from this materialism finding it without soul. His rejoinder is another Sleeper Awakes tale. This sleeper awakens to a post-industrial world which has reverted to cottage arts and crafts, and everyone is happier for it, including the anti-vaxxers.

While Bellamy pictured the future as a continuous development with the present, Morris posited a rupture that overthrew the factory system and industrialism, and their attendant corruptions. Much of the book is devoted to the pleasures of arts and crafts, with nothing about tiresome necessities like clean water, sanitation, medical science, and communication.

An irreligious and illegitimate, left-handed vegetarian homosexual pacifist with one name and a shock of flaming red hair who dressed as dandy, seldom finished a job, and never published, that is Leonardo from Vinci (1452–1519). He would be banned by the NRA in Alabama, hung by the Veep, and not get a job at a university today.
Never hit a KPI. No tenure. No promotion. Try imagining his 360-degree review. Go on, try!
He was the illegitimate son of a notary and a servant girl.  His father recognised and accepted him though for the first twelve years or so he was brought up by his mother, the servant girl, and her new husband. At about twelve Leonardo went to live in his father’s home.  There is no doubt the first eleven years were formative. Read on.
His father’s house.
While in the care of his mother he was free to roam unshackled by the conventions of the notary’s higher social status and rigidly conventional family life.  Roam he did through hills and dales where he began the close observation of nature that never stopped.  Like the boy who became Peter the Great, he was free of the inhibitions of the status that he later acquired.
His father soon realised that this boy was never going to be a notary. He was dreamy, always scratchy away at things, doodling in the dust, pulling things apart.  His father arranged to apprentice him to an artist’s workshop in nearby Firenze. It was hog heaven for the lad.  He did the work assigned to him, starting with crushing shells to make paint, cleaning brushes, and sweeping floors. Then he went on to preparing the surface of boards, walls, and canvases for paint.  He worked his way up from these entry jobs, very quickly, to painting backgrounds like sky and hills.  Next he was painting background figures which soon got him promoted to foreground figures. While a teenager his talents surpassed the master of the workshop.
Leo stayed an apprentice for longer than usual because he was content, but eventually his father staked him to set up his own workshop, and perhaps assisted in getting some early commissions for him. Leo’s talents bloomed. His only ambition was to keep puzzling away at things.
He took commissions and worked on them, in some cases for years, without finishing many of them. As he did so, he invented new techniques, the most significant being oil painting, which in turn led to his famous technique of sfumato.  Together these two measures allowed him to produce colours and dimensions unlike anything previously done in tempura. Later he would stress the goal of creating the illusion of three dimensions on two. As did Ludwig von Beethoven, so Leonardo invented form and content together.
Living in bustling Firenze, Leo extended his close observation to people. He begun to carry a small notebook night and day and he sketched endlessly, as he observed. He also wrote notes and puzzles. About 7,200 half-quarto pages from these notebooks have survived that is, perhaps, a mere portion of the original total. Still this is more on paper than a contemporary biographer of Steve Jobs could find because Jobs worked in digital media from the get-go and most of it has disappeared with the passing of floppy discs, hard discs, and web sites. 
Instead of finishing a commission, Leonardo would spend hours examining the condensation on a glass of cold water on a hot day, ants on a leaf, the faces of men in a pub, or applying the eighteenth coat of oil paint to a tree in the background of a painting. While he concentrated hard on what he did, he did not focus on completing tasks. All trip, no arrival.
The anonymous accusation was a common practice of the time and much emphasised in Firenze.  Write out an accusation and drop in the box. Done. (This was a practice revived by the Naziis in Occupied France.) These accusations covered everything from tax dodging, to cheating business partners or customers, short changing deliveries, adultery, and homosexuality.  While sodomy was a moral sin and a capital crime, it was also much practised in Firenze. Hypocrisy is not confined to D.C.
One such latter accusation was made against Leo but it was unsubstantiated upon investigation and he saw it off.  Other similar accusations, however, followed. Whether any specifics in the assertions were so, it is true that he preferred boys to girls or women. True or not, sustained or not, the accusations and innuendoes were making his life and work difficult. After he left Florence, nothing more is heard of such accusations, though it is clear that was his way of life.
In Milan the usurper Il Moro, was buying legitimacy by attracting entertainers like Sharon Stone to Milan. To make peace with the new ruler of Milan, the Signoria of Firenze commissioned Leo to make a lyre of silver for Il Moro and personally to deliver it. While so doing, Leo also applied for a job as engineer, maestro, painter, and celebrity pet.  The duke commissioned him to do a giant equestrian statue which of course remained unfinished during the seventeen years Leo spent on Moro’s dime.
He did earn his keep by producing entertainments for the duke. These shows included automatons, flying hoists, tableaux, and all manner of smoke and mirrors.  The author makes the point that with these shows, Leo had to deliver on time, on target, and on budget. And he did! Repeatedly.  
Being an impresario distracted him from the equestrian bronze but made a great reputation for the duke. (Later this duke would invite the French to come to his aid and that precipitated more than thirty years of incessant war in the Italian peninsula. The French liked shopping in Italy, and paid with swords, crossbows, siege guns, cavalry, and more.)
In these shows Leo’s engineering and artistry were united. They also demonstrated his management ability to prepare and stage them.  He spent years in Milan and only left when Il Moro’s world collapsed. He returned to Florence briefly and then in a dream come true King Francis I of France offered him a pension, not a commission for a specific work or works, but retainer to do what he liked.

He set up a house and pottered away.
While he had been a strapping red head in his prime, he aged rapidly and badly. Those who met him for the first time in his fifties and later routinely took him to be ten or more years older than he was.

There is some reason to believe that Raphael used him as the model for Plato, as above, in his great painting of the Academy for a Pope.
Most of Leonardo’s engineering ideas were never tried, and he completed few paintings, yet he was recognised far and wide as the genius of the age. How does he compare to Paris Hilton, that is a question to consider. His recognition infuriated toiling rivals like the religious zealot Michaelangelo who tried to blacken Leo’s name at any opportunity.
To commission a work from Leonardo was difficult and almost always fruitless. He often played hard to get and declined commissions. When he accepted, whatever the notarised contact said, it was done in his way and on his terms. That most famous of all paintings, the Mona Lisa, which the author details at length was never finished. While Signor Giaconda commissioned it, he never saw the completed work. Instead like several other paintings Leo carted it from Milan, to Florence, to Rome, to France, daubing at it off and on for years.
It was not procrastination. His technique took time. In Lisa’s case, the canvas had a base of white lead, which even with other coats of paint over it still reflects light like nothing else. The lead coating took time, and by the way, this unique property of white lead paint was recognised by others and commonly used on the eyes of portraits. An artist who licked his brush to get a point with this lead for the white of eye developed lead poisoning and this killed many.
Over the white lead Leonardo added very thin coat of oil paint and then waited weeks or months for it to dry. Then another with a wait. And so on. At times he changed his mind and altered a painting and waited. He out waited all of his patrons except Francis who had hired him as a companion more than anything else and they seemed to enjoy each others company. When Francis had time off from murdering Protestants or sacking Italy, he visited Leo for a natter. Though I did wonder, without enlightenment, what language they spoke together.
Leonardo was never idle and in the weeks of waiting for paint to dry he would take up a new project and do, say, a series of drawings of water falls, or rivers. He was always fascinated by the motion of water. Indeed at times he speculated that water to the Earth was as blood to the body, and he meant that literally as much as figuratively. Though for all his polymath genius he never understood the fifth grade science of evaporation.
While he learned much from reading, he never published his own research, though he spoke of doing so, but those words became another unfinished project. He had been an autodidact in his early years and had so little education he could barely read, and he was defensive about that for years. More or less secretly he spent years trying, off and on, to learn Latin with little success. (Miss Vera Earl, MA, would have put his declension in order in no time!) Gradually he came to read Italian and learned from the tomes he read. Perhaps there was a psychological barrier to publishing because of his early life in which books were for others.
It is a wonder, in an age without knowledge of germs, he lived as long as he did. That the white lead did not kill him may be down to his slow pace of painting. But also, where local circumstances were conducive, he did hundreds of autopsies with accompanying drawings of the muscles and bones of the human body without much hand washing, sterilising of knives, and such. Since most of the cadavers he could work on came from the poorest strata of society, often they were diseased and infested, yet he lived.
This quintessential embodiment of the Italian Renaissance, this son of Firenze, this Tuscan-speaking Italian died in France and King Francis gathered his mortal possessions, so that in time the Mona Lisa and many of the drawings passed to the Louvre, where I once saw Lisa behind a bullet proof glass and over the heads of and in the storm of flash bulbs from hundreds of Japanese tourists. I also saw for a few seconds two of his completed, smaller religious works in the Hermitage in a squeeze play.
Isaacson has a prosaic explanation for Leonardo’s (in)famous mirror writing, which is best read in its entirety. It demystifies this practice, and disqualifies Leonardo from the Rosicrucian Hall of Fame.
He was a contemporary of Niccolò Machiavelli, who signed for the city of Florence a contract commissioning Leo to paint a triumphal scene. Needless to say it was never completed. Isaacson supposes Machia and Leo were friends, but I rather doubt it. The evidence is circumstantial at best, and as personalities they had nothing in common. Geniuses do not always attract each other.
Still Isaacson’s book is extensively researched, measured in its inferences, and concentrates almost always on available evidence, which is almost always art, paintings, sketches, models, and drawings, much of it from the notebooks Leo always carried. He succeeds in bringing alive this man who could spend hours examining the condensation on a glass of cold water, drawing the shapes as they came and went, or simply staring intently at the glass as if it alone existed in the world.

The notebooks were numerous and many have been lost. Some were sold off to admirers on his death, and so valuable was anything of his that some notebooks were ripped up and the pages sold separately. In this practice was room for forgeries. Yet much of them remains and they are the only autobiographical source for this remarkable man. On the pages are his many interests, and lists of things he wanted to do, find, understand, know, and test. By the way, though he was pragmatic enough to keep it to himself one entry in the notebooks says that ‘the sun does not move.’
He was so remarkable that even in his lifetime apocryphal stories of his powers were circulated and these multiplied after his death. The journalist of the time, as now, were completely unscrupulous in the exaggerations heaped upon his name to peddle their wares. Thus he became encrusted with myth and legend. Part of Isaacson’s achievement has been to strip away those layers that readers may see the man within.