Political theory and practice

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (2023).

Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.50 by 92 litizens.  

Genre: Non-Fiction; Species: Social History.

Verdict: One for trivial pursuits. 

Tagline: Get it down on paper!  

It was a double whammy.  First paper and then the convenience of the notebook to carry it around.  

The paperful office was the technological marvel of the age.  Papyrus, clay, and parchment were the media before paper.  Papyrus won’t grow anywhere else but the shores of the Nile River, and it does not travel well.  Clay, well impermanent and easily changed. Parchment, expensive and also easy to alter. Hence palimpsest.  None of these media facilitated commercial activity beyond goodwill and memory.  Altering something on clay or parchment was child’s play. That way lies fraud. Keeping either quick notes or detailed records on them was not feasible. 

Then a binder of books of parchment, began to experiment with flax and hemp, and discovered he could make paper.  Soon an experienced worker could make 4,000 sheets (slightly larger than A4) a day. The binder used this paper to record the accounts of his business, and was able to do so in a detail that exceeded everyone else.  Soon others wanted to do the same and he began selling them paper.  

All this occurred about 200 kilometres from Florence, and businessmen there heard of and tried this new development.  Paper gave them a competitive advantage in the detailed records they could keep.  In time, letters of credit replaced the risky and difficult task of moving gold and silver coins.  These letters made the Florin of Florence the stable currency of choice around the Mediterranean and as far north as the Netherlands.  In the long fallout the Dutch currency was called a florin well into the Twentieth Century.

Then the second innovation occurred: Double-entry bookkeeping. (See Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  Click away.) This method of matching assets and liabilities adding up to zero was a revolution comparable to Copernicus’s conceptual breakthroughs at Padua.  Florentine business flourished with these new found intellectual technologies.  

Ledgers, day books, receivables, inventories, catalogues, expense sheets, contracts, and more were quickly and easily recorded and were relatively fraud proof.  

Popes made use of these technologies to distribute and receive funds from the Catholic Empire. The Medici became the preferred agent for a number of Popes, and profited greatly from it.  

From the Thirteenth to the early Sixteenth Century Florence bustled, and one of the ways the rich indulged themselves was through art works.  To save their souls they commissioned religious art, and for their own diversion private art in oil, canvas, marble, granite, and more.  

All of this artistic explosion was worked out in notebooks, which became essential to artists, who could now do drafts, studies, cartoons, and the like, as Giotto may have done to create the lifelike figures he did.  

The most famous notebook user among artists, was of course Leonardo da Vinci who recommended the constant use of notebooks.  He carried one affixed to his belt. Mostly he used them for sketches of the constant motion of nature, but he also recorded plans in them by mirror writing and in a code. He filled thousands of pages only a fraction of which remain.

Likewise, later the irascible Isaac Newton made extensive, life-long use of notebooks to work out his mathematical ideas.  Historians of science have used them to map the evolution of his concepts.  

Paper also fuelled European exploration when Portuguese navigators started to keep logs, draw charts, or map islands with fresh water. These innovations were soon taken up by Portugal’s ally, England and these technologies made the world more familiar and smaller.  

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus started with notebooks but switched to cards in developing his system of nature. 

When the hospital practice of intensive care began in a Danish hospital during a polio epidemic, the notebook, monitoring patients, was almost as important as the tracheostomy tube.

Agatha Christie always had a notebook at hand and filled hundreds of them with ideas, snatches of dialogue, room maps, plot ideas.  Since she worked on several novels at once, alien that she was, and she did not date the notebooks, researchers make careers out of relating the finished book to notes scattered through dozens of notebooks over years.  It seems she read back over the notebooks periodically and extracted material from them years later.

The police ‘inspector’ was so named because when shifts changed his job was to inspect the notebooks the Bobbies carried wherein they recorded their rounds which were countersigned by worthies along the way to prove the officer did indeed do the assigned round.  The worthies might be Anglican vicars, school teachers, shop keepers, or publicans. The police notebook was thus in the first instance for management control. But officers soon began using them to record observations and events on their patch as further proof of their diligence. The police notebook as we knew today on cop shows came, like most innovations, from the bottom up.

I found the opening product placement add for Moleskine put me off but I kept at it.  For years I carried a notebook in a back pocket and there are shoeboxes of them in the office closet. I still use them to keep track of my gym activities. But these days to make notes I use Siri.

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Operation Mincemeat (2010) by Ben Macintyre

Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rated by 4.02 by 20,290 litizens.

Genre: History.

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Overloaded. 

Tagline: Tis a far better thing than he had ever done before.

Espionage has many forms and disinformation is one of the principal ones.  To mask the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 a deception plan was conceived, prepared, and launched to confuse the Nazis.  It would be impossible to conceal the fact that Sicily was the next geographically logical target, so the plan was to capitalise on that obvious fact by implying that a feint would be made to Sicily while the real attack would be on the Peloponnese in Greece with the strategic goal of a link with the Soviets via Yugoslavia.

Winston Churchill had often spoken of the soft underbelly of Europe, evidently having never seen the mountains of Italy or the Balkans, and the site would be consistent with that.  But how to do it?  

What would convince the Nazis? Soft intelligence of rumours and such is useful but that takes a lot of time and there was little time for that on this occasion because it was in February when the decision was made to invade in July. Still rumours were planted, but something that would rivet attention would be better. It had to be something that the Nazis found out for themselves and interpreted for it to have credibility with them.  It could not simply be handed to them. So a complicated and roundabout plan was hatched.  

An airplane crash would be faked off the coast of Spain at a place where the local officials were known to be pro-Nazi.  A cadaver would float ashore with a brief case chained to a wrist containing some papers which were vague, but which lent themselves to the interpretation that the next major objective was Greece.  

That sounds pretty simple but the preparation and execution was anything but simple. The imperative of secrecy meant everything had to be done carefully. (Although by launch date at least 50 people or more, by my count, knew the broad outline and purpose of the exercise. The author does not offer this kind of numerical summation.)  

Every step was hard.  In wartime England finding a dead body to use was the first, and in some ways the hardest problem.  One of the good points of this book is the deference and respect accorded to the deceased, one Michael Glyndwr.  Eventually, against an ever ticking clock, a cadaver was found that (1) could be used (no family to claim it, no witnesses to its death, no obvious signs of the real cause of death), (2) of military age, and (3) roughly physically fit enough to have been in the army: Someone who is not going to be missed or sought after. The final difficulty was the identity photograph on his service card.  The dead do look dead. 

Once found, a body would have to be kept for some weeks while the papers and other paraphernalia were assembled and the seasonal tides became right off the Spanish coast. There was no point in preparing the papers and gear if no corpse could be obtained so that only started once the corpse had been secured.

Getting a uniform also proved difficult, since every item of clothing issued had to be accounted for and assigned to a soldier. Most difficult of all, because they were the scarcest of all in wartime England, were underwear!    

Preparing the papers also proved a challenge.  No one was satisfied with the drafts others wrote, and so more drafts were written, each typed with copies by office staff.  Imagine a committee of twelve writing a letter! Impossible.  

Even harder was faking a plane crash. Even getting an RAF plane to fly the body to the right locale proved difficult. One could hardly say we need it for a secret mission to deceive the enemy to the RAF to file flight plan. Instead a submarine did it in such a way that only two intelligence officers saw the body. The crew of 60 certainly knew something unusual was happening. Using the submarine allowed for a more exact placement in the tidal action. (The crash was faked with an explosion on the water.)  

While all this was going on, the cadaver was decomposing in cold storage.  

Apart from these practical hurdles, the toughest nut to crack was pitching the information so that it tapped into the predispositions of the German intelligence analysts.  Not too much, just enough for them to find confirmation for what they already suspected.  

Another key, apart from Churchill’s focus on Southern Europe, was the British presence in the Balkans, mainly with Tito’s partisans, but also a remnant of British troops that had gone to ground in Greece when they could not be evacuated in 1941. These were stirred into some action to support the story.  Meanwhile, in Egypt Greek-speakers were recruited and organised.

He had to be named, and every serving officer was in the Army or Navy Register.  What name to use?  This was a comedy of errors.  The name of dead officer could not be used for reasons both practical and moral.  And so on, and on.  But it had to be a name in a register but who would not be surprised to hear he had died, because his death would be published. Long story on that one. Because once the body was found in due course it would be identified and buried. 

Once the man was in the water, there was a wait to see if the tides had been correctly predicted. Yes.

When the body was recovered would it pass examination by a coroner? Yes, but only just.  In fact, the Spanish medical examiner entered all manner of hedges and qualifications in the written report about the cause of death, how long the body had been in the water, and time of death but this report, by luck, did not accompany either the cadaver or the briefcase thereafter.  

Then would the Spanish hand over the papers to the Germans in Madrid.  No!  Some fool in the Spanish bureaucracy followed correct procedures and locked the papers up, pending release to the British after the body was identified, claimed, and buried by the Brits.  

A contingency plan went into operation to alert the resident Germans in Madrid (there a lot of them — about two hundred — who preferred that posting to the Eastern Front) that the papers existed and were valuable.  This was done by starting word-of-mouth rumours of a British reward for the return of the brief case and contents. Not a colossal amount of money but enough to set the German mind thinking. 

There was a lot of cat-and-mouse in Spain. Once the papers were finally in German hands, the Nazis saw what they wanted to see.  In Spain the resident Germans needed an intelligence coup to make themselves look good to their bosses back home in Berlin so they could stay in Spain. Their willingness to believe was duly noted in London and exploited with the later Normandy deception to come. 

In Berlin the OKW army analysts wanted something definite to concentrate on, and this gave them a target. Despite all the stereotypes of German realpolitik and efficiency what shows here again is the incompetence, disorganisation, and fantasy in much of their intelligence work. Just as bad as S.O.E.

And of course once Hitler accepted the truth of the Greek misdirection, no one else dared criticise, equivocate, question, or hesitate.  When the information proved wrong, of course, Hitler blamed everyone else but himself. This same cycle of incompetence and stupidity was repeated with the deceptions regarding the Normandy invasion a year later.  Once again Hitler was fooled, and that was that.  

In neither case could or would Hitler ever take responsibility for his own mistakes. Now that is genius!

There was another wait once the papers reached Berlin to see if they were examined, and acted on.  Well, after a wait, Field  Marshall Erwin Rommel was sent to Greece. He took with him two fully equipped armoured divisions that were then not in Sicily when the Allied landings occurred.  

The author has amassed a great deal of material, all of which is presented! There are too many back and side stories about the alcoholic intake of the Brits during the war. That may well explain S.O.E.’s catastrophic incompetence. Not so very amusing viewed in that light.   

A strong point is the account of the forensic assessment of the papers and the cadaver.  By the same token I would have liked a little more on the attitudes of the Spanish officials involved.   

I read The Man Who Never Was (1953) by Ewen Montagu (the main architect of the plan) (168 pages, rated 3.96 by 1412 litizens) when a lad of an (un)certain age. When the film of 2021 came around I was reminded of that.  However, I did not go to the movie at the local Dendy since having my ear drums assaulted for 2 hr 8 min after having my patience exhausted by the repetition of Val Morgan ads repeated three times, after having paid the $24 price of admission did not appeal to me.  Curmudgeon that I am. Perhaps one day I will see it on the telly chopped up by imbecilic commercials, but that is what the mute button is for. 

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (2019) Cecelia Watson 

Good Reads meta-data is 213 pages rated 3.67 by 2126 litizens.

Genre: non-fiction; species: grammar.

DNA: Pedantry.

Tagline: Is it semicolon or semi-colon? 

Verdict: anti-climactic.

Tagline: Well, someone had to do it. 

‘Class just for fun today let’s review the uses of the semi-colon. There are two principle uses: (1) to join two independent sentences as clauses and (2) in lists where items contain commas, the semi-colon can be used to mark off separate items.’ 

‘There is (3) another less common use for effect to insert a pause shorter than a colon.  If a period is the longest pause of four beats, a colon is three, a semi-colon is two, and a comma is one.’

The effort to make grammar into a science has led to a proliferation of rules so that in the latest edition of that Bible of style, the Chicago Manual (more on this sacred text in a moment), there are now forty-six (46) rules governing the wedding of a dot and squiggle which is neither a period nor a comma but rather their unloved child. This proliferation of rules was ostensibly intended to clarify the use of the semi-colon but has only further shrouded it in mystery.  Try reading these rules and you’ll see what I mean.

Author uses the semi-colon to chart the growth of grammar and its priestly attendants since the Eighteenth Century.  The first English grammar books appeared in England and forced that unruly and irregular mongrel tongue into rules derived from Latin and Greek with parts of speech, clauses, cases, numbers, declensions, gerunds, conjugations, and the like. The rules propounded were policed by grammaristas who bludgeoned those who erred with weighty tomes on grammar seasoned with a superior smirk.

Sidebar: though not explored by the author, I wondered if this migration of grammar from Latin and Greek was one explanation for the long shelf life of those languages in British education.  

By the middle of the Nineteenth Century there are hundreds and hundreds of these rule books on both sides of the Atlantic.  Needless to say they contradicted one another on each side of the sea as well as across it.  However, they did not included punctuation which had roamed free until that time.  

Bringing punctuation into the fray was an innovation that gave a market edge for a time, but soon even more grammar books appeared with contradictory rules for punctuation.  These explorers of the dark reaches of English usage proved their points by rewriting the past. Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer were all corrected and revised according to the Nineteenth Century science of grammar.  

Nor were contemporaries spared this policing.  Mark Twain found the vernacular he used in his stories rewritten into correct English by a publisher.  He was so incensed, the more so after his first protests were disregarded, that he composed a story, then took out the punctuation marks and listed them at the end, while inviting the publisher to insert the marks where he liked.  

Henry James went further. He found American reviewers and publishers fastened onto his use of punctuation rather than the character, the plots, the events, the stories, drama, psychology, etc.  To escape this pedantry he moved to England, where….  What do you know? More of the same.

He was so angered by such reviews that he refused ever to be interviewed by a journalist, despite frequent requests. Many seeing this declaration as a challenge tried but all failed. His one and only appearance before the fourth estate was at a fund raiser for the American ambulance service in the Great War. Of course even there a journalist did try to embarrass him about the semicolon! 

In about 1906 the University of Chicago Press compiled a manual for in-house use.  This was the first guide to grammar aimed at neither learners nor students, but at writers and editors.  There was soon a grey market for it, and – delayed by World War I – it was published in 1921 as the Chicago Manual of Style, and I was suckled on it, starting with its school version (Kate L.) Turabian’s Guide.  I have the current Sixteenth Edition of the Manual on the shelf behind me as I type. Taken together the contemporary editions of these two now total nearly fifteen hundred pages. My undergraduate copy of Turabian was ninety-five pages. The new edition is now four hundred plus pages.  The forest is so dense that no trees are visible. 

The semi-colon has also had its day(s) in court as judges mind-melded with black letter law to infer its meaning.  I found all of this so much nonsense, but there it is.  

Many writers explicitly avoid the semi-colon, like Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, and George Orwell.  On the other hand, it was an essential pediment for Henry James to build his cathedrals of words, Martin Luther King, Jr employed it for cadence in his speeches, and Raymond Chandler made it zing on the rare occasions when he used it.  

It is true that James may have over done it because Author claims to have counted 4,000 semi-colons in one of his longer novels. It did sometimes take him a long time to get to the point. Why anyone would count semi-colons can only be explained by a PhD.

The book is enlivened with clever drawings at the beginning of each chapter.  The prose is easy to read. Recommended for pedants.