The Happiest days of our Lives

".. The newspaper stories were like bad dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories."

From The Handmaid's Tale

Arthur & George

On George

Did xenophobia enter main stream taboo status only after WW 2?

From the Fear of Muslims to Neo Nazis beating up Indians- so many instances pop up now in the media fairgrounds and bask in the sunshine of public dissent and opinion.

Racism of course, will continue as long as there are dark and pale humans around and as long as they both continue to procreate.

I do not know of many examples of well publicized racism in the pre world war era.

All of colonialism was indeed racist and hence I assume it was part of the accepted scheme of things. After all, when a Gujarati got thrown out of a train in Pietermaritzburg for 'darker' reasons, in the pre-war times, the news came to the 'civilized' world almost a century later, as the first scene in a Hollywood blockbuster.
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Barnes' depiction of George is so much more beautiful than all the 'tales of displacement' being churned out every other year for Booker that and Pulitzer this by our women writers.

Maybe that's the difference between hype and art.

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On Arthur

Like everybody else I believe in Holmes…and Watson. The cocaine, the violin, the most quotable of eccentric lines, the women (or the lack of) and the impossible chivalry…life’s so much better when we believe that Holmes did exist.

Along comes along Sir Arthur full of cricket and waxed moustache, championing Spiritism, playing the consulting detective, stewing in Victorian sexual paranoia…Holmes and Watson did indeed exist!

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Arthur & George

The days when Sir Arthur played cricket were so different- his cricket is full of English snobbery, impossible Victorian chivalry and stiffness, with corseted ladies watching some very confused men, from sun drenched boundaries.

W G Grace c Storer b Conan Doyle 110

Arthur’s game has now been completely usurped by George’s people- it has been imbued with their boisterous colourful chaotic culture. How would Sir Arthur react to that?

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Sir Arthur’s obsession with Spiritism is funny yet…disturbing. A hall crowded with thousands of people waiting for Sir Arthur’s séance appearance reminded me of Herge


I now understand now, what Herge seems to be poking fun at.

All of Europe, before the war, seems to have been obsessed with the business of Spiritism and Clairvoyance...

Not just Sir Arthur, but almost a good fraction of the world was searching for a way to conquer death. They seemed to believe that if turn of the century science could suddenly throw in so many miracles at the most breath taking regularity, death would be explained away soon too.

After the death of 100 million people in just some six years- I think our race has given up on the what-after-death issue- at least for a while.

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On Arthur

I wonder what Sir Arthur would have to tell the new-age terrorists

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