18 June 2010
Favourite Hate Figure
The Editors
The Sky News presenter Adam Boulton names his 'favourite hate figure' in the May issue of Total Politics:
There's a classics don called Mary Beard. I think she's the worst kind of modern liberal. Or you could widen it to the London Review of Books.
Comments
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18 June 2010
at
9:29am
outofdate
says:
Shame he confuses the LRB with the some other three-letter rag, otherwise it would have been quite funny, especially the image of Adam Boulton, apoplectic even at rest, ripping the flimsy pages to shreds as he goes along.
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20 June 2010
at
6:43am
Ay yah...
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21 June 2010
at
2:07am
pinhut
says:
@
outofdate
It's probably because she's intellectually curious and not that good-looking, a sort of female John McCririck. She usurps both the man's role of Thinker, while neglecting her proper position, that of the Living Ornament, pleasing men by careful choice of clothes and skilfully applied cosmetics.
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21 June 2010
at
2:11am
pinhut
says:
@
pinhut
Oops. I am only suggesting that her looks bear a relation to John McCririck, not the intellectual curiosity.
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21 June 2010
at
6:57am
Phil Edwards
says:
@
pinhut
I still think you might want to reconsider that analogy.
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18 June 2010
at
9:30am
Nick Holdstock
says:
Total Politics describes itself as 'a lifestyle magazine dedicated to all things political', which makes it sound like it's trying to be a kind of GQ-New Statesmen hybrid. In this vein, it promises to provide 'sartorial tips including what suits to choose, how to wear them and who's wearing what in our Political Fashion column'.
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18 June 2010
at
2:31pm
Phil Edwards
says:
Ouch. This reminds me of when, as an idealistic teenager, I first encountered someone who hated socialists. It wasn't that they were bored by politics or unsympathetic with people who took it seriously; it wasn't even that they thought people with my beliefs were mistaken or stupid. It was much simpler: they thought socialists were a bad thing, and a street/town/world containing fewer of them would be improved thereby.
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21 June 2010
at
2:04am
pinhut
says:
@
Phil Edwards
"This reminds me of when, as an idealistic teenager, I first encountered someone who hated socialists."
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18 June 2010
at
9:48pm
Robin Durie
says:
I'm with Phil on this - so he really "hates" Mary Beard? I mean, really "hates"?
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21 June 2010
at
10:43pm
alex
says:
this debate has centred round personalities. To judge 'Total Politics', on the other hand, you could be totally indifferent to people as long as you understood colour. TP's site was designed by someone with a strong penchant for garish colours and capital letters. But what colour did they decide was most suitable for the adjective in their magazine name? Brown...
Read moreI suppose it would make no sense at all to hate the TLS, that would be like hating sand, or being passionately opposed to drying paint. Then again the reason the dyspeptic ageing male is funny is precisely because there's no sense or proportion to his ressentiment, so that he'll take massive injustice or genocide with equanimity but be reduced to a spluttering wreck by a grocer's apostrophe. Being one myself I can report (in reply to Robing Durie) that 'hates' is exactly right, no point mincing words.
It also sets itself the daunting task of being 'unremittingly positive about the political process'- one can only suppose that they view the LRB as being outwith this sphere.
I was taken aback and frankly rather baffled. I got over it in time, and even came to see that some people might have (what they considered to be) good (if mistaken) reasons for hating socialists (depending on what we mean by 'socialists'). And now this.
He hates the LRB - even more than he hates Alastair Campbell, presumably. Isn't that a bit like saying you hate reading views you may not agree with expressed articulately?
Are you still encountering them? I am. Just this week I've been denounced as 'a red' by one of those strange people from the US.
So, what/who would be the quid/quis pro quo? Well, of course, Melanie Phillips.
But do any of us really hate MP? Sure, she's a wind-up merchant of the 1st order, wrong about more or less everything she writes, & pompous in the extreme...but, "hate"?...nah...
But one way or another - since when did it become fun to tell everyone about how, & how much, we hate?
Btw - Mary Beard is one of the finest writers for the LRB - both her reflections on contemporary events, & her "scholarly" reviews, which are invariably engaging & compelling.