Heart of Darkness

Letters

Vol. 12 No. 13 · 12 July 1990

From Nicolas Walter

Readers of the London Review of Books are presumably expected to sympathise with Christopher Hitchens’s account of Conrad Black’s campaign against him (LRB, 28 June). However, although I have virtually nothing in common with Black – certainly not his politics or his wealth or his power or his ruthlessness – I must say that I actually sympathise with his view of Hitchens’s journalism. Hitchens himself calls one of his articles ‘ill-tempered and mean-spirited’, and that seems a fair description of most of those I have read over a period of nearly twenty years.

They belong to a form of journalism he shares with several figures right across the political spectrum (such as Alexander Cock-burn and Tom Nairn or Auberon Waugh and Paul Johnson or Richard Ingrams and Julie Burchill), which depends on abuse and rhetoric rather than analysis and reason, and which attempts to arouse emotion rather than increase understanding. Ten years ago I told him I thought he was a discredit both to his profession and to his politics, and I still think so. No, I wouldn’t want to ban him – or anyone else – but I certainly don’t want to read him.

Nicolas Walter
London N1

Vol. 12 No. 17 · 13 September 1990

From Nicholas Griffin

It is surely remarkable, worth perhaps an entry in The Guinness Book of Records, that our own Conrad Black should generate such tedium as to bore even those capable of surviving a dinner with Mrs Thatcher and a London military ritual (LRB, 28 June). Little wonder that the Economist, not many months ago, described Canada as one of the most boring countries in the world.

Nicholas Griffin
Troy, Ontario

Vol. 13 No. 1 · 10 January 1991

From Ian and Charlotte Townsend-Gault

Everything about Conrad Black is tedious, not to say banal, but it is surely a mistake to confuse individuals with the country that spawned them, or else where would England be? What lies at the root of dicta such as that attributed to the Economist (multiple cross-references, but see the Letters of 13 September 1990) whereby Canada is found to be ‘one of the most boring countries in the world’? Pine-tree envy? It appears to be little more than an up-market version of the Sun’s contemptible campaign to ridicule the French. Britain is overpopulated, badly polluted, deprived of the guarantee of basic human rights with, consequently, a self-serving judiciary and a sycophantic press. Such a country must, in all charity, he forgiven for a habitually sour response to another which has transformed its colonial status, most recently thanks to strong and effective human rights guarantees, and workable cultural pluralism. The Canadian-Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) has been unaccountably ignored in recent discussions as to how human rights should be entrenched in the United Kingdom, despite the fact that it provides an obvious contemporary model. Sensitive response to the natural environment is not seen to be the prerogative of selected inheritors of the nature poets, ‘Our Age’ or any other clique. The example of living native cultures makes such exclusivity untenable.

Canada is not perfect – that would, no doubt, be boring. As it is, the label can only be applied in ignorance.

Ian and Charlotte Townsend-Gault
Bowen Island, British Columbia

Vol. 13 No. 3 · 7 February 1991

From Jennifer Dawson

I couldn’t agree more with Ian and Charlotte Townsend-Gault (Letters, 10 January) about Canada. Who are we in Britain with our slavish press, failing democracy, racism and insouciance to be so condescending and dismissive? And so consistently? I spent two weeks at a writers’ conference in Toronto in 1987. I liked the city very much, found Canadians pleasant, open, articulate and spirited. On the campus we talked about less numbing things than ‘Lark Rise to Laura Ashley’ and who was going to be next Master of St Ethwold’s, I found that students – a new experience – didn’t treat their seniors like faintly unpleasant slugs that had somehow got tiresomely onto the fingers of Thatcher’s children as they popped things into their mouths. Floreat Canada.

Jennifer Dawson
Charlbury, Oxfordshire