John le Carré on Brexit: ‘It’s breaking my heart’
"Is there anything I would like to add to his epitaph? A line by May Sarton that he would have enjoyed: One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being"
NB: A sensitive meditation on contemporary politics by the iconic chronicler of the Cold War (and the hot wars surrounding it). Le Carre is a humane, brilliant and non-ideological mind - with first-hand knowledge of the worlds' biggest tragedies. His books are literary masterpieces, not pulp spy-fiction This speech, delivered in Stockholm on January 30, is worth reading. DS
They wore you out, those American nuclear warriors. I have a particularly unpleasant memory – and maybe so had Palme – of the US government’s twenty-something defence analysts who lived on rock music and Coca-Cola while they calculated to the last half-million or so how many of us would be turned to ash in a first strike...
NB: A sensitive meditation on contemporary politics by the iconic chronicler of the Cold War (and the hot wars surrounding it). Le Carre is a humane, brilliant and non-ideological mind - with first-hand knowledge of the worlds' biggest tragedies. His books are literary masterpieces, not pulp spy-fiction This speech, delivered in Stockholm on January 30, is worth reading. DS
They wore you out, those American nuclear warriors. I have a particularly unpleasant memory – and maybe so had Palme – of the US government’s twenty-something defence analysts who lived on rock music and Coca-Cola while they calculated to the last half-million or so how many of us would be turned to ash in a first strike...
I’m not just a remainer. I’m a European through and through, and the rats have taken over the ship... Boris Johnson with
our blessing has taken his place beside two other accomp-lished liars of our
time: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. If Palme were trying to get the truth
out of them, which of the three would he turn to? Or none of the above? One day somebody will
explain to me why it is that, at a time when science has never been wiser, or
the truth more stark, or human knowledge more available, populists and liars
are in such pressing demand
The last splinters of Jamal Khashoggi have, we assume, been swept under the carpet of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The culprits have freely confessed that they acted on impulse. They just went a bit wild, the way boys do. The Crown Prince is shocked. The rest is fake news. No bone saw, no screams, no Khashoggi lookalike walking out of the consulate wearing the wrong shoes...
It was only when I set
out to explore the life and work of Olof Palme, and entered his spell, and discovered that same
affinity with him that Ellsberg had so eloquently described, that it seemed
just possible I might not be quite such a bad fit after all. Reading and thinking
about Palme makes you wonder who you are. And who you might have been, but
weren’t. And where your moral courage went when it was needed. You ask yourself
what power drove him – golden boy, aristocratic family, brilliant scion of the
best schools and the best cavalry regiment – to embrace from the outset of his
career the cause of the exploited, the deprived, the undervalued and the
unheard?
More posts on John Le Carre
Was there, somewhere
in his early life, as there is in the lives of other men and women of his
calibre, some defining moment of inner anger and silent purpose? As a child he
was sickly, and partly educated at home. He has the feel of a loner. Did his
school peers get under his skin: their sense of entitlement, their contempt for
the lower orders, their noise, their vulgarity and artlessness? Mine did. And
no one is easier to hate than a contemptible version of oneself. Graham Greene remarked that a novelist needed a chip of ice
in his heart. Was there a chip of ice in Palme’s heart? He may not have been a
novelist, but there was art in him, and a bit of the actor. He knew that you
can’t make great causes stick without political power. And for political power,
you definitely need a chip or two of ice.....
