2008
...............................................................................................................................................................

April 30th; Light rain. Help Franc move furniture, stay for dinner. We watch an 18th-century Black Adder episode where Atkinson's character meets Dr Johnson. An oldie from Fela, strutting around in blue-green Y-fronts with his mike & cigarette, getting all indignant. Notice his pretty young wives contradicting him line by line from the second call and response on.

April 29th; Go to Apple showroom. Thank goodness, they replace my defective battery on seeing only the warranty. Visit a number of pharmacies in search of herbal remedies, and find myself in one chemist's with two customers being dealt with by two members of staff, while a third customer, a rather pretty brunette, waits in front of me. One customer is a man with greasy grey hair and a curious odour. He says everything very slowly and LOUDLY, as if he had a sharp blow to the head some years ago. He is wearing his clothes the way a partly-consumed slab of lard wears its wrapper, he has a long list of medicines he wants at reduced prices, and it starts to become clear he does not plan to leave the shop until he gets exactly what he wants. Minutes crawl by. I inspect three odd pictures on the wall, which show old woodcuts of mediaeval chemists done in enamel paint on thick, roughcut chunks of fibreboard roughly oval in outline. Slowly I see that the outline of the middle chunk of board, unrelated to the shape of the picture, is slyly done in the shape of the late-19th-century big Hungary. This is from when Hungary was, as something of a last resort, promoted to co-ruler of the Habsburg Empire for its last few decades before collapse in World War One. It has the fishtail shape in the lower left-hand corner where parts of the Slovenian and Croatian coast are now. After ten minutes with both customers still taking up the two members of staff and the third customer still waiting in front of me, I leave. Robin arrives in the evening, in high spirits from a bash at the Dutch Embassy.
April 28th; See 'The Kiterunner' with Viki. Moving, almost sentimental in places, this Afghan film tells a tale of a father, his son, and his son's best friend. Themes like shame, pride, honour, forgiveness are handled with dignity and the characters built up carefully yet simply. Good. Afterwards, orange juice and we chat about voyeurism. Rather less artistic, online find charming black-and-white film about aliens killing everyone in Britain. A sort of decade-earlier version of Terry Nation's 'Survivors'.

April 27th; Dinner at Franc's. Recommends this film.
April 26th; Fruit tea with Agnes at the library. She knows Grazyna, who has moved to a euro-job in Belgium, and Agnes comes up with the wonderful image of working in Brussels being like moving "closer to the sun", the centre of power & money that all of Europe's sunflowers turn to face. By night Terri & Alvaro invite me along to a party hosted by Oliver, Istvan, and their urbane Dutch sheepdog Gustav. Oliver's colleagues Csilla, Ibi, and Boglarka smoulder enticingly in one corner. Ben, his girlfriend Katharina, and his sister Gemma ply me with alarming quantities of generously-mixed cocktail/punch-type stuff.

April 25th; Pick up shoes from cobblers. Visit Istvan, who helps me instal XAMPP on my laptop. Go swimming on island. Franc comes over with cakes and we drink tea. The progression over just 3 or 4 years [1968? to 1971] from this song to this song reminds me oddly of once teaching my cocker spaniel how to bark. After repeating the word "wuff" with my human accent a few times, she suddenly got the idea of dogginess. She excitedly ran round and round the sofa barking with happy abandon, taking it as far as it would go. It's clear that Pulp and Supergrass and other 1990s retro bands wanted to recapture the mood of Mr Marriott's first video more than his second. Franc & I dine on pizza & red wine.
April 24th; Kind Zaza signs my library-membership application. Decaff Irish coffee & dinner with Nora & her student Gabor, a National Bank network engineer.

April 23rd; Seems those yellow flowers were rape. Entire fields have come out in intense yellow over the weekend. Grey day. Robin drives with me to Kiskunfelegyhaza for his check-up with a new dentist, who it seems is very good. We have lunch at a middling restaurant called 'Desperado' and walk round town a bit. Then I catch the train from the station, which has an odd combination of pre-war fascist modernism, neo-rococo plasterwork on the ceiling, and odd early 20th-century touches. Particularly striking is the train times board. Unlike Kecskemet station, which traded in their white-painted metal board about two years ago, Kiskunfelegyhaza still has a large metal board on the platform with little hand-set clock faces whose pointers show departure times. Metal plates slot into grooves to show destinations and platforms of various trains. All painted a Swedish sort of blue and yellow, with proud red lettering. Much clearer than the dot-matrix electronic scoreboard that Kecskemet now has. Take 2.30pm train to Budapest. Now for a brief message.
April 22nd; In the morning, Robin finds the lawnmover is not working well after all. Georgina rings up, only to hear from the wife of Lawnmower Laci that an ambulance took him to hospital an hour earlier. He has just had a serious accident while mending a lawnmower. Thick grey bands of cloud hang motionless in the sky. As the light fails, Zsuzsi plays draughts with me and then Zsuzsi & Bela show me how to play croquet outside in the dusk. After dark I do some papier mache in the kitchen.

April 21st; Strange, long, warm day. Robin & I drive to see Lawnmower Laci in the early evening to pick up the lawnmower Georgina & I took over there yesterday. He seems not to hear us, but we eventually he realises we are outside. We enter his house as darkness falls, strangely quiet, over Nagyrev. This is a town, almost cut off inside a loop in the river, where forty odd people died, poisoned, between 1911 and the 1920s. Some victims unwanted babies, some unwanted husbands. Laci's Alsation dog is - incredibly for Hungary - completely silent. It assesses our trustworthiness quietly. Just as real guard-dogs do in countries where people realise you should train a dog, rather than keep it chained in the garden, uselessly, anti-socially going off all day and night like a broken car alarm. It seems Laci knows about dog breeds, and we meet his cocker spaniel too. Getting a lamp from his workshop, he guides us through his garden to show us his collection of carefully restored Soviet-era jeeps and vans. We stand, our heads surrounded by apple blossom, as he plays the torch on the grey or mud-green vehicles parked on the grass. Robin says he is often melancholic, and some years ago mended his car forgetting to put any bolts on one of the wheels, but seems quietly happy now and has clearly changed. A tree frog chirrups and croaks loudly. As Laci shows us out onto the road, random, soundless flashes of lightning on the horizon warn of the coming thunderstorm. Back at the house, we eat brown pasta and Brie by a single candle so we can see jagged stabs of lightning and pay proper attention to the increasingly loud rumbles and cracks of thunder.
April 20th; Wake up strangely early and alert. Probably the gingko and guarana I tried yesterday. A day of sport, in which Robin improvises some croquet for the children, rigs up a tennis court, a couple of them do rollerblading, and I join the children for the usual riding lesson at Rita's paddock overlooking the huge field. I ride in circles on Otello wishing I had not worn a black shirt in surprisingly hot sun. Even the deranged dog on the chain seems too tired from the heat to bark senselessly as usual. Zsuzsa and Kasper gallop quite well now. Nothing around us apart from our clothes betrays which century we are in. After riding, both Kasper and Bela climb on a haystack. Otello, a large black horse, surprises me by getting into his stall and promptly rolling around on his back for a good wriggle in the straw. Turns out Rita's late father was also a novelist, like her mother. Some French pop music. Ze gurl eez crazee! Mind you, is this really any different?

April 19th; Catch earlier train to Robin's on the Great Plain. In my compartment are three women, all looking glum and exhausted. The blonde lass is wearing one of those puffy white jackets, an off-white cardigan, a pink and grey shirt with writing across the breasts in glittery letters, and blue jeans. Completing this look are turquoise socks with pictures on them, black training shoes with silver padded stripes down the side, purple-tinted steel-framed sunglasses with deep pink sidebars along the arms, and her fingernails, which are cut square and lacquered a bright pale green just paler than apple green. Almost exactly the colour that the chewy lime-flavoured Opal Fruit pastilles used to be. Small yellow flowers seem to have engulfed the last four tracks at Kecskemet station where I change onto the local train. Stationmistress Liza meets me off the train at Tiszaug and greets me like an old friend. Warm sun as soon as we get into open flat country is putting everyone in a good mood. Robin drives up and we give Liza a short lift. Later we pick up Letty off the bus back from a school athletics outing in Pecs.
April 18th; Phone Moscow to find where Vlad works these days. Budapest public transport closes down for a one-day strike. Franc & Peter drop by for drinks. Peter mentions that he met the Slovak-Hungarian girl in 'Bakkerman' on a train a couple of years ago and asked her to act in his Transylvanian film.

April 17th; Hand proofing to Heikki. Then Martin & I dine at 'Jelen' bar while he explains superdelegates to me.
April 16th; Be afraid. Big Dog has been improved.

April 15th; Green tea with Zsenya, who relates how he recruited a Canadian man for an important job, only to find he already had a Hungarian husband. Meet Viki at the Corvin cinema to watch 'Bakkerman', a truly appalling Hungarian comedy about country life. Drunk, fat peasant characters, perhaps from somewhere near the Slovak border, do some self-congratulatory larking about while drooling over the village siren & the sleazy barmaid. A lot of falling-over-and-getting-covered-in-mucky-stuff jokes give it a strongly Germanic feel, with some 1970s-Bavarian-sex-comedy lineage. Despite a dire story and some third-rate acting, one or two well-observed cameo roles. Nonetheless, this is the most amateurish type of film: smug, sloppy slapstick from people without the discipline of real comedians. Like watching overweight parents think they look funny on the dance floor. No, really.
April 14th; Iced coffee with Nora. Curious Tarot spread. Song from a few years ago: sounds easy to make an audio texture like this, yet hear them struggle to do it a g a i n. What must it be like to hit the nail on the head just once?

April 13th; More editing work for Heikki. Sunday. Just after 6pm, I go out to the shop in the lemon-coloured sunshine you get just before dusk. On the way back to my flat, I visit the big, flaky yellow church. In this light it's the rich hue of that cheese in tiramisu. Surprisingly, a service is in progress [Is 6.30pm Vespers for Catholics?]. I stand at the back holding my silvery tin of Red Bull caffeine drink to help me continue proofreading later. Some kind of assistant priest in white is kneeling to one side of the altar, and at crucial moments bells smaller and higher in sound than a dinner gong are rung for emphasis. The church is full. A couple of worshippers, standing at the back near me, kneel at this stage. Some of the Hungarian text mentions Easter just past, but I don't know the calendar well enough to place this ritual. In the middle of the aisle, but right at the back, just a few feet in front of me, I can see the back of a young mother with a pram she keeps quietly rolling forwards and back on a slight curve to soothe the baby inside. Not clear if the move is curving because the wheels are skewed or because she knows the move that lulls the infant better. As a couple of other people kneel, she kneels too, but without stopping the to-and-fro motion of the pram which now completely blocks her view down the church to the altar. Somehow odd, a kneeling woman moving a pram back and forward. More bells ring out, and I notice a faint jingling from inside the pram from some kind of plastic rattle each time it moves, plus a charmingly restrained baby gurgle. Kneelers stand up and she stands up too and starts walking around the back area slowly wheeling the pram in figures of eight across both sides of the aisle behind the back row. I get a glimpse of her face: she looks tired, late twenties, judging by her skin eating a diet poor in veg and vitamins. Once again editing at my table back at the flat under a desk lamp, it is so quiet, I can make out a very faint tingling sound in the room. Turns out to be bubbles bursting against the inside metal surface of my half-drunk can of caffeine drink.
April 12th; Last night met Nathalie at the internet cafe, the day after the museum reminder, for the first time in several years. We drank mango lassis together and did some debriefing. Struck me during this chat that the proper translation for 'banlieue' is actually 'township'. Today, proofread for Heikki. Taking a break in the editing, I find a website about disreputable herbs & spices. The rye mould ergot gets the encouraging summary: "Ergot poisoning (St Anthony's Fire) causes hallucinations, gangrenous loss of limbs, and death." Moving on, I come across a tape transcript about experiencing another substance: "I saw him on the wall, and he was lying in a swamp of blood, it was like blood, and he had skulls all around, it was like he was lying on this morass of bodies in a swamp, there was blood instead of water, and the skulls were all around his head like a halo, and they were covered with vomit, this orange vomit, which was coming out of their eyes… [sigh] …and that’s it, that was all there was… [heavy breathing] …but it was the most benevolent thing, you know, and benevolent because of the power…" To organise that kind of evening, apparently you should smoke some acacia.

April 11th; Irish coffee with Viki. Banana at Heikki's office.
April 10th; Lunch and decaff coffee with Martin at Klauzal square. Very interesting chat, about Alice Bailey, among other people. Weather actually warm now. Finish 'Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters' by Alan S. Miller & Satoshi Kanazawa, which has lots of explanations for various behavioural mysteries, based on evolution, not standard sociology, and of course, though some of them might be incomplete, they make more sense than the sociological ones. Q. Why would Bill Clinton endanger his job as president to mess around with Monica Lewinsky? A. Because enjoying access to more women is what an alpha-male job like being president is for... Q. Did men get larger than women, or women smaller? A. Women got smaller, because polygyny rewards the genes of girls who reach menarche earlier and therefore stop gaining height ...and so on. This way of thinking, if not some of the details, has seemed pretty obvious since reading Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' in 1982, and my biggest surprise was how recent much of the research is. The authors gamely admit to only getting into this field themselves in 1994. Some of the open questions are very interesting. Male homosexuality now has an evolutionary explanation with some supporting evidence, but lesbianism doesn't yet have even a good hypothesis, for example. Meet Franc later. He takes me to an event at the Ludwig about the paintings of Istvan Nadler (using colours rather reminiscent of Next shopping catalogues from 1980s Britain), where I bump into Robin's friend, Swiss artist Hans. Franc & I also meet Jeff, who - when we are discussing angry white men doing weights and taking steroids in fitness clubs, thus shrinking their gonads - describes this as the "white man / steroids / small penis Bermuda Triangle". Jeff continues, describing the desktop, vertically down-pointing camera tripod wired up to a laptop he rigged together to scan in hundreds of catalogue records from 75 years of 19th-century Hungarian contemporary art auctions for his Phd. Jeff muses he should really patent his contraption. Franc dubs this the Bermuda Tripod, into which thousands of books will disappear, forever digitised. I warn Jeff he has a day's head start to open his patent application before it will have a prior-art problem caused by this weblog. At the gallery, an elegant girl claims to know me and then reveals she worked with Nathalie Pigeon in Budapest well over a decade ago. She asks if I know what has happened to Nathalie. I say no, I haven't seen her for six or seven years. Later on, Franc & I come back to my flat with pizzas & beer where we chat while I tidy a bit, then open and break permanently the white-tape thing Robin bought me in Rome. Franc kindly explains a couple of the buttons on my camera to me.

April 9th; Go to cobbler to get measured up myself, and discover that oltes are not in fact different from Paris points. He shows me his tape measure. It is marked in centimetres, Paris points (= oltes = 2/3 of a centimetre), and in the corresponding British shoemaker's unit which looks like 2/3 of an inch. Sorry to mislead you, Tex. Finish a book I bought in Rome in January, 'Romeo & Juliet' (Romeo e Giulietta), translated by Agostino Lombardo. This was pretty slow going since I don't read Italian but cussedly made myself read each line both on the English and Italian pages. Did I pick up the rhythm of the language a bit? Probably not even that. Nonetheless, interesting to reread a classic, deliberately slowing myself down - different things emerge as important. Mostly the size of the Friar's and Nurse's roles: the play is virtually a four-hander with four equal roles, two adolescents and two actors of their grandparents' generation, confronting the parents in between them. Leisurely chat with Marion over cakes in the afternoon. Bump into Heikki late at night in the Indian canteen.
April 8th; Train from a grey, damp Lakitelek after a hot chocolate with Robin in the station pizzeria. Almost empty carriage the whole way back to Budapest. Today I only got five Nigerian scam letters, but yesterday was a record so far, seven in one day.

April 7th; Robin & I drive around. He needs pieces of wood, and we visit Praktiker, OBI, and finally a plywood and plank sawmill in Szolnok so anonymous we are unable to find the front door and end up getting in through the goods entrance, using their helpful pile of pallets as steps. As we pack stacks of freshly-cut five and ten ply board in the back of Georgina's car during a short spell of rain, she phones Robin him to say that near-hurricane winds are threatening the house and the boys' school. I buy drawer handles at a Szolnok hardware shop where Robin gets into detailed discussions about wood tints and lacquers. Then we eat some chicken at a Mexican-style restaurant next door with mirrors on the ceiling, sofas at every table, lots of fruit machines, and two other customers the whole time we are there. I stick up some posters in Tiszafoldvar on the corner opposite where the funfair was last week and we buy spring onions and eggs from an old lady on the main road. Back at the house we end up talking late about whether modernism is finished, and whether the Nigel of Darkness was right years ago to predict that after 2000 the past would become more fashionable than the future.
April 6th; In the morning, finish 'Will the Boat Sink the Water?', a book about China's bullied, exploited 900 million peasants. They live far inland, away from the glamorous coastal cities, unknown to urban China and the rest of the world alike. This is a book by two brave Chinese journalists, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, who are admirably outraged as they report on peasants tormented and sucked dry by greedy communist bureaucrats at local level, but seem to share the same heartbreaking naivete as everyone else in the book about the Maoist system having once had some achievements or value. Perhaps they could not hope to get it published in China if they just said straight out that Maoist rule was based on deceit and starvation from the very start. Yet they seem to believe, with worrying sincerity, that the system can somehow be repaired with a new or better "system" of local officials, when it should be obvious by now it never worked to start with. The curious title is based on a quote of Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, that the peasants are the water of China, that can either hold up or sink the boat of the emperor. How the surreal-sounding inversion makes sense is never justified. Some of the book reads oddly for a foreigner - there is a chapter which takes place in a place called Zhang County, where the extorting bullying local official's family name is Zhang, and he is opposed by four upright peasants bravely enforcing their rights, all four of whom are also called Zhang. Seems unkind to carp about such a courageous and important book, but it is frustrating how gullible left-wingers worldwide were for half a century about Mao's "successful exception" when behind the lies was obviously fascism on a massive scale, almost certainly the most monstrous regime earth has ever seen. The authors, a married couple, get their house stoned these days, apparently. I suppose some enormous, hideous civil war in China is on the cards. Then go with Robin to pick up three of the children from their riding lesson and on to the cakeshop between Cserkeszolo and Cibakhaza. The blonde is still serving there, minus her Egyptian goddess eyeliner.

April 5th; Meet the lovely duo Peggy and Nora for afternoon drinks. Pack for Robin's, and at the station in Budapest am ushered into a dingy office when I ask if any late connections are available for Kunszentmarton via Szolnok. The fat woman is patient with my idiotic customerness (how much better the train service could run if they didn't have to waste their time with fare-paying passengers), looks through her timetable book, and explains, sighing wearily at my ignorance, that, by now, 7pm, absolutely no further connection is available to Kunszentmarton tonight. We spend 20 minutes discussing alternative routes via Kecskemet all in her timetable book, before she discovers that I can in fact catch the 8.25pm to Szolnok and from there catch a train to Kunszentmarton, my original query. I'm no longer even slightly surprised by this kind of thing. Of course, being Hungarian, she acts as if this is a completely novel idea, not the question I walked in through the door with 25 minutes earlier. Go to the Don Pepe restaurant to have a superb cold soup made of plums, an indifferent coffee, an indifferent beer, and an indifferent pizza that makes me feel mildly unwell. Catch train from Budapest to Szolnok. The small train from Szolnok leaves half an hour late, keeping Robin waiting patiently in his car at the other end. It stops at all the small stations near Robin's house that the woman in the dingy Budapest office repeatedly assured me in a exasperated voice that it definitely didn't stop at. Robin and I meet around midnight at Kunszentmarton. He is enjoying the little traditional brick station and the fact that the grumpy stationmaster is dressed in full uniform.
April 4th; With Robin to the cobbler downstairs in the morning. He measures Robin's feet in a unit called 'oltes', using a special tape that is calibrated in centimetres, oltes, and a French unit (presumably Paris points), all three different.

April 3rd; Yesterday's mix of sun and rain gives way to general greyness. Strange moment waking up on sofa in Budapest next to the desk lamp I moved over to the sofa so as to read by last night. For a second I have a clear picture of the complete darkness with the lamp the only source of light last night, contrasted with this morning, where daylight pours under, round and through the undersized thin curtains. (After all, why would an East European think of hanging curtains that actually block out light?) The very banal thought that it is very dark at night and very light during the day becomes oddly vivid for a few seconds as I wake up and look at the little lamp that was the only source of light eight hours ago. Finish a dark little book with a hideous brown cover (not the attractive caricature on front of the Faber & Faber edition) about a quarrel between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge at a philosophy seminar in 1946. This is 'Wittgenstein's Poker' by David Edmonds & John Eidinow. Though the book is well meant and fairly well written, the subject matter is strangely depressing and the premise a bit unsatisfactory. Supposedly, at a crowded 1946 meeting of philosophers, Wittgenstein picked up a poker from a fireplace and waved it around, perhaps at Popper. Then, challenged by someone to name a moral rule, Popper gave as an example "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers". The question is, did Popper say this before, or after, Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed angrily out of the room? Popper in a book he wrote later claimed he said it before, making it look as if Wittgenstein left the room in a sulk, humiliated in argument. A couple of witnesses present insist he said it after Wittgenstein had left the room, making Popper look rather less victorious. Problem 1: This question isn't answered by the end of the book. Problem 2: We hear very little from the other people in the room at that meeting. The whole reconstruction seems to have been spun out of about one page of notes or less for each of four or five people who were there. I was hoping at least we would get four or five pages worth of interview with at least ten people who were at the meeting. Instead we get extended biographies of the two small, argumentative men from Vienna. Naturally these describe their different involvements with the people and ideas of the pre-war Vienna Circle of verificationists. There is some explanation of Wittgenstein's ideas on language, rather less explanation of what Popper actually says in 'The Open Society and its Enemies'. The pop-star quality of Wittgenstein's own personal charisma, that still enthralls many today who never met him, is quite well captured. However, the final taste the book leaves is a sour one. Two enormous egos, filled with resentment and insecurity about their own intellectual limitations and reputations, squabbling over status in front of the harem - not really discussing whether philosophy has problems or only linguistic puzzles, the ostensible theme of that evening's seminar.
April 2nd; Late breakfast briefing Gyongyi, then meet Viki for drinks, and finally an iced coffee and a beer with John-Michel & Katrina.

April 1st; Help Robin move some old fridges and a couple of agricultural tyres off his land to the recycling place round the corner. Dragging the heavy farm-tractor tyres across rough grass on a rope behind the green Benz tests the engine, and I sit on top of the boot of the car to put more weight on the back axle. Robin drives me to Lakitelek, and then I realise I have left my phone at his house. He kindly drives me back and we return to the railway station. I have plenty of time for a leisurely pizza in the annex to the Lakitelek restaurant done up to look like a railway carriage in every detail except for the mature tree growing up through the floor and the ceiling. I read more of Frank Sulloway's book until my pizza arrives on a plate with a design on it in grooves showing a man putting/taking a pizza in/out of an oven. On the small train, at Kecskemet station, and on the last train to Budapest, I read through the French Revolution section, and finish the book as the train pulls into the Budapest terminus. Frank Sulloway's 'Born to Rebel' is a book I've been meaning to read for years since reading a piece about Sulloway in the Economist. It is interesting to see how little impact it has still had, probably because his idea does not seem, as he warns, counterintuitive enough to excite readers. Sulloway refines Darwin to look at human history. He uses statistical analysis of large sets of historical figures chosen by historians in those fields, not by himself, to show convincingly that first-borns among children identify with authority. First-borns are more likely to become scientists or politicians, yet less likely to support new & revolutionary theories or movements within their scientific field or political life than later-borns. First-borns (including only children with some caveats) are more likely to be political conservatives, and if they are political liberals, it usually emerges that they are identifying with liberal parents as loyal first-borns tend to do. If first-borns innovate in science, it is likely to be in a technical field, to follow on from a serious estrangement from a parent, or - like first-born Galileo - to having been trained by an older relative (in Galileo's case a musicologist, Vincenzo Galilei) who also innovated in a scientific field. First-borns emerge as overwhelmingly likely to oppose a new theory like evolution in its first few years, likely to be bitterly argumentative in disputes over priority, and more likely to support reactionary new theories like spiritualism or racial eugenics. In the French Revolution, first-borns dominated the royalist representatives (even after correcting for primogeniture), yet among the revolutionaries it was first-borns like Robespierre who were most likely to vote for execution of opponents, while later-borns on both sides were more conciliatory. Fascinating, methodical piece of work. Sulloway has clearly accomplished something that eluded both Marx and Freud - a convincing, probabilistic explanation for political and social attitudes and thus historical change. Birth order, for example, turns out to predict political views a thousand times more accurately than socioeconomic background. As Sulloway keeps stressing, major divisions are within families, not between them. In their early struggles for parental love & support, siblings learn strategies which last a lifetime, and Sulloway's refinement of Darwin's ideas makes it even clearer that the naturalist aboard the Beagle will be the only Victorian remembered a couple of centuries from now.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / contact@otherlanguages.org

back up to top of page