Other People, by Frances Partridge

By this time, reading Frances Partridge's diaries feels like returning to an old friend's life - I like her very much. This volume is not as interesting as the precedent (Hanging On), one feels somehow that her son's death didn't affect her as much as her husband's, or perhaps she was better fitted to withstand loss by that time. But anyway, it depicts very nicely the way a life loving woman coped with her solitary life, focusing on her friends' lives to keep interested in living and enjoying life, and most successfully. One cannot but admire her for that.

Malabourg, by Perrine Leblanc

A good enough novel, somewhat a dark tale with a redemption, set in French Canada (it caught my eye in the bookstores of Montreal last year). The writing is beautiful, and it's interesting to read Canadian French, very different from France French in many ways, but the story left me unmoved.

The Story of the Stone - The Golden Days, by Cao Xueqin

I don't remember where I read about The Story of the Stone, maybe it was in the Times Literary Supplement or in the New York review of Books, but it roused my curiosity so I ordered the first volume. I enjoyed it very much - it starts as a picaresque novel, and it grew on me, depicting a lost world of beauty and privilege, about a civilisation - the Chinese - I know very little about. It's a surprisingly modern novel, considering it was written in the 18th century. After some time, the narrative gets a little tiresome, with the silly pointless intrigues and pettiness of the characters' lives, curiously so reminiscent of the Ancien Régime, that was their contemporary across the world in Europe. But the characters are extremely lively and convincing, and they really come to life. So I think I will read the next volumes in the saga.

SPQR, by Mary Beard

This is a very good History book. The first part especially, until the end of the Republic, is just brilliant - the way the author reconstructs Roman history according to Roman sources is really interesting and up to the point, it's the best I've read so far. The second part is clearly inferior and it disappointed me somehow, but even so the depiction of the Roman way of life was extremely interesting and engaging. All in all, it's an excellent book.

The danger in the absurd

I have written less and less about Jews and Muslims because dislike to fuel the hatred; it's such a charged subject and I have several friends that are already over incensed about it. But I can't resist writing my 2 bits about the news of the recent UNESCO resolution draft about the Temple Mount, that strikes me as particularly absurd and as a sign of what is saddening and frightening in our Western civilisation. The absurd starts with its very existence - why on earth would it be necessary to define a historical place in this way, as if it's not sufficiently known to all the parties interested. But there it is nevertheless. I can understand that some Muslim countries advance such proposition, as a political maneuver part of their usual strategy of playing victim and reinforcing the anti-semitic propaganda they use to demonize Jews as a scapegoat for their own failures, as xenophobia and minority groups discrimination has been used for centuries by many kinds of governments everywhere. I can also understand that immoral and corrupt governments like Russia's or China's support it, as a means to appease their own sizeable Muslim minorities while in a way undermining Western-styled democracies and thinking, so killing two rabbits with the same stone. But that Western democratic countries can support it or abstain to vote (as so many did, mostly abstaining), supporting in that way such a ridiculous and despicable rewriting of History for political reasons, is infuriating. It is the kind f misguided "political correctness" stemming from a ridiculous sense of colonial gilt allied to a coward ad counter-productive policy of appeasement that, by denying our Western values of honesty and democracy is corroding the very base of our civilisation. That is the real problem, not the refugees or the minorities. The Western problem is not standing for and upholding the values on which our civilisation - the most successful until now even if not perfect - allowing in that way intolerance and obscurantism to get a foothold and set in. That's how great civilisations fail, from within, and not because of the barbarians, who just take advantage of their weaknesses and tiredness and, in the end, become a kind of solution, as the famous poem by Cavafy so rightly expresses. This UNESCO pitiful vote is a sad sign of decadence, as is the Trump phenomenon in the US, the Brexit vote or the tolerance by the EU f its members' Hungary and Poland policies. In this case, it's mostly symbolic, but symbols are meaningful.