Damien Thompson har anmeldt boken «The Secret History of the World». Den usensurerte versjonen finnes på Counterknowledge. En smakebit: The Secret History of the World is, by a comfortable margin, the worst book I have ever reviewed. It’s not just badly written, sloppily edited and full of egregious errors of fact, though it is all […]
Damien Thompson har anmeldt boken «The Secret History of the World». Den usensurerte versjonen finnes på Counterknowledge.
En smakebit:
The Secret History of the World is, by a comfortable margin, the worst book I have ever reviewed. It’s not just badly written, sloppily edited and full of egregious errors of fact, though it is all of these. The book is morally deplorable. “Jonathan Black” is the nom de plume of Mark Booth, head of Century, an imprint of Random House. For many years, Booth has commissioned titles built around bogus history and conspiracy theories. Not content with this, he has now written a “history” of civilisation that repeats the wildest claims of his authors and throws in some nasty ones of his own. …
The book ends with a conceited bibliographical essay. I liked this bit: “Beethoven spoke of the Appassionata as his most esoteric work but for me it is his last piano sonata, no. 31 in A flat major Opus 110, in the course of which, suddenly he jumps forward to the music of a hundred years later the prophesied jazz.” Ye gods, where do we start? Beethoven didn’t describe the Appassionata as esoteric; the passage in question does not prophesy jazz; although it does occur in the last piano sonata, that work is no. 32 in C minor Opus 111. And shouldn’t a professional editor be able to punctuate?
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