I have started reading in bed again. I used not to do it, as I tended to fall asleep almost immediately my head was anywhere near a pillow. But, though I am sleeping well, I've started reading again.
Mostly, at the moment I am reading Robert Service's life of Lenin. Service is not a particularly inspiring writer, and I sometimes wonder about his grasp of Marx's ideas. But for the most part, writing after 1991, he holds in check any Cold Warrior tendencies he might have. And the life - what a life! - is so dramatic that I find the book utterly gripping.
When not getting my pulse racing with Vladimir Ulyanov, I am reading sections of Graham Robb's 'adventure history' of Paris, Parisians. For some reason, I used to think that Graham Robb was a writer stained by the favour of the Daily Telegraph. Perhaps Home County Tories do like him, but of course that's not his fault. I don't see anything very adventurous in the book, but the stories he tells are wonderful and well told. I am a soft touch when it comes to Paris, but the book is a joy, and a kind of compensation for the fact that I haven't been to Paris for nearly two years.
Every so often, I am picking up the Hill/Scarpitti edition of Nietzsche's Will to Power. A risky thinker, but enthralling, and fatally quotable. Here he is opening his notebooks:
What has greatness must be spoken of with greatness, cynically and without shame, or not at all.
Dark words, dark times.
Conor
