The Author

If we were to judge someone by their last word, few of us would be well remembered. 

Not in the least, this may be the case of authors, who may or may not decline in their waning days, should they live so long, or face the predictable but inexorably overwhelming pressure of expectation. 

The Buddies

 

No one was perplexed, in spite of their possible exorbitant resistance to both the Russian war and the notion that others could not share that sentiment, when soon-re-elected president Putin hosted recently re-elected president Xi, in a show of seeming dalliance expressing alliance. 

This is, beneath the skimming surface and known to any student of history or the intricacies of geopolitics, not the case. China and Russia have always been rivals - sometimes outright enemies - and only the stupid choices and stupider and empty blows to both parties by a weakening (well, relatively speaking, at least) Western world, self-consciously at that, has brokered this dalliance. For there was a day when the Chinese president, or General Secretary, could not have been welcomed in the Russian capital, or vice versa. 

Simon Tisdall, and the case for even bigger defaitism

It is, contrary to my better habits and presumably against my mental health, an unfailing impulse of mine to ascertain the news of The (formerly Manchester) Guardian as often as possible, a practice I can only put down to the tender but omnipresent force of habit as well as its generous policy of disposing news, and other matters, freely to the world. But as Mr. Big, the movie version, this gracious policy (supplemented by constant collect-like calls for the mercy of the benefitted readers for whatever coin they do have as consequence) hardly even smuggles in a motive of exercising an influence - well beyond Manchester too - which is well worth such partial charity. 

And in my habit of still clicking the opinion pages, if not always due to the art of creating a simple-minded or nasty headline, I found myself grovelling over the words of 

Like Marx but right(-wing)

 

Stephen K. Bannon. "Steve." The very name, like the slightly elongated "Stewie", evokes an attitude as well as a character, a tension that tends to make any discussion - as I know the phenomenon - unpalatable. When he maxed his ego, and what must then have felt like a position similar to the 16th century statesman, as well as flauntering his likely demise, by invoking Cromwell (16th, not 17th century, the one very aware of the loss of his condemned, and still breathing body) as a model for himself, close relatives were flabbergasted, as any enjoying the acclaimed, if "narrow", adaption of Shakespeare's early adaption of the fate of Titus Andronicus, face provided by the great Welshman, 

to the extent that his movement ought rather (putting aside my emphasis on "Kekist" and the power of the green beast) to be called Bannonites rather than Trumpists. With regard to the world outside the United States, an alluring landscapes to the other, leftist populists he so enamours, and certainly to the "woke" "progressive" "left", 

What is it then, beyond the unruly world of early-21th century economic thought, with left and right both lambasting the reprehensible and unending evils of an ostensibly centrist neoliberal consensus.