DANGER!! BOOKWORMS 

We don’t know what Putin reads these days but it’s probably not the TLS or the NYRB. Bare chested horse-riding seems to be his thing. However the reading habits of his political heroes has been revealed recently in a couple of accounts and it seems they were quintessential bookworms. It’s enough to make you burn your library card (are there still such things Ken?). Take the mad carpet chewer for starters:

As Hitler told Riefenstahl, he read nightly, a habit that appears to date back to his early years in Linz and Vienna, where August Kubizek observed his intense passion for books. "Books, always more books! I can never remember Adolf without books," Kubizek recalled. "Books were his world." Another early Hitler associate, Rudolf Hausler, who shared quarters with Hitler in Vienna and later in Munich, recalls his roommate reading dense tomes until two or three in the morning. According to Kubizek, this passion for books had nothing to do with leisure or pleasure. It was "deadly serious business."
From my own conversations with surviving Hitler associates, it appears that Hitler's nocturnal reading habit was still in place decades later. Margarete Mitlstrasser, one of Hitler's longtime housekeepers, recounted a nightly regimen that included his reading glasses, a book, and a pot of tea. Hitler read intensely, even fiercely. The Berghof estate manager, Herbert Doring, recalled an evening when Eva Braun intruded on one of these late-night reading sessions and was dispatched with a tirade that sent her hurtling red-faced down the hallway.

Hitler’s Private Library – Timothy Ryback

Then there’s Uncle Joe – perhaps best known to Oiks as the Wigan based mint-ball maker. Joe was almost a scholar – or at least a fanatical bookworm (is there a difference?).

Stalin was a voracious reader, who set himself a daily quota of between 300 and 500 pages. When he died of a stroke in his library in 1953, the desk and tables that surrounded him were piled high with books, many of them heavily marked with his handwriting in the margins.

As he read, he made notes in red, blue and green pencils, under-lining sections that interested him or numbering points that he felt were important. Sometimes he was effusive, noting: "yes-yes", "agreed", "spot on". Sometimes he expressed disdain, scribbling: "ha ha", "gibberish", "scumbag" and "piss off". He became extremely irritated whenever he came across grammatical or spelling mistakes, and would correct errors with his red pencil. From the works that remain, (in his lost library) we discover that he was very interested in history, preoccupied with the lessons of tsarist rule in Russia, ominously obsessed by the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Peter and Catherine the Great. Most of the surviving annotated works relate to Marxist thought. Perhaps the biggest insight his book collection offers is that he was a diligent, reverential and genuinely enthusiastic reader of works by Lenin. Failing that, he settled for books written by his rivals. When Trotsky's conclusions annoyed him, he wrote "Fool!" in the margins.

Stalin’s Library – Geoffrey Roberts

So there you have it. Vicious tyrants empowered by books. One thinks of termites in old French farmhouses. Everything looks fine – perhaps a little sawdust-like detritus then suddenly one day the whole house falls down. Try not to be in it when it does.

Ken Clay April 2022 

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ALEXIS LYKIARD

THE EXERCISE OF FAITH 

It takes place around 6 am, he recently confessed,
A time well before Welby breaks his fast.
His Lordship then – though downcast daily and depressed
Like members of his flock, dependent on medication –
Practises what defies all rational explanation:
The Primate goes ape and gibbers in tongues! 

Such a regular workout may impress the pure,
Committed Anglicans and those who worship holiness,
But commonplace credulity is strained… The allure
Of sacred texts and ancient hymns, gyms or meditation,
Vanishes readily when you venture to speak in tongues:
Goddledegook’s the stuff to toughen up the lungs. 

***

(Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury
Interviewed in Radio Times 19-25 Feb 2022)

 

War - Otto Dix