Jeremy Paxman

A thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking book. A rebublican by conviction when he started the book, Paxman considers all aspects of the British royal family, past and present: their ancestry and history; their relationship with their people, and with God; their day-to-day life in the past and these days; their obligations, rights and responsibilities. It's a closely and thoroughly researched book, but witty too, and written with a light touch. At the end he concludes that, with all its imperfections, the stability and well being of our country is better assured by the fact that we have a hereditary monarch, rather than an elected president. I found it easy to agree with his arguments.… (meer)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-life-in-questions-by-jeremy-paxman/

It’s an entertaining book, as you would expect from his public persona. Paxman was from gently decaying middle-class roots, but he got to Cambridge and, equipped with his M.A. Cantab, became the face of both Newsnight and University Challenge. He cut his journalistic teeth in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s, and paints a striking picture of the awfulness of official government policy, and the BBC’s difficulties in reporting on the situation properly – there were two striking incidents where he himself was centrally involved in clashes between the broadcaster and the government, but it doesn’t seem to have done his career much harm in the end.

Paxman doesn’t have a lot of self-doubt; this gives us an entertaining take on war reporting, writing books that nobody ever buys or reads, politicians in general and running a quiz show, but the deep reflection is more on the cogs and gears of politics, and why it is important to hold the ruling class to account, than on any deeper sense of society or indeed personal purpose. I enjoyed it a lot but slightly struggle to remember particular incidents, now that I’m writing it up a couple of weeks later.… (meer)

i read this book 13 or 14 years ago. really! (yes! i'm just adding it now!) not that it was forgotten. it has lived in the back of my brain ever since. when the anthrax scare happened, when i saw mr. death, whenever the X-files had episodes about strange diseases, whenever i think of sheep on rocky scottish islands (for reals! look up Gruinard Island), whenever W mentioned imaginary WMD's, and now, yesterday, when i listened to the new episode of radiolab (http://www.radiolab.org/2012/jan/09/) and found out that fritz haber, father of biowarfare, lived in the city where i now live. in fact, the title of the book is from a quote by this lovely piece of work. this is what you get when you invent, and USE, chlorine gas: your wife kills herself in protest of your actions, your government is taken over by nazis, who first drive out jewish people like yourself and then take another of your inventions, zyklon A, and make it even deadlier, zyklon B, and more effective at killing off your relatives. that's just part of it. i'm beside myself and a little angry. just, i dunno, read the book. if you can stomach the fact that in WWI the opposition had no idea what mustard or chlorine gas were, so when they were hit with it they would run. the gas would overtake them and they would run, and then they would be gasping for air, so they would remove their gasmasks. gasping = quicker, more painful death full of mucus and blood and drowning in your own saliva and seriously, this book had an effect on me. duh.… (meer)