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Edited on Sun May-14-06 09:54 AM by onager
(I'm kidding, of course. Bush read? Pfft! Every summer the puppy-dog media runs one of these canned White House press releases bragging about the pResident's heavy vacation reading schedule. I don't buy it for a second. As I remember, Bush constantly slagged book-reading intellectuals until well after 9/11.)
In the late spring of 1912, the graceful yacht "Enchantress" put out to sea from rainy Genoa for a Mediterranean pleasure cruise--a carefree cruise without itinerary or time-schedule...
The "Enchantress" belonged to the British Admiralty. The accomodation aboard was as grand as that on the King's own yacht. The crew numbered nearly a hundred and served a dozen or so guests, who had come from Britain via Paris, where they had stayed at the Ritz.
Among them were the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith; his brilliant 25-year-old daughter Violet; the civilian head of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill; and Churchill's small party of family members and close colleagues.
In the final enchanted years before the First World War brought their world to an end, they were as privileged a group as any the world has known...
The Prime Minister (was) an ardent classicist; he read and wrote with ease and pleasure in classical Greek and Latin.
Winston Churchill, no scholar of ancient languages or literature, was as jealous as a child. "Those Greeks and Romans," he protested. "They are so over-rated. They only said everything FIRST. I've said just as good things myself. But they got in before me."
Violet noted that: "It was in vain that my father pointed out that the world had been going on for quite a long time before the Greeks and Romans appeared on the scene."
The Prime Minister was an intellectual, aware that the trend among historians of the ancient world was away from an exclusive concern with the European cultures of the Greeks and Romans.
...modern civilization--that is, European civilization--had its beginnings not in Greece and Rome, but in the Middle East; in Egypt and Judaea, Babylonia and Assyria, Sumer and Akkad...
In the early years of the Twentieth Century, when Churchill and his guests voyaged aboard the "Enchantress," it was usual to assume that the European powers would continue to play a dominating role in world affairs for as far ahead in time as the mind's eye could see...
Conspicuous among the domains still to be dealt with were those of the Middle East, one of the few regions left on the planet that had not yet been socially, culturally and politically reshaped in the image of Europe.
From A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin
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