Favourite Hate Figure
The Editors
The Sky News presenter Adam Boulton names his 'favourite hate figure' in the May issue of Total Politics:
There's a classics don called Mary Beard. I think she's the worst kind of modern liberal. Or you could widen it to the London Review of Books.
Comments
I suppose it would make no sense at all to hate the TLS, that would be like hating sand, or being passionately opposed to drying paint. Then again the reason the dyspeptic ageing male is funny is precisely because there's no sense or proportion to his ressentiment, so that he'll take massive injustice or genocide with equanimity but be reduced to a spluttering wreck by a grocer's apostrophe. Being one myself I can report (in reply to Robing Durie) that 'hates' is exactly right, no point mincing words.
It also sets itself the daunting task of being 'unremittingly positive about the political process'- one can only suppose that they view the LRB as being outwith this sphere.
I was taken aback and frankly rather baffled. I got over it in time, and even came to see that some people might have (what they considered to be) good (if mistaken) reasons for hating socialists (depending on what we mean by 'socialists'). And now this.
He hates the LRB - even more than he hates Alastair Campbell, presumably. Isn't that a bit like saying you hate reading views you may not agree with expressed articulately?
Are you still encountering them? I am. Just this week I've been denounced as 'a red' by one of those strange people from the US.
So, what/who would be the quid/quis pro quo? Well, of course, Melanie Phillips.
But do any of us really hate MP? Sure, she's a wind-up merchant of the 1st order, wrong about more or less everything she writes, & pompous in the extreme...but, "hate"?...nah...
But one way or another - since when did it become fun to tell everyone about how, & how much, we hate?
Btw - Mary Beard is one of the finest writers for the LRB - both her reflections on contemporary events, & her "scholarly" reviews, which are invariably engaging & compelling.