Looks tell all

Look at the picture of Hillary Clinton on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph. The caption reads ‘Barack Obama glances at Hillary Clinton after she lost her temper during the Democratic debate in Manchester at the weekend’. But it is not how Obama looks; instead it’s Hillary: she is smirking. Whatever else she is doing, she is playing a calculated game. All the reports today are running Obama’s way but for a contrarian view, read “Why Neither Obama or Clinton will win’, David Herman’s post in First Drafts, the Prospect magazine blog. If either do, Herman thinks this “would be the greatest shock in US politics since the war.”

Dietary requirements

Tim Rice confides in his Diary in this week’s Spectator that whenever he gets a form asking for his dietary requirements, he always put “large helpings”, which request, he says, is unfortunately (but quite correctly) rarely acted upon. I usually put “Summer Pudding”, with much the same result.

Bhutto: a (yet) more detached view

In John McNaughten’s blog, Memex 1.1 http://memex.naughtons.org/, an interesting excerpt from a piece by David Warren on Canada.com about Benazir Bhutto.

My abiding memory of Benazir (I too was an exact contemporary at Oxford) was our first meeting: she was wearing pink hotpants and stretched out on the floor of a close friend of mine, eating Turkish Delight. McNaughten’s summary, “attractive, rich and petulant” is accurate to a point; Benazir was also great fun. It was that girl I remembered when I heard the news of her death, not what she became.

Whither Hillary?

An interesting post in Coffee House (The Spectator’s blog) this morning by James Forsyth: Is there a way for Hillary to recover from this defeat? His view is that there are only “two things that spring to mind that could revive the Hillary campaign, but both are out of her hands. One is a game changing gaffe by Obama. The other is an event that makes Americans want a president who is above all, tough.” The latter he believes is something that worries the Obama camp. My take is that although Hillary (and Bill) are and should be worried, we shouldn’t be. Four (or worse eight) more years of a Clinton in the White House is a dreadful prospect: bring on the young!

George MacDonald Fraser: Home at last

“The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry river-bed in the dry belt, somewhere near Meiktila.” So starts George MacDonald Fraser’s Recollection of the War in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here. Although he will be remembered more for Harry Flashman , if you haven’t read this memoir, you should. It is not just a classic of military autobiography, but a very moving account of war seen through the eyes of a young man.