Reading

Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson.

The great relief he gives comes in two flavours: things have indeed changed, changed utterly; he has a name for the disease, and it accounts for all the symptoms we see around us now. The disease is militarism (the worship of war and its weapons and accoutrements, its headlong destruction), and it has always been the deadly enemy of democracy.

And, as occasional relief from the austere comforts of Johnson, I am also reading The Red Queen*, by Phillipa Gregory. She's very good – and the covers of her Tudor novels have delicate lacework of red or silver foil tudor roses in a kind of Moorish arch across the top. They gleam when you tilt the book and the light glances off them. Whatever else falls, light still falls.

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*Which is something of a tour de force. Gregory takes this vain, ambitious, cold, narrow woman – cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd by her gender and circumstances, married off at 13 to Owen Tudor, half a country away, whose circumstances do not enlarge or gain in freedom until the Battle of Bosworth – and makes us see her. We pity her at times. Often, in fact. But in her cold, narrow, unlovely way, Margaret repels our pity. She is, finally, the mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII - as far and overtly above our pity as she always thought she was.

Gregory is very good. And no slouch at power relations.