pass

i love the review sections of the weekend papers they serve to alert me to new and exciting things i should read, watch or listen to. sometimes it may just be that a certain creator has something new coming out and i have to make a note that i want it. what i am i saying want for, i need it!
other times i am drawn to the subject of the review and find myself making a note of yet another item i may have to get (how i love those reviews that put me off).
on rare occasions i just want to find out what other people think before i make that commitment to get something. so it was with the collection of hugo young papers that have been released.

i was never a great fan of hugo young, but i did enjoy reading his columns. so the idea of getting to see some of the background notes and thoughts to his writing is a fascinating one.
the weekend papers had two contrasting reviews: the sunday times had rod liddle, the observer had andrew rawnsley.
both reviewers make the point that hugo young was the outstanding liberal centrist commentator of his generation. from rawnsley that is high praise, from liddle it is little more than a compliment. rawnsley’s work can be seen as part of a continuum with hugo young’s work, while liddle is somewhat more to the right.
so liddle’s review is full of little jabs at the left. he pulls out all the negative material he can find on gordon brown, he hints that hugo young leaked off-the-record comments. furthermore liddle believes that young only interviewed people who shared not only his worldview but were similar in background. in short that hugo young was a snob.
rod liddle not a fan of hugo young, not much of a surprise. a major selling point for the book.
andrew rawnsley is a fan. he sees hugo young as a great reporter who went in search of the answers, who dug beneath the surface to get the truth. for rawnsley hugo young is a man of integrity. the great and the good spoke with him because he would not betray them. not that this protected them from his “magisterial savagings”, because if young felt they deserved it then he would berate them in print.
so far so good. rawnsley is selling it to me.
he even mentions how hugo found gordon brown to be a genial chap.

a slight digression here; there is another book i am interested in malcolm gladwell’s “outliers”. pretty much all the reviews seem to say it is an interestingly written book, but it is not telling you anything startling. the digested version is that genius (of all types) is partly natural and mainly a lot of hard work, with a bit of luck.
fair enough it is a slim volume and i wasn’t expecting the secret of the universe.

however one of the selling point of the hugo young papers is that because of the unprecedented access and proximity to the great and the good that young had that we mere mortals would learn something about those in power.
rawnsley himself says that the notes are “peppered with revelatory and entertaining character sketches”, sounds like good stuff.
then it hits you like a wet kipper in the face, rawnsley writes “from a guardian lunch with princess diana he takes away a prophetic thought: 'although she laments the incessant publicity, i wonder how she would survive without it.’” how on earth was that prophetic? it is just a banal thought that any reader of “hello” magazine could have come up with.

now it might be a little churlish of me to decide to pass on a book because of one less than stunning insight into the people’s princess but there you go.
the book is 800 pages so it must be possible for them to have found something a bit more prophetic than a puff piece on diana. still if you are going to have a book that length sitting on the shelf you may as well have a diana story in it as you know that is likely to get you some copy and some sales.

so the “hugo young papers” might be the work of a titan, i am going to pass on it. who would have thought it would have been andrew rawnsley’s review that put me off?