Cold cabbage anyway (people didn’t like Brown? No!), Lord Mandelson’s memoirs read like the work of a robot with a dictaphone.
Cold cabbage anyway (people didn’t like Brown? No!), Lord Mandelson’s memoirs read like the work of a robot with a dictaphone. Contrast the letters of the Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 bc).
‘I talk to you,’ Cicero said to his chum Atticus, ‘as though I were talking to myself,’ and in doing so he reveals the man: cultured, liberal and humane, witty and stylish, nervous, vain and indiscrete, but perhaps most of all, ever dependent for peace of mind on the views of others.
‘Think what I must be suffering,’ he tells Atticus, ‘when I am considered mad, if I say what is right about politics, servile, if I say what is expedient, defeated and helpless, if I say nothing.’
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