iPadding at last - and Mandelson too

This is the first post from my new iPad.

 I appreciate that I am late in this game and that there may be no new praise to give to this remarkable reading machine.

 I am not sure I have quite maximized it for writing.But doubtless that will come.

 Buying it was a success in itself, a morning trip to Regent St with TLS commercial director Jo Cogan, a wearily smiling promise from a boy in a blue T-shirt that an iPad might be available soon, a painstaking registration requiring memories of a password once used to buy Miles Davis CDs and long forgotten, a strict warning that if a machine should by any chance appear for me I must claim it within 24 hours or lose it to arrival, a fierce rejection of the thought that I might pay in advance to secure my stash (buying heroin must surely be easier than this), a return emptyhanded to the office and then, lo, an email that same afternoon congratulating me on my luck, the arrival (this time I mean 'arrival' while last time as this keyboard did not quite understand I meant 'a rival'), a lon queue to collect my prize that starred a cast of city boys, dons, civil servants and young men with £50 notes one would never see queuing for anything else (I meant a 'long' queue but I still cannot go back on this keyboard, a longer queue anyway than any I have stayed in voluntarily since the Hard Rock Cafe in 1975).

 So now I have it. More maybe later.

 To those who have asked about my review of Peter Mandelson (see last post), it is in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter, I can't wait for the TLS iPad App. Here's one from ABC that is of some interest: "ABC News App for iPad™: your world. in your hands.

The ABC News interactive globe gives you a new way to dive deeper into the stories that matter most to you.

ABC Start Here Spin Shake Touch Filter Save Share Engage

Spin the globe with a swipe of your finger
Shake your iPad to shuffle up the articles and videos
Touch any image to read or watch the day's news
Filter the globe by selecting your favorite topic or show
Save stories to 'My Favorites' to read when you are offline and on the go

Share the buzziest stories through Facebook, Twitter or e-mail"

TLS letters could do with a workover--they seem to be formatted for reading at a latenight meeting of the Committee of the Department of Sleep at the Academy. Why can't people learn how to write for the Internet?

I have just completed Andrew M. Colman's "Oxford Dictionary of Psychology"--except for Julian Young's philosophical biography of Nietzsche, the best book I have read in the last month.

I would recommend that this Colman entry be deleted in the next edition: "personification n. The attribution of human characteristics to non-human entities, as when the dying English television dramatist Dennis (Christopher George) Potter (1935-94) named his cancer Rupert, after a media mogul whom he hated; or as a *figure of speech in which a non-human entity is referred to as though it were human, as in the phrases 'merciful death' and 'angry thunder.'"

[Clayton Burns]

An excellent review by Sir Peter in WSJ:

The Heart of Darkness: A biography that tells a tale of spin and
power, Blair and Brown: "The Third Man," by Peter Mandelson.

Even if "Like many successful bedtime stories, much of Mr. Mandelson's tale is written as though the author were still a child himself, a brave lost boy lashing out in large black letters, more charcoal than crayon, some of them smudged by tears."

Ironically, in one of the Related Stories in WSJ, by MIRA SETHI (Henry James's Most Affecting Portrait: 'What Maisie Knew'), the writer notes how we are placed in Maisie's mind:

"We see this early in the novel, when James writes that Maisie 'puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a center of hatred... that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.' 'Imperfect signs' and 'prodigious spirit' have a characteristically Jamesian ring, but 'everything was bad' suggests the more elementary formulation of a child—Maisie's, in other words. We can imagine her asking her governess, as she is tucked into bed, 'I make everything
bad, don't I?'"

British politics as explained in "The Third Man" could only be elucidated by the Mach scale, introduced by Richard Christie and Florence Geis, and discussed in "Studies in Machiavellianism" (1970). A questionnaire designed to measure the personality trait.

An assessment that should be mandatory for British politicians is the version named the "Kiddie Mach," "for use with children," according to the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology.

[Tim Crean]

I can't resist asking are you iPadding from Paddington Station?