• Home
  • Contact
  • About Me
Paul Seabright

.com

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Books
  • Research
    • New Research
    • Working Papers
    • Published Journal Articles
    • Published Book Chapters
    • Current Research
    • Ideas for Future Research
    • Collaborators and Co-authors
    • Conferences
  • Other Writing
  • Lectures, Podcasts, Teaching
  • Coups de Coeur
    • Visual Artists
    • Places
    • Recommended Books
    • Blogs and links
    • Curiosities
  • Français

Browsing Tags fiction

Steady On, Jeeves!

Inspired by this news story from London….Image created by OpenAI’s DALL·E.

“Steady on, Jeeves!” I exclaimed. 

“Sir?” He was icily polite.

“Are you feeling quite yourself, Jeeves?” I asked, with what I hoped he would interpret as a tenderly solicitous air. 

“Sir?” A little slower this time, with the tiniest hint of menace.

“I’m sorry, Jeeves, it must be me. I thought you were hallucinating. I should have known better.”

“Sir?” He sounded bewildered. 

“Yes, Jeeves”, I said, relieved at last to have found an explanation. “I need one of your pick-me-ups. It was quite a night, last night. I’m the one who’s hallucinating, not you. Forget I mentioned it.”

“May I ask what your hallucination consisted in, sir?”

“Yes, of course. Quite absurd, really. I thought you said….”

“Sir?”

“You’ll think me ridiculous, I know. Rather embarrassing to admit, really. But I thought you said…”

“Yes, sir?”

“I thought you said….no, ha ha, I can barely utter it…I thought you said the Drones Club…”

“Sir?”

“I thought you said the Drones Club had voted to admit lady members.”

There was an awkward silence. I wished the ground would open and swallow me up.

I began to stutter. “Er, er…absurd of course..”

“No sir”, said Jeeves – even more icily, if that were possible. Who’s the chap, Beer or Lear or someone, who goes out on the icy heath? I know how the fellow felt.

“I told you I was hallucinating”.

“It was the Garrick Club, sir.”

I reached out to steady myself against the wall. 

“There it goes again, Jeeves. I’m still hallucinating. Get me that pick-me-up, quickly, please.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“It’s getting worse, Jeeves. This time I thought you said it was the Garrick.”

“It was, sir.”

It was with a surprising degree of calm that, some minutes later, I noted a gradual slowing-down of the stars that had begun to spin around me upon hearing Jeeves’s words. The pick-me-up he had pressed to my lips had something to do with it, no doubt. I had sunk back onto the chaise-longue. Eventually the blur in the drawing-room around me began to clear.

“I say, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir?”

“What is it those classical chaps are always saying? O tempora…?”

“O mores, sir.”

“That’s it, Jeeves! If even the Garrick….I mean, if even the Garrick, well we’re sunk, aren’t we?”

“Indeed, sir”.

“I mean dash it, Jeeves. Where’s a fellow to go to escape the….”

“Yes, sir?”

“The, the, what’s the word I want? Something beginning with E”.

“Entanglements, sir?”

“That’s the word I want. The entanglements of the fair sex. I mean to say, if the fair sex are to be found skulking even in the Garrick, there’ll be nowhere to hide!”

“Precisely, sir”.

“Entanglements everywhere!”

“Indeed, sir.”

There was another silence. I tried to look philosophical, but I fear that my eyes were swivelling. Like that patient old Pop Glossop described to me once, a most enlightening conversation until it dawned on me that he was comparing the patient’s state of mind favourably with that of yours truly. 

Jeeves coughed, discreetly. I recognized the signs.

“What is it, Jeeves? I can tell you’re hatching something. You look like a gull sitting on an egg.”

From the tiniest flicker of an eyebrow, I could tell that Jeeves was deeply wounded. But he is made of sterner stuff, and the moment passed.

“I fear, sir, the days are gone when one could escape entanglements at the Garrick, even without the presence of lady members.”

“I say, Jeeves, you don’t mean….?”

“Precisely, sir”. 

“What’s that thing about bread, you know, the loaf that durst not something-or-other…?”

“The love that durst not speak its name, sir”.

“That’s it, Jeeves. I say, we’re really torpedoed below the waterline now, aren’t we? Though, come to think of it, that’s not the metaphor…”

“I would not venture to describe the situation in quite such apocalyptic terms, sir.”

“Oh you bally well wouldn’t, would you? What makes you so jolly confident, may I ask?”

Jeeves coughed again. I have learned to pay special attention when he does that.

“If I may make so bold, sir…”

“Yes, Jeeves?”

“I have in recent weeks become engaged, sir, in what, were I of the apocalyptic turn of mind that your lordship so recently expressed, I might have described as just such an ‘entanglement’, but which I would now rather express as a most happy state of circumstances, sir.”

I tried to parse that one. Jeeves’s pick-me-up wasn’t helping. 

“I say, Jeeves, you don’t mean…?”

“I do, sir”. 

I paused. And then, because pausing seemed to be doing me some good, I paused again.

I examined the situation from every angle. 

“Well, Jeeves, I must say, I hope you’ll both be very happy….”

“Thank you, sir”.

“And, for the avoidance of all confusion, am I to understand that the fairer sex are in no way involved in this, er, entanglement?”

“I think it unfortunate, sir, that in answering in the affirmative I might be thought to doubt the fairness of the gentleman in question”. 

“I see, Jeeves.”

“Thank you, sir.”

It was a wiser, but not after all a sadder Bertram who sidled into the bar at the Drones that evening. I had done a lot of what I believe is called thinking. Not much of it in the Drones, I grant you. But I sensed that changes were in the air. 

“I say, Pongo!” I exclaimed, spying him deep in thought over a brandy-and-soda in a corner Chesterfield. “I’ve got a rather strange question for you!”

Pongo turned a jaundiced air on Bertram, as if to wonder morosely when my questions had ever been less than strange.

I coughed slightly, before proceeding. I’ve noticed Jeeves does that sometimes, and it gives what he says a certain something. What’s that word beginning with G?

I couldn’t find the G-word, but I found another in its place.

“I say Pongo, you don’t know anyone who might be willing to put me up for the Garrick, do you?”

From Pongo’s startled look I understood that I was going to have to explain it all to him from the beginning. 

Recommended Books in 2013

Because I have had so little time to write here about books I have read in 2013, but have still (fortunately) had time to read some, I thought I would make a list of some of the most memorable, without necessarily adding much commentary.

In the following; books given 5 Stars are enthusiastically recommended, and are on a part with the other books on my “Recommended books” page. But I will mention some others with lower ratings that are nevertheless interesting.

Some of these books were published in 2013 but not all. Books are in alphabetical order of author, five stars first then four stars.

I start with a few I can remember and will add more between now and Christmas, and hope to add a short commentary to each title before then.

* * * * *

Craig Childs: The Secret Knowledge of Water: “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning”. A strange and touching memoir of one man’s quest to find hidden water in the deserts of the South-Western United States.

Paul Collier: Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World

Sebastian Faulks: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Michel Houellebecq: La Carte et le Territoire

P.D. James: Death Comes to Pemberley

Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible

Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

Dany Laferiere: Comment Faire l’Amour à Un Nègre Sans Se Fatiguer

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: Magnificent first and second books in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, chief counselor to King Henry 8th. Fascinating from many points of view, including for a subtle portrait of the corrupting effects of power. At the beginning Cromwell is apparently quite upset to hear about the effects of torture on heretics, while by the end of the first book he is sending political opponents to the stake or the executioner’s block, not exactly without a qualm but with a matter-of-fact acceptance that this follows from the policies to which he has become committed. Shows that the best way to make someone do something morally troubling is not to give them good arguments but simply to insinuate to them that it is the logical consequence of something else they have already decided to do. The second book sees this deadly logic applied to the destruction of Anne Boleyn.

Jan Morris: Conundrum

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Chris Stringer: Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth

Alison Wolf: The XX Factor: How Working Women are Creating a New Society

 

* * * *

 

Alison Booth: Stillwater Creek

Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

Richard Powers: Gain

Bhisham Sahni: Tamas

Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead

Richard Trivers: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

 

* * *

Richard Rhodes: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

A Perfect Spy

A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré. Published by Knopf in 1986, now available in a Penguin reprint.

I read this book when it first came out and thought it a masterpiece. I re-read it recently with some trepidation, fearing I would be embarrassed by my earlier enthusiasm. I needn’t have worried: it remains a brilliant novel by any standards, and the character of Rick Pym, the protagonist’s father, is unforgettable.

Buy here.

Le Club des Incorrigibles Optimistes

Le Club des Incorrigibles Optimistes, by Jean-Michel Guenassia. Published August 2009 by Albin Michel.

Wonderful account of an adolescence in early 1960s Paris, by a boy who comes across a chess club frequented by Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Kessel and a cast of East European émigrés who all have shadows they would prefer to escape. The book is sad, evocative and sometimes side-splittingly funny. I particularly loved the description of a supercilious Air France employee refusing to help a Russian pilot who has been diverted to Orly because of fog (I could just see that single raised eyebrow the Air France staff have been trained to deploy so deftly). The hero, a 12-year old boy who walks around the streets of Paris reading, insists he is in no danger of running into a car or another pedestrian because he can rely on everyone else’s interest in avoiding him. Until the day when he crashes into a teenage girl who is also holding a book in front of her nose. It turns out to be a great way to meet girls who share his literary passions.

Tags: Fiction, Français

Buy here.

 

A Pleur-Joie

A Pleur-Joie

By Elvire de Brissac. Published 1969 by Grasset.

The other other woman writes acutely and movingly about being mistress to a man with not only a wife but an established mistress as well. Funny, sad, sharp as a razor.

Tags: Fiction, Français

Buy here.

 

 

  • Tags

    artists BBC behavioural economics book cambridge university press central europe church company of strangers competition policy Covid-19 darwin darwin college lecture economists epidemics experiments feminism fiction Français gender Haiti histoire historians History jointventure lockdown marriage markets narrative networks podcast princeton Psychology radio regions of europe religion récit sexual selection supply chain teaching technology trade tribune Trust videos war of the sexes whimsy
  • Connect with us:
  • © 2025 Paul Seabright
  • Powered by WordPress