Ashes back; will Warne be?

by Harry on September 12, 2005

After a rivetting series, England have, at last, won the Ashes back. I have wasted a lot of work time listening to these matches — I hope there isn’t another series like it for years.

I pointed out to my dad yesterday that without Flintoff this would have been a walkover for the Aussies; he, reasonably, retorted that without Warne it would have been a walkover for England (even without Flintoff). I can’t remember any series in which both sides had one such dominating player. Warne is supposed not to be back — but the guy took 40 wickets in a 5 match series at 16.875 a piece; it is hard to believe that someone who can achieve that in his mid-30’s will be done for before he’s 40. And as for Flintoff — he’s like a throwback to the 60’s, or 30’s, or something, the days of Washbrook, Laker, and the like: if he didn’t seem so unselfconsciously generous, I’d think he had made it a mission to shame every other sportsman and woman in the world.

Oh, and I should add, well done, chaps! (as if any of you are reading!)

Maybe they can put my name on the cover of Suicide

by Kieran Healy on September 12, 2005

Routledge publish a nice line of “classic social science, literary criticism and philosophy”:http://www.routledge.com/classics/. A couple of months ago I picked up their edition of “Words and Things”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415345480/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, Ernest Gellner’s entertaining hatchet-job on linguistic philosophy _a la_ Wittgentein, J.L. Austin and the like. The flyleaf has a couple of blurbs from Bertrand Russell and the Times (“The classic attack on Oxford Linguistic Philosophy”, etc) but also one from Bryan Wilson, the sociologist of religion. He says “No one who has flirted with, or been puzzled by, postmodernism, or wondered about the meaning of resurgent Islam, should fail to read this tour de force.” What? This is in fact an endorsement of another of Gellner’s books, “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041508024X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. Perhaps a small, once-off error, I thought — but then last night I was in a bookshop and saw Routledge’s edition of “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041525406X/kieranhealysw-20/. While the front cover affirms the author as Max Weber, the spine insists that credit should go to Friedrich Hayek. Perhaps there’s an intern somewhere in need of a harsh performance review. I suppose these errors aren’t quite so bad as they might have been: a friend of mine who was an editor for a major university press once told me that they had to recall the entire run of a prominent astronomy book because, mysteriously, every instance of the word “quasar” in the text had been replaced by the word “banana.”