Saturday 11 October 2008

 

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Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests


Winning when losing

Friday, 4th July 2008

I love Ben Mcintyre's columns. They're always so different. Today's, on Abba, is a real treat:

Waterloo, for example, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974, even though it refers to a military victory that only the British care about. “My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender.”

One Abbaologist has suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that this is “clearly an attempt to recontextualise 19th-century European geopolitics. Napoleon had so subverted the principles of the French Revolution that for most Frenchmen his defeat was the only way civilisation could be saved.” I feel like I win when I lose. How typically French.

Do read it all.

BTW, his biography of Agent Zigzag is a classic. I'd put it in the same class as Bernard Wasserstein's simply wonderful Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. Anyone who hasn't read that should drop everything now and make good that ommission.

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Water

July 5th, 2008 3:35pm

More intelligent simpletons

Fred Kite

July 6th, 2008 6:22pm

Secret Lives is indeed an enthralling book. It reminds me of Ray Lewis for some reason.

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