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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
GRAND INQUISITOR, 23 Jun 2004
There are very few slouches, if any, among the political interviewers that I have seen in Britain and the USA. Paxman is not perfect by any means, but I have never quite seen his equal. He has two besetting sins. One is in overdoing questions of the 'Why are you beating your wife?' variety and the other is a propensity to naff debating points, trying to manoeuvre ministers who admit to the slightest change of mind into saying that they should be considering resignation on that account. He is quick-witted, forceful and tenacious, and he is guiltless of the mindset known in America as 'respect', something that can disconcert his American interviewees who consider respect to be their right.The tone he adopts in this book does not surprise me, but it may have surprised some of his victims. It is analytic, the wit and perception is often acerbic, but in general it is far from unsympathetic to politicians. Paxman muses on what the job is, what it is perceived to be both by those who do it and by the general public, and what persuades people to go in for it. He sees the whole political circus as a combination of the inspiring and the demeaning, its actors a combination of the powerful and the completely futile, helpless, naïve and manipulated. He does not spare individuals, and even American readers ought to be entertained by the part about the ludicrous Sir Gerald Nabarro, whom older British citizens will wince to recall and who would have been thought highly improbable if he had been a character in fiction. He has no strong political convictions of his own so far as I can see, and he is candid about any he ever did have. Like myself, he joined the Labour society at university not through any great belief in Labour but because he could not even stomach the alternative. He feels some obvious nostalgia for the days when there was a clear philosophical divide and not just a choice of managements, as when Clement Attlee's post-war government aspired to 'the socialist commonwealth of Britain', but he is not so simple-minded as to suppose that any such clear ideological choice is possible without disastrous results these days. How much, or rather how little, really depends on ideology as opposed to perceptions, outside influences, individual decisions and particularly individual mistakes, sheer luck and above all what Macmillan called 'events, dear boy, events' is something on which I find him particularly clear-headed and illuminating. He writes in much the way he talks. That suits me in general, except to say that he is prone to giving too many instances. On air these come over very effectively as pungent asides, in print they tend to dilute the thrust of his argument which is somewhat discursive anyway. This is good-quality journalese, the work of a thoughtful, intelligent and battle-experienced professional, and I found it a very easy and agreeable read. As a writer he is no Muggeridge, but as a thinker he is less egocentric and much fairer-minded. He is witty and entertaining, but in fact the funniest thing is not in the text of the book at all, but the last two quotes from reviews on the back page, and I'm sure he picked those, or at least approved them, himself. He would not, I'm sure, expect me to award him 5 stars, and consequently I have not done so.
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by Jeremy Paxman
by Jeremy Paxman
by Andrew Marr
by Andrew Rawnsley
