When I was little, my mother taught me never to say nice things about myself. Like many of her lessons this one scored high on the moral or aesthetic scale and rock bottom on the scale of useful practical advice.
These days it’s hard to get by in any field of endeavour without blowing one’s own trumpet. People have become more credulous than ever in the past; they’re prepared to accept others’ self-assessment on face value – naturally expecting that the same courtesy will be extended to them.
Thus a self-effacing lady or gentleman is unlikely to get far in life, especially in a field where few objective criteria exist. People assume that any modest person has to have a lot to be modest about. Conversely, as so many artists and musicians prove, putting on fine airs paves the road to success much more reliably than any real mastery of their art.
Alas, this is one of the very few of my mother’s commandments that I have followed (with minor and infrequent deviations). That’s why I won’t say what I think of my new book How the Future Worked (available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk), leaving gasps of delight to others:
“Alexander Boot explains what it is to be Russian. Reared in the hell that was Brezhnev’s paradise, he writes about his homeland with a kind of benign despair, giving so vivid a portrayal of a Soviet childhood and youth we could almost be there, while being very glad we weren’t. Entertaining and informative too.” Fay Weldon
“A brilliant evocation of life in the Soviet Union after it had settled down into its oppressive-drab phase, which will tell you more about Russia than a hundred academic volumes. Boot plunges us imaginatively into the Gogolian-Leninist Russian world as if we were there ourselves.” Dr Theodore Dalrymple
“A gripping, intelligent and masterly narrative that flows naturally while revealing the truths of Soviet and Russian life like no other memoir I’ve ever read… Boot is a superb writer.” Vitali Vitaliev
Anyway, enough of all that. Normal service on this blog resumes tomorrow.