i digress

Obviously I mainly care about noble deaths, these days, but you are probably also interested in learning that when I read books, I think nothing of turning down corners of pages so remind myself that there are good things to go back and find. Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, which I never stop going on about, is a problem in that I have turned down practically every page. Every character who appears seems extraordinary enough to demand attention. For instance, Philip Snowden, chancellor in the minority Labour government in 1924. He's described this:

an intensely moralistic teetotaller, crippled by tuberculosis of the spine, who could only get around supported by two walking sticks. With his thin lips, icy eyes and bloodless skeletal face, his black suits and his black Turkish cigarettes, he looked like an undertaker in a horror movie. But despite Snowden's fervent belief that capitalism was doomed and his suspicion of bankers, he had espoused the cause of orthodox finance and the gold standard with all the fervour of the old puritan radical stock from which he sprang...