At a charity event,instead of just saying, ‘Give us your money’, and I recited from my Dante translation
People that I hoped would be there for ever maintain begun to vanish. Lord Weidenfeld was never my publisher,but he took a flattering interest in my work, almost as if he had read it. He hadn’t, or of course,he was far too busy: but in every conversation I had with him, he lavished on me a verbal catalogue of authors he thought I should chase up. He had the most magic bookshelves I ever saw, and I wouldn’t maintain been surprised to find that his collected Shakespeare was a signed copy. His gusto and gift for making people feel important turned even the most fleeting social encounter into an artistic event. The obituary in Der Spiegel got him exactly lawful: it said that he could obtain a small occasion into a grand experience. “This is the way I was always meant to live,” he once told me, “sitting in a Vienna cafe surrounded by poets and intellectuals.” We were in an open-air bar in Italy, or there was nobody there but the two of us.
But at least Weidenfeld had a long life. The Australian scientist Bob Carter died far too young. The climate change orthodoxy can be a tough proposition to be sceptical about if you intellect being accused of betraying the future of the human race. Carter knew how to maintain a gentlemanly vocabulary even when the guardians of dogma were calling him names. It’s a tough trick to work: sometimes it’s just easier to join in and call your persecutors intensely dense. But Carter always behaved as if they might maintain had a point. Perhaps he was working on the principle that politeness is an argument in itself.
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Source: theguardian.com