Lend me your ears great speeches in history12/27/2023 ![]() ![]() Alongside the truly grand utterances in this book - the rallying cries or elegies of King, Byron, Havel, Nehru and others - this seems, er, lightweight. The trouble is that the theme of any campaigning speech is: vote for me. But he also finds room for several rambling, evasive monologues by Richard Nixon and then there's Barry Goldwater, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Jack Kemp, Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman, and so on. Presumably for comic reasons, Safire has included Dan Quayle's trapped-in- the-headlights performance in the televised vice-presidential debate. It is a shame, though, that the book leans so hard on politics, a field of endeavour that generates the least interesting work. It was slower to dispense with the shapeliness of biblical language, quicker to accommodate the fleet-footedness of everyday speech, and seems more varied and supple than our own aloof version. Besides, American is a rich and versatile tongue. ![]() The best speeches are written and spoken - a fusion of the rhetorical arts, or what we now call 'language skills'. It is not a question of the spoken word being more dramatic, or simpler, than the written word. But while it is tempting to dwell on the intellectual weight of the 200 speeches squashed between its covers, they are for the most part models of lightness.īut these are inevitable quirks, and do not detract from the collection's seductive appeal. William Safire notes that it weighs 2.4lb, and commends Antiphlogiston - an ointment for the book-holding deltoid muscles - as the most effective remedy against any spasms or twinges that might follow an enthusiastic reading. Lend Me Your Ears is a substantial volume. Their views do not tip the scales, though once in a while they can be the last straw.Īs with people, so with books. Little guys, however brilliant or solemn, are rarely described as big guns. Only the heavy brigade - Healey, Lawson, Heath, Jenkins, Maxwell and so on - are said to 'weigh in' with an observation or a thought. IT IS a fact universally unacknowledged that the weight of an opinion stands in direct proportion to the size of the person to whom it belongs.
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