Warren Buffet on Charlie Rose

Scents and sensibility

Jonathan Meades
Published 02 October 2008

Perfumes: the Guide
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
Profile Books, 384pp, £20

Luca Turin is a biophysicist and a street fighter in scientific academe. He has been a whistleblower on neurophysiological experimental malpractice and is the proponent of an olfactory theory which, while initially denounced as rogue science, is now increasingly acknowledged as the new orthodoxy. He is also a consultant "nose" to the perfume industry, though one who is sufficiently bolshie to bite the hands that have fed him: this is always a good sign.

His wife, Tania Sanchez, is described as a "perfume collector and expert, and a journalist". I guess I might describe myself in the same way, though the "expert" component is a loose fit. Still, there are 34 perfumes in my house as I write this, ranging from regional obscurities such as Écume d'Arcachon and Sent Bon de Bayonne to classics: Jicky, Mouchoir de Monsieur and Pour un Homme - all three of which meet with Turinia's endorsement.

I cannot tell you how much that means to me, for this highly excitable couple have set themselves up as The Measure, The Ultimate Arbiters. They aspire to be perfume's Parker, Pevsner, Pudlo. And, yes, they absolutely adore alliteration. It constellates in their oeuvre along with outré simile, hyperbole, quasi-synaesthesiac prose, in-jokes, arcane scholarship, unwitting mock-heroism, tireless exuberance, and a self-referential hermeticism that sites perfume at the very centre of the world.

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Sotheby's Private View: Impressionist & Modern Art, New York

Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, to be held 3 November, 2008

Join specialists Simon Shaw, Emmanuel DiDonna and David Norman as they introduce eight highlights from the Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, to be held 3 November, 2008. Highlights include rare masterpieces by the modernist Kazimir Malevich and the impressionist Edvard Munch, as well as seminole works by Degas, Picasso, Monet, Modigliani and Matisse.

The man who knows too much

He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib... No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as 'the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist'. Rachel Cooke meets the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington

• Rachel Cooke
• The Observer,
• Sunday October 19 2008

American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Photograph: Martha Camarillo

Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. 'Brad Pitt loved this place,' says Hersh with a wolfish grin. 'It totally fits the cliché of the grungy reporter's den!' When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated - the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It's not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees, trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems, each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers.

By the time I look at Hersh again - the full panorama takes a moment or two - he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its horns on it.And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their scoop, they describe him - the competition. He was unlike any reporter they'd ever.......Read more

Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) Richard Rorty

Reprinted from Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin Books, 1999).

The other day – as I watched George W. Bush, our Neo-Conservative, Market-Fundamentalist President announce the purchase by the US government of 250 billion dollars of equity in nine of the largest US banks – I had a near-realization. That maybe, something BIG is afoot -- not exactly a birth of something – but rather a sudden death, the terrible end of something that we never thought would end in our lifetimes. It felt more or less (although I know this is not accurate or even similar—but that’s how it felt) like the day I stood in Brandenburger Tor – beer in hand – and awestruck as the Berlin Wall was torn down by ordinary German citizens from both sides of the iconic wall that defined and symbolized an era. This brought me to Rorty’s piece and the bigger picture: Where are we today in America? Where do we want to go? Some excerpts follow: (read the complete version) (HT)

“The left's hostility is partially explained by the fact that most people who admire Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as much as I do - most of the people who either classify themselves as 'postmodernist' or (like me) find themselves thus classified willynilly - participate in what Jonathan Yardley has called the 'America Sucks Sweepstakes'. Participants in this event compete to find better, bitterer ways of describing the United States. They see our country as embodying everything that is wrong with the rich post-Enlightenment West. They see ours as what Foucault called a 'disciplinary society', dominated by an odious ethos of' liberal individualism', an ethos which produces racism, sexism, consumerism and Republican presidents. By contrast, I see America pretty much as Whitman and Dewey did, as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas. I think that our country - despite its past and present atrocities and vices, and despite its continuing eagerness to elect fools and knaves to high office - is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented.



The right's hostility is largely explained by the fact that rightist thinkers don't think that it is enough just to prefer democratic societies. One also has to believe that they are Objectively Good, that the institutions of such societies are grounded in Rational First Principles Especially if one teaches philosophy, as I do, one is expected to tell [5] the young that their society is not just one of the better ones so far contrived, but one which embodies Truth and Reason. Refusal to say this sort of thing counts as the 'treason of the clerks' - as an abdication of professional and moral responsibility. My own philosophical views - views I share with Nietzsche and Dewey - forbid me to say this kind of thing. I do not have much use for notions like 'objective value' and 'objective truth'. I think that the so-called postmodernists are right in most of their criticisms of traditional philosophical talk about 'reason'. So my philosophical views offend the right as much as my political preferences offend the left.”

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George Soros on Bill Moyers

Universal Declaration of Human Rights