Actors in Interviews

With most actors, I think they should only appear in films and refrain from doing interviews. I also do not appreciate actors commenting real life events. The utmost non-film-related action I accept from actors is social engagement.
But I absolutely credit them with no authority at all to speak about politics or politicians.
So you well can imagine, that I mostly avoid watching or reading interviews with actors. They can not tell me anything I want to know.
I am not interested in their private life or affairs. The only thing they could impress me with is making good films.

The only exception, which absolutely took me by surprise is the unnamed actor:
I do like him in his roles as Lucas North, Claude Monet, John Porter and (after his character is dumped into a big bowl of water and nearly drowned by Robin Hood) I even like his nearly human but slightly pissed of character of Sir Guy of Gisbourne.

You will ask - what has this all to do with HISTORY, the main aspect of this blog?
I asked myself - do I use the same scruples going through historical documents and results of historical research?
Do I mistrust results, when they do not come from historians or do I demean documents written by a non-professional?
In certain ways I very much do that!
But I also realised, that this attitude, though also practised in earlier times, is much more manifested since the early 19th century and its increasing departmentalisation of science.
Goethe was one of the last German scientists, being able to write about colour theory as well as biological studies of the Gingko tree, while being a well known writer and author of poetry. He still found avid attention and readership for his oevre.
Our division of science today seems to affect all aspects of life and business. Experts of all kind get specialised more and more even to parts of a scientific field.

And now you really have earned the link to the interview I am talking about in so many words:

London Celebrating Wellington's Victory

To the birthday (22nd of August) of the actor mentioned in the previous blog post, a very nice video with lots of London material was published on YouTube.
It is created out of little snippets from the "Spooks" series 7 (Kudos / BBC production) and includes an excerpt of one of my favourite music pieces, "Wellington's Victory" composed by Ludwig van Beethoven.
I hope you enjoy this little video advertisment for London spies:



The history behind the music is quite interesting, as Beethoven originally did not compose the music with the intention to celebrate the English victors. He, for quite some time, was a fan of Napoleon. In Vienna, with French troups enclosing the town (where Beethoven had first hand experience for his music of how canons in different distances sounded), this surely was not an easy point of view.

An Interesting Interview ...

An interview, which alerted me to the modern reception or more correctly scepticism in today's society about politics was the interview on the BBC Breakfast Show about "Spooks" (10/2008).



The interview is in no way criticising politics - on the contrary. The polite way of answering the interviewers questions on a personal experience basis is cleverly done and in my opinion a great way of founded criticism. Here the abilities of the actor (which I knew from "North & South") as well as the topic of the series "Spooks" caught my attention.



P.S.: I do not mention the actors name here in this blog post, as I once read on a fan-blog about him, that mentioning his name alone brings a mega uprise in click rates. As I do not want to use his popularity for my sake, I refrain from mentioning him here directly.

At first I wanted to shorten his name as a replacement for 'special someone' to the initials. You easily will find out, why, as a German historian, I refrained from doing so, when even my university had problems shortening the summer semester that way.

Welcome ...

To start a BLOG with a quotation, was not my original intention.
But just as I was about to write my first entry, I found a quotation I wrote down years ago.

Though it is sceptic about the necessity of historians, it quite eloquently puts reason into focus and gives the relevance of historical research a specific timeframe:

"[...] historians, like natural philosophers, come to believe reason sufficient for understanding and deceive themselves that they see all and comprehend everything.
In fact their labours ignore the significant and bury it deep under the weight of their wisdom.
The mind of man unaided cannot grasp the truth, but only constructs fantasies and fictions which convince until they convince no more, and which are true only until discarded and replaced."
(Iain Pears "An Instance of the Fingerpost")

This quotation therefore seemed ideal to get my main intention about the fiction of history and the reason of the unreasonable into my first posting.

I hope you will enjoy reading my musings and I welcome comments and feedback.

Thank you for your attention and best greetings,
RG