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  “… Mont Blanc was before us- the Alps, with their innumerable glaciers on high all around, closing in the complicated windngs of the single vale- forests inexpressibly beautiful but majestic in their beauty- intermingled beech and pine, and oak, overshadowed our road, or receded, whilse lawns of such verdure as I have never seen before occupied these openings, and gradually became darker in their recesses. Mont Blanc was before us, but it was covered with a cloud…” Thus, Mary Shelley describing her trip with Percy through the French alps in 1816. We are in Divonne, a small town not far from where the Shelley party ended up staying in “Monsieur Dejean’s Hotel d’Angleterre in the fashionable suburb of Secheron” – to quote Richard Holmes invaluable biography of Percy Shelley, The Pursuit (I can’t think of any better way to approach Shelley than through his biography – no poet was less impersonal. The whole point was to cast off those Anglican shackles). That is about a 95 euro taxi ca

 I notice that Bjorn Lomborg, who I had totally forgotten about, is on a global Murdoch-y tour to tout his dismal pseudoscience. I'm impressed - most conmen from the OOs have crawled under various rocks, or gotten with the Trumpman, who showed them how to do it. Few would have the face to go to Australia and proclaim that the bush fires were just an out of control picnic, and lets get some gas in the SUV, baby.  So, I looked back in the archive to see what I wrote about him back then. And I found a nice like funeral speech for the entire decade: "Literary Criticism should  take up the curious case of ‘scepticism’ in the anti-environmentalist discourse. It is curious that skepticism is a virtue touted by the dubious, and foisted off on the credulous, to prove the incredible. At the same time, in the same decade, in which the overwhelming power of Saddam    Hussein’s secret weapons of mass destruction were accepted as fact by the establishment and the U.S. population in the face