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GREAT BORES OF YORE

SNORE | June 18th 2008

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Are men boring? Many of our readers think not (and have duly taken Sabine Durrant to task). Marcus Berkmann's "male view" placated few of you. But some men are most certainly boring, Adrian Wooldridge has found. Herewith, some yawns of yester-year ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2008

W.E. GLADSTONE BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
"If you were not such a great man," Gladstone's wife told him, "you would be a great bore." His belief that he was doing God's work on earth led him to lecture everybody on everything: Disraeli said that "of all the Bulgarian horrors", his rival's pamphlet on the subject was "perhaps the greatest". Queen Victoria wrote that she would "sooner abdicate than send for or have any communication with that half-mad firebrand". The prostitutes Gladstone picked up for the unnatural purpose of subjecting them to morally uplifting lectures found him harder to avoid.

IMMANUEL KANT PHILOSOPHER
To fellow philosophers, Kant was a giant. To the rest of humanity, he was perhaps the dullest man ever to darken a wigmaker's doors. His writing, perfectly displayed in his 800-page "Critique of Pure Reason", was ponderous even by the standards of German academia. He refused to travel more than a hundred miles from his home in Konigsberg, Prussia, and his habits were so regular that the locals could set their clocks by his daily walks.

KIM IL-SUNG NORTH KOREAN DICTATOR
He was the most boring dictator the world has seen, which is a high bar indeed. His habit of delivering eight-hour lectures on tractor production was bad enough. But he also managed to out-bore Lenin and Stalin in spinning class resentment into windy "political theory". The "Eternal President" bores on long after his death: his statues litter the country and students are still forced to read his interminable writings.

CALVIN COOLIDGE AMERICAN PRESIDENT
In many ways he was admirable--he thought governments should do as little as possible. But the policy extended to his conversation. "Silent Cal" had nothing to say, yet insisted on dining out in Washington society. Asked why he accepted so many invitations, he said: "Got to eat somewhere." When Dorothy Parker told him she had bet that she could get more than two words out of him, he replied: "You lose." Parker took her revenge: on hearing that he had died, she asked, "How can they tell?"

EVELYN WAUGH NOVELIST
Waugh was a great bore-baiter, never happier than when ridiculing bores (the hero of "A Handful of Dust" has to listen to the complete works of Dickens). But all the baiting turned him into some-thing of a bore himself. He adopted the pose of a reactionary country squire, giant ear trumpet and all. If what was being said bored him, he simply removed the trumpet. This stunt too became a bore--which, for Waugh, only added to its appeal.

MICHEL FOUCAULT PHILOSOPHER
The post-war growth of universities created a vast new territory for bores. But one stands shaven head and shoulders above the rest. Foucault took the fad of focusing on marginalised groups ad absurdum--dwelling not on women and workers but on prisoners, lunatics and freaks. He inspired a whole generation of tenured tediocrats to write turgid books about irrelevant people--and then force their unfortunate students to read them.

(Adian Woodldrige is Washington bureau chief of The Economist)