CL Sulzberger’s book A Long Row of Candles is mostly a pretty dull diary of people he met and places he went while a top New York Times correspondent. It shouldn’t be; he lived in interesting times and places.
The first part, though, is good. He lets himself go a little, becomes a little less stiff. And you come across passages like this about the Balkans in the 1930s:
It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars. Less imaginative westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists. Karl Marx called them ‘ethnic trash’.
I, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them.
All the stereotypes are here. Nonetheless, I know exactly what he means.
