Basket.

Six days on, I am two-thirds of the way through Paul Kennedy's work - not as much as I would have liked, but it was a busy week, what with charging people and getting people charged and all (yes, I might just have got someone sent to the SAF Detention Barracks, but that's another and a long story). The book proved surprisingly easy to digest and was a lot easier on the eye than Modern Times' 800 pages of size 8 font, but I was left disappointed once more by its Eurocentric focus. At least it did bother to explain how the world came to be Eurocentric in the first place, but I expected quite a bit more on the Ming, Mughals, Safavids and even the Ottomans.

And while Paul Johnson seems to dislike everyone, Paul Kennedy seems to like everyone. He is one of the extremely few authors I've read who actually take a less-than-dim view of British appeasement in the 1930s. Practically everyone else calls Neville Chamberlain a cowardly weasel and only stops short of actually using those two words in their texts. He is also an amazing statistician, and has about one hundred pages devoted to endnotes, which is incredible. Not to mention the myriad tables measuring everything from common economic indicators like Gross National Product to rather more arcane calculations of each nations' "war potential". Excellent text; I plan to finish it this weekend.

And that, more or less, was my week - in between helping to punish those already in trouble, getting more people into trouble and as usual, staying out of trouble. In between writing mini-essays arguing the Cuban Missile Crisis. In between playing a sitting duck target for the voracious northern mosquitoes.

All in a week's life.