In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
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His short report on the appointment of Piers Lane as Director of the Sydney Piano Competition is a little too blunt, but true. On the other hand, JD writes a rather ludicrously overblown blurb about the "respected" Sydney event, when a careful listen to the interview with Lane to which she herself provides a link, makes it clear that Lane's opinion is that the usual shenanigans have lost the competition respect and he intends to remedy that. He says this gently, but when you hear he intends to exclude from juries anyone who has prior acquaintance with competitors -- teachers, in short -- you know what he's getting at. And he has more to say. JD really needs to regain at least a little subtlty, for her post re an interview with writer Bernieres astonished me by putting at the start a longish paragraph on the wonders of Fera at Claridges. What is this now -- the Michelin?
Lastly, in the entire Sistema debate, one thing is ever-annoying: Blaming the Sistema rather than whatever use has been made of it by the Government, something still not satisfactorily clear to me, though I do not discount it. Blaming the system, as if it will result in the same in Scotland is, if I may be forgiven for knowingly extreme analogs, not much different logically from blaming hydrogen cyanide for the Holocaust or evil atoms for the atomic bomb.