THE DISRAELIS, FATHER AND SON

That's Benjamin Disraeli above, the flamboyant Prime Minister of Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria. My connection with him dates back to high school when I fell in love with an anthologized essay of his father's:"The Man of One Book."  I had no idea who the author was, I just liked the style and the content of the piece, and made an effort to copy it.

I was vastly impressed with the elder Disraeli, how he seemed to love learning, and how he kept his focus and stuck to his point without ever failing to entertain. This blog is influenced by that style, though the style has been so corrupted by other influences on me that you might have trouble finding it.



The father had an enormous influence on his famous son, Benjamin. Thinking about them calls to mind the close relationship of John Stuart Mill and his dad...it's the rare case when a boy and his father are virtually the same person. It's hard to talk about the younger man in the abstract, so I'll include a wonderful scene (above) from a film about Benjamin Disraeli called "The Mudlark."

George Arlis played Benjamin Disraeli in another terrific film called "Disraeli," which I won't attempt to excerpt here. Nobody I played this film for liked it nearly as much as I did. I admit that it's a strangely uncinematic and old-fashioned movie, and that it probably played better on the stage than on the screen. I forgive the faults because it has one of the virtues of the elder Disraeli's essay style; a narrow, relentless focus on the character of its subject.

Anyway, here's (below) an excerpt from the essay I liked so much in high school:

If I remember right, the essay ended with the admonition: "Beware the Man of One Book."

In my case the one book was really one author, Bertrand Russell. Starting at the end of high school I read everything of his that I could get hold of and eventually I began to think like him. Now, all these years later, I've come to disagree with him about almost everything. The amazing thing is that I still love the guy. He taught me how to think, even though I've come to different conclusions.

Read Disraeli's essay at: http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/42777/