Alexander Pope once said "A little learning can be a dangerous thing;" it implores us to indulge deeper in education. It can also be a harmless thing when ignorance does not change the world. James Kirkup, who has obviously not tasted recently the Pierian spring, was 'analysing' the appointment of Baroness Ashton as the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs - essentially the EU's foreign minister. But your words are as dust if you don't check your facts - a blog is no more substantial than the wind, but when you get paid for appearing in a national newspaper, you really ought to raise your game. To wit "Upon hearing of the death of one of his rivals, Talleyrand, Napoleon's foreign minister, is said to have asked: "What did he mean by that?"
This certainly brought a smile to my face. I'm am no scholar on the intricacies of European politics in the period 1815-1848, but I remember my history books. It was Metternich, the arch-fixer, commenting on the 1822 death of Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, that delivered the quip. Kirkup remarks later in the piece that his opening paragraph is apocryphal. Well ain't that the truth. The only real info is that Talleyrand, the defrocked priest, did work for Bonaparte, although given that he frequently co-operated with the anti-French coalition behind his master's back, it is moot how much use he was. Making such a cardinal error rendered the rest of Kirkup's piece immaterial, since using such a story to llustrate your point, if you get key aspects wrong, you clearly have a feeble grasp of where you're going.
I scanned glassily the article, but Talleyrand's name cropped up again, at the end. Error compounded. "Baroness Ashton is no Talleyrand," he says. How would you know? It is plain that you have little conception of Talleyrand's achievements and quotes or indeed who he is. Far better in this context is Metternich's lament that at times he had controlled Europe, but never had he ruled Austria. The conservative chancellor of the Austrian Empire (as then it was called) also said "I could have predicted anything except a liberal Pope." Were he still alive, he might have wanted to add Baroness Ashton to that list too (mind you, given his work behind the scenes, maybe not).
Incomparably more risible than the newspaper scribe is the quote I heard from one Z-list talking head, who appeared on the show covering the last ten years. "For me, the story of the decade is the story of Heat magazine." A complete absence of learning on this occasion.