#robert conquest

The Three Laws Robert Conquest the British-American historian of the Soviet Union had considerable insight into the workings of political bureaucracy. Although probably misattributed, what have become known as Conquest’s Three Laws are still instructive when we consider how organisations work, and more importantly how they fail. The Three Laws are generally understood as: 1.        Everyone is…

Yaroslav Pavenko. Photo: Ukrainian Pentecostal Church Yaroslav “Slava” Pavenko, a twenty-two-year-old chaplain, was helping to lead a worship service, when he had to duck, along with everybody else, under cars and shelters as rockets from the invaders came. The air shuddered and hummed. He wore a bulletproof vest and helmet, but a fragment from a projectile slipped underneath. The chaplain was…

Yaroslav Pavenko. Photo: Ukrainian Pentecostal Church Yaroslav “Slava” Pavenko, a twenty-two-year-old chaplain, was helping to lead a worship service, when he had to duck, along with everybody else, under cars and shelters as rockets from the invaders came. The air shuddered and hummed. He wore a bulletproof vest and helmet, but a fragment from a projectile slipped underneath. The chaplain was…

Then very pissed off with one’s schooling;

            Then fucks: and then fights

            Then judging chaps’ rights

Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.

On Mao -

There was a great Marxist called Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That’s a lot to have done in But where he did one in That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

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This is another of Conquest’s, which appears in slightly less pointed form (“little Sophie”) in Amis’s memoirs:

The first man to fuck Brigid Brophy

Was awarded the Krafft-Ebing Trophy

Plus ten thousand quid,

Which, for what the chap did,

Will be widely accounted a low fee.

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Perhaps one of his most famous bits of comic verse was his take-off and modernization of Jacques’ famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It:

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling

Then very pissed-off with your schooling

Then fucks, and then fights

Next judging chaps' rights

Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

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Technically expert animadversion on the embarrassing Observer critic Philip Toynbee:

You cannot, when dealing with Toynbee,

Just pay him back in his own coin, be-

Cause talking such piss,

Would come rather amiss:

Robert Conquest, who said, about the historian Arnold Toynbee -

“You cannot, when dealing with Toynbee,

Just pay him back in his own coin, be-

cause talking such piss, would come rather amiss.