Pearls of Cut Price | Bonar Thompson & Trevor Blake (ed)

Published by mogtus-sanlux
ISBN: 978-1-944651-40-4
$16.50
6 x 9", 180 pp., paperback, matte cover

“It can be laid down as an axiom — I say it in all humility — that the man or woman who has never heard me speak has failed in life.” — Bonar Thompson, The Black Hat

Bonar Thompson belonged to that noble and nearly extinct order: the public nuisance with a vocabulary. He was a Hyde Park orator, pamphleteer, editor, broadcaster, performer, and political stray dog, equally capable of haranguing the crowd and mocking the kind of men who believe crowds make them important.

Pearls of Cut Price is one of three balanced collections of Thompson’s writings, edited and introduced by Trevor Blake. These volumes are not arranged as a solemn course of instruction. They may be read separately, together, backward, or according to whatever system best flatters the reader’s intelligence.

Here are Thompson’s barbs, boasts, arguments, recollections, and printed mischief: the work of a man too theatrical to be a mere theorist and too intelligent to be only an eccentric. His subject is politics, but his deeper quarry is vanity—especially the vanity of reformers, bosses, patriots, believers, unbelievers, and everyone who thinks mankind is only one committee away from salvation.

Also available as part of a discounted three-volume Bonar Thompson bundle.