A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
HAVING read the Blue Book containing the diplomatic documents on the negotiations preceding the war, I am a little inclined to question its title to be a best-seller. It has sold, no doubt, on the strength of the extracts quoted from it in the daily papers, and if buyers thought all the book was like that they were wrong. It is true that von Ribbentrop used that shocking adjective " cursed " (the Blue Book gives the original, verpflucht) but he apparently only said it once and he said nothing worse. And the daily Press, with its heading " Goering's naked ladies " went a long way towards suggesting that the Field-Marshal was revealed by the documents as a dissolute voluptuary. What Sir Nevile Henderson said was that Goering explained to him that he proposed to drape his hall with tapestries " mostly representing naked ladies labelled with the names of various virtues, such as Goodness, Mercy, Purity, etc." That would hardly make them unique in the annals of statuary and art. After all, the Venus of Milo is tolerably naked, and the Venus of Medici quite. On the whole the old Penny Blue Book of 1914, with its record of the Bethmann-Hollweg " scrap of paper " interview, was considerably better value.
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