Also Supermac was the first major pollie to use a teleprompter. And the first UK PM to hire an advertising agency for election campaigns- following Ike who was the first POTUS to do so.

In fact my father, a solid Labour voter and Soho boho gun copywriter/creative director for Coleman Prentice Varley, found himself to his disgust asked to work on the Tory Party account in the late 50s. He refused but only after first wangling a meeting with Supermac who he said was a lovely old duffer, very funny but rather shy. In retrospect, he said the other thing about that meeting that struck him was being able to stroll up to the door of No. 10, tell the lone copper out front they had a meeting and being shown right in.

For my money, one of the great speeches which spawned a legendary catch phrase, in this case “the military industrial complex”, was Ralph Williams and Malcolm Moos’ farewell speech for Ike. Aside from that line, it’s also a bloody good speech anyway, both technically and in content. Interestingly, in earlier drafts the speech actually referred to the “military-industrial-congressional complex”.

Anyway Don, I’m very interested too in political rhetoric, along with the history of political advertising, for reasons that are more than personal. If you wanna swap notes, Nick has my real email address.

And speaking of political advertising and David Cameron, here’s an object lesson in how not to design a party political poster.

Start here.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240734/As-pre-election-campaign-steps-gear-meet-Dave-airbrushed-poster-boy.html

You gotta admit that concept and design is just asking for it.
http://mydavidcameron.com/posters/sturgeon1

And wait, there’s more.
http://mydavidcameron.com/cameron

Fred Shapiro’s The Yale Book of Quotations is a great source of information. Whenever I was searching for quotes online, Google Books kept returning pages from this book.

When I saw it on the shelf at Borders, I bought it. The best thing about it is that it gives references so you can look up the original source and see the context.

Online you have Fred Shapiro himself. He takes readers questions at the NYT’s Freakonomics blog.

The people who read Fred’s posts can also be a good source of information (we’re well into Web 2.0 now). When I posted a comment with what I’d found out about the spurious Socrates quote Garson O’Toole shot back with a complete account of where it came from — along with a reference to a source in Archive.org.

***

I saw your tweet on Cameronism. I’ll get back to this and the JFK stuff.

Are there any resources you’d recommend on the web for 1 – I often want to look up the origins of sayings. I just love knowing this and mulling it over.

I was going to do a rather half baked post on 3, but haven’t managed to yet. Managed a tweet but. “Contrast conservatism in UK after over a decade of labour http://bit.ly/bUmwdl with conservatism here after a decade of Howard.”

What do you think of JFK’s speeches. I’m an admirer of great speeches and he’s the only person famed for what people think was great oratory who leaves me totally unmoved. He seems too focused on being clever, has lots of snappy paradoxes or perhaps there’s a more precise term for it. “Let us not negotiate from fear, but let us never fear to negotiate”. I’m sorry but I think that’s contrived and silly.

And yet so many of his famous lines conform to that formula – including ‘ask not what your country can do for you . . . (yawn) but what you can do for your country’.

Still the punters seem to have liked it in the fullness of time.

1. tracking down where quotes and catchphrases come from (I enjoy doing this in the same way some people enjoy doing crossword puzzles);
2. political rhetoric;
3. David Cameron’s reinterpretation of conservatism; and
4. the rhetoric of John F Kennedy.

I don’t claim any special expertise in any of these topics. And I have no special interest in the works of George Bernard Shaw except as a source of pithy quotes and as a contributor of Fabian thinking.

When writing papers, tracking down primary sources is my favourite form of procrastination. I don’t need much of an excuse to head off to the NLA, the Hancock basement or Fisher Research in pursuit of an obscure book or journal article. I hate using a secondary source for a quote or citation.

great read. Is this an ongoing topic of interest?