Mess is good ...

... Bryan Appleyard - Blog Archive - On the Great Clive James. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... he tells the story of the New Zealander Sir Keith Park who, with rare brilliance and courage, administered Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. His statue was on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for a while, and some young columnist moaned that she had never heard of him, as if “she really thought ignorance was a more honest form of knowledge”. James does not name her, and he controls his rage to end with the magnificently balanced clause — “the battlefield where he led his pilots to a victory that cost so much, and you could say cost too much, except that defeat would have cost everything”.