`History is the continuation of political struggle by other means." The (British) historian was talking about the way competing versions of the past are employed by Serbs and Albanians; given the famous dictum he was paraphrasing, you couldn't help wishing they'd decided to lob textbooks at each other rather than deadlier materiel.
But then, that's never been the way in Kosovo, as Kosovo - The Seeds of Conflict (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday) made abundantly clear. Alan Little's well balanced and embarrassingly eye-and-ear-opening series also proves, by being an exception, the accuracy of another rule: the media are generally rotten at explaining history.
Here we were, in 1999, Europeans in a Europe hosting a very nasty conflict, and we knew shockingly little about its roots. In place of useful history lessons, we were treated to sloppy use of terms like "genocide" and "fascism", and to tearful reporters who treated the latest swing of a horrifying regular pendulum as if ethnic refugees were unprecedented since Exodus. (Attentive readers will have noted this week that it has swung back to drive 175,000 Serbs and gypsies out of Kosovo.)
We needn't have dug into the dim-and-distant past. As recently as the 1980s, Albanians governing the then-autonomous region of Kosovo were employing the language of ethnic cleansing, discriminating against Serbs and causing a relative trickle of tens of thousands of Serb refugees from the province.
Why then - when we were occasionally told that Slobba rose to power in the late 1980s by whipping up Serb nationalist sentiment about Kosovo - were we generally left to conclude that this sentiment had something (irrational) to do with sacred sites and a battle in 1389?
This week's second part of the The Seeds of Conflict (produced earlier this year by the BBC World Service and intelligently picked up by our national broadcaster) brought us from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire in 1912 to the rise in Albanian influence and confidence under the benign Yugoslav constitution of 1974. (Benign, that is, to minority nationalities; it was scary for many Serbs, whom history has taught to raise paranoia to a fine art.)
Before their adoption by NATO and Co, Albanians in Kosovo have in this century had the misfortune to be on the wrong side - that's "wrong" as in "losing", thus "wrong" as in "immoral" in the eyes of victor's history.
Yes, Kosovar Albanians were happy with the Turks, co-operated with Austria-Hungary and welcomed Nazis and Italian fascists as their liberators. In every case this was understandable, especially given the way Serbs generally employed the whip when they regained the "moral" authority to do so. But the Albanians' (junior) partnership in a series of vicious, butchery-stained wars against Serbia does rather muddy the waters of the latest Western crusade.
Anyway, that's all behind us now, isn't it? We should be enjoying the weather and whatever truncated silly season this dirty old world can squeeze out for us, shouldn't we?
And what summer would be complete without picking up a trashy book? When Reading in the Shade arrived on RTE Radio 1 last summer, it ostensibly called us for 15 minutes a day to that seasonal pleasure, but with books that were generally far from trashy. Now that it's year-round and stuck with the scarf-and-wellies title of The Book on One (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), the programme is at last delivering some real trash.
But wait. Summer reading is supposed to be unpretentious trash, not unlistenable rubbish. The confusion arises with this week's offering of Niall Williams's Four Letters of Love, as read breathlessly, and with something that suspiciously resembles embarrassment, by Liam Cunningham.
Monday's instalment was unpromising enough, the memoir of a Dublin boyhood crisis, when the narrator's father dumped the steady job to become a painter. If the language was cliched ("the dazzling blueness of his eyes") and the sentiments familiar ("I sat, and listened to the end of my childhood"), it was still more or less tolerable.
Then, on Tuesday, the action switched to the Aran islands, where folks don't speak, except in brief bursts of Irish, and all their wild emotions are reflected in the waves, the rocks, the stony walls. I'm afraid my notetaking pen dropped from my fingers in amazement as I waited for the parody to cease; as of Wednesday, no such luck - and I abandoned the effort.
Sure, there's no accounting for taste, and radio remains an astonishingly wide-ranging, catholic medium. Whereas on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), builder Michael Bailey (as impersonated by Joe Taylor) could be heard telling a barrister that, no, he didn't understand what the questioner meant by the word "euphemism", a spin of the dial would tell you that Lenny Bruce employed "a classically modernist form of meta-humour".
The Life and Crimes of Lenny Bruce (BBC Radio 3, Monday) was not short of such high-falutin', sometimes demanding language about the Fifties and Sixties comic: "Jazz, specifically Sharp Dressed Post Bop, provided Lenny Bruce with a milieu, an aesthetic . . ." Oh yeah, SDPB, of course - would that be the stuff blowing all over the soundtrack so I can't hear the interviews? "He wasn't a buff, an expert or even a connoisseur" - Do I hear aficionado? fan? - "but he liked the clothes, the attitude, the lifestyle."
THIS was summarised rather more sharply by a musician who shared strip-club stages and dressing-rooms with Bruce: "He said it wasn't a party unless you could get some heroin."
Just to be clear: this was a great programme about a great artist - his work rather than his absurdly tragic life - rescuing Bruce from the revisionist "but he wasn't funny" school with excoriating clips from his stage routines and funny/sad summaries of his obscenity trials. And though he died in 1966, seen by many as a martyr to the cause of free speech that has since been vindicated, I still wouldn't get away with transcribing some of his material in The Irish Times . . .
A few weeks back this column mentioned Phantom FM, the popular indie pirate with plans to go legit under the Independent Radio and Television Commission's new Dublin regime. Some readers have noted the absence of the station's name from the applicants' list. Fear not. As I reported, Phantom FM is going, not for the "youth-oriented service" licence but for a "special-interest" licence, under the name of Spirit FM - which could easily be confused with its two Christian competitors. Since that category also includes applications from the Corpo's traffic service and from Radio France Internationale, that's a set of autumn hearings we won't want to miss.