I bought John Manduca's The Flavour Of The Mintoff Era on Tuesday and had got a hell of a way through it by the end of the evening. It was only the fact that a) Chelsea were playing 'Pool and b) I was knackered that prevented me finishing it - I've not found myself treating a non-fiction book like a page-turner before.

I lived through the years Mr Manduca covers and the trip down memory lane was evocative, to say the least. It evoked the atmosphere of the times vividly; it evoked the feelings anyone with a brain had towards Dom Mintoff clearly and it evoked the dangers we all faced scarily.

Mr Manduca, with whom I had the privilege of working within the Confederation of Private Enterprise, brings a journalist's research to bear on a narrative which benefits enormously from the richness of the source material.

Anyone with an ear for the nuances of language as employed by masters of the art of report writing such as the series of BHCs who were posted here (the Brits just love their abbreviations - their Excellencies the British High Commissioners must have been called BHCs: if they weren't, they should have been) can read between the lines and discover riches beyond measure, as Mr Manduca did when preparing this book for us.

Reading through the pages, even at a decent clip, you can suss out the dramatis personae pretty accurately, especially if you factor in the biases inherent in summations of events that were being prepared in the excitement of the times and even more especially (excuse the cumbersome nature of that last phrase) if you factor in the fact that the people writing that stuff probably didn't think it would be read by anyone other than the select few at Her Majesty's Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

The principal actor in this particular cast is, obviously, Mr Mintoff, Prime Minister of Malta from 1971 to the time when he decided to lumber Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici with the poison chalice the Premiership had become in the early to mid-1980s.

What did the people who were watching and dealing with him at the time make of Mr Mintoff? Is their assessment a fair one? To my mind, the answer to that latter question is a resounding yes.

To see what they made of the man, let's sum up a couple of hundred pages or so into a few words, shall we?

Mr Mintoff, according to the people writing about him at the time, was something of an autocratic pip-squeak with chips on his shoulder the size of melons. He delighted in being rude to anyone who he thought thought he was better than him (work it out) and suffered fools badly, if at all, for all that he seemed to surround himself with them, with the exception of a few of significantly sharp cookies. Leaving aside a couple of non-elected Mizzis, Albert and Edgar of that ilk, Mr Mintoff's immediate circle seemed to consist in people who were scarcely up to the mark - de mortui mandates that this bit ends here.

Mr Mintoff was impulsive, didn't think things through, couldn't care less about the niceties (which is not a bad thing in itself) and was far from reluctant to pander to the basic instincts, with which this country is as blessed as any other.

Malta under Mr Mintoff became a bitter place, where violence and corruption were allowed to breed in rich compost and where workers' rights had become a joke. The General Workers' Union was emasculated, the free unions were treated worse than dirt and the economy was in tatters. Democracy was ailing and, in 1981, a majority of Maltese had voted him out, only to be ignored and, with the rising of tensions, thumped repeatedly for their troubles.

I came of age during this era and I witnessed many of the episodes Mr Manduca relates at first hand, occasionally in his company, sometimes in the company of others making up the Ħielsa group that used to try to monitor human rights violations and help where we could.

We had no shortage of work.

The apologists will accuse Mr Manduca and, presumably, me, of selective memory and classist bias against a man that many still revere as "Malta's Saviour". That is their right and it is equally my right to gainsay them, for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that Mr Mintoff saved Malta from precisely nothing very much.

History, it is well known, is re-written so many times that memories get blurred but the fact is that Malta didn't need saving from anyone, thank you very much.

Actually, it did. It needed saving from the likes of Ceausescu, Kim il whoever, Gaddafi (now happily moderated and rehabilitated but then hardly a bastion of democratic thought) and Maoism, to name but a few.

Get your hands on Mr Manduca's book and have a good look through it. If you're my age or so, you'll remember more than you perhaps want to, now that we're a civilised country again. If you're younger, try to disprove the adage that the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

Shame named

The power of the 'net is exhilarating.

As you know, I write a blog in this paper's electronic portal (you can access it by clicking on the link at the bottom) which I try to change every couple of days or so - or when the comments dry up. I'm not the only one - the elections spawned a particularly interesting "independent" blog, by a fellow columnist whose opinions are not those of a shrinking violet.

You know who I'm talking about, of course.

There was a case recently when a man was found guilty of abusing, by various non-physical, means, children in his care. The court, on pronouncing sentence, ordered that the guilty party's name should not be published.

I believe that many columns ago (many, many) I had ruminated on this practice, which finds justification only in the protection of the victims. My words then had taken on an uncanny resemblance to seeds cast upon stony ground, to the extent that accountants and singers and teachers and, for all I know, candlestick makers have been spared the embarrassment of having their names published along with an account of their crimes.

An outing has now occurred on the blog to which I referred. While the decision whether or not to publish the name here is up to the editor, since it is he who has to answer for it and not me, I'm leaving a little space for it.

Freedom under the law requires that the law is applied as the law should be applied. Banning a guilty party's name is allowed in certain particular circumstances and if a court's order is not adhered to, because these circumstances do not obtain, two arguments will, no doubt, be made.

One argument is that the authority of the courts needs to be respected, which itself is an argument I respect, while the other is that, while exercising their authority, the courts have to respect the law. The authority of the courts is currently seeking balance with the right to inform and be informed freely.

Perhaps this balance will be achieved by the courts seizing the moment judiciously.

Up the blues

How does a team that is packed with such skill and so many expensive stars manage to play like a load of Zimmer-frame wielding pedestrians?

Ballack gave us perhaps one or two moments of genius but looked like a dolt most of the time, Drogba seemed to be completely out of sorts, Lampard, perhaps understandably, was miles away and the rest, with the exception of Terry and Cech, might just as well have stayed in the dressing room.

But they still managed an away draw in the semi-final of the Champions League, soon to be followed by a thumping for Man U and a win over the 'Pool after that. Man U will drop a point against Wigan and Chelsea will do the double over them, completing it in Moscow.

There's something about that colour blue this year, scraping in at the last minute, isn't there?

Beck at Becky's

Sorry, I just couldn't resist the pun - we were up north, as is our wont, but for a change (and because we had a wedding to go to) we crossed the channel, rather than having others cross it to nourish themselves with us.

We went to Rebekah's in Mellieħa, conveniently placed for us five minutes or so from the ferry.

This was good stuff, excellently cooked and served, the only catch being that, given our venerable age, we were moderately sleepy by the time faces came to be stuffed.

imbocca@gmail.com, www.timesofmalta.com/blogs