In a conversation between (Canadian) Christian Genest (whom I first met in 1986, in a dinner cruise of Lac Léman organised by the French Statistical Society for its national meeting in Lausanne) and David Bellhouse that recently appeared in the International Statistical Review of January 2025 figures the following bit that quotes my… review of Bellhouse’s William Playfair!
Christian Genest: More recently, you produced some very original work on William Playfair (Bellhouse, 2023), who is generally regarded as the founder of graphical methods in statistics. What about it?
David Bellhouse: The best I can do here is to quote from Christian Robert’s review of my book in Chance (Robert, 2024).
‘The impressions I kept from reading this detailed account of a perfect unknown (as far as I am concerned) are of a rather unpleasant, unappealing, unsuccessful, fame-seeking, inefficient, short-sighted, self-aggrandizing, bigoted, dishonest character, a ‘rascal’ in Stieglerian terms, running away from his debtors for most of his life, with many jail episodes for bankruptcy, while trying to make a living from all sorts of doomed commercial projects, ill-conceived scams, short-lived blackmailing attempts, and mediocre books that did not sell to many’.
I am glad David enjoyed the quote (to which I may have invested more effort than usual to give it a sort of Dickensian flavour). Incidentally, I learned there that David was a French horn player (which would have been my first choice of musical instrument had I been given a choice when starting playing music!)
