Using the briefest of quotable snippets from each, the documentary builds a crude argument that the global financial meltdown was a conscious "inside job" caused by greedy, ruthless, mendacious, out-of-control bankers.
He was close to Arthur Scargill and to the Scottish miners' president, Mick McGahey, and acted as liaison officer between the miners and the rest of the union movement, handling finances for the strike in a period of official hostility when mendacious rumours of financial impropriety were spread and the bank accounts of the National Union of Mineworkers were frozen.
This pattern has been repeated around the globe in the past two centuries, and shared myths of nationhood come thick and fast in the form of inter alia national anthems, a manicured or mendacious version of the past, and the elevation of people who supposedly represent the best of a country, not always deservedly.
The biochemical states of Maurice and Billy and Constance also intrigued, and then, of course, loomed the indelible fact of Purdy and Michael Florida, the aristocrat and the outcast, hurling themselves over the coffee table like some heroic tandem from the mendacious mythopoetry of another age, one of whistles and human waves and the Maxim guns ripping away.
And what could be more modern than Quixote's tour of a printer's shop in Barcelona, where the knight discovers copies of an unauthorized and mendacious version of his own history?
Taruskin, who has a well-deserved reputation for intellectual feistiness, might have been expected to unleash a wounding quip, but on this occasion he agreed that he had at times overstressed Stravinsky's Russianness, as a way of countering the composer's mendacious accounts of his early nationalist period.
Along with his first newspapers, he inherited this attitude from his father, Sir Keith, who wrote an influential, if mendacious, account of Australian military suffering (the fault of "G&T swilling British officers") at the doomed Gallipoli landings of 1915.
The invasion of Iraq, based on false intelligence and mendacious claims of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, was the most obvious example of this.
I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the stupid British Conservative Party, to the mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen.
The province was settled before the first world war by European farmers, lured to the area by free land and the mendacious promise of an "agreeable" climate (winters can feature temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius, and summers 40 degrees).
