Last month I publish a video of Watford West in its final days.
This one from Londonist shows that station and the whole branch as they are today, awaiting revival as part of the Metropolitan line.
The Croxley Green branch today
Last month I publish a video of Watford West in its final days.
This one from Londonist shows that station and the whole branch as they are today, awaiting revival as part of the Metropolitan line.
Jonathan Meades in Nazi Germany and Shoreditch
At the start of the month Jonathan Meades had an article in the London Review of Books reviewing two books on Nazi Germany:
- Hitler at Home by Despina Stratigakos
- Speer: Hitler’s Architect by Martin Kitchen
Speer’s earliest war crimes were largely restricted to evicting Jews from properties that Nazis coveted or which might provide shelter for bombing victims. He also effected the demolition of many homes to make way for the bloated white elephant of Germania, Hitler’s new capital.
These clearances were paltry put beside the consequences of his work on concentration camps. He had no part in running them but it was part of his brief to get them built, to quarry and fire the materials. He was close to Himmler and enthusiastically subscribed to the Reichsführer SS’s dauntingly simplistic policy of Annihilation through Work.Turning to Hitler at Home, he writes of the construction of the Führer's public image:
The note that ... dutifully credulous journalists struck was remarkably consistent and testifies to the manipulative efficiency of Hitler’s publicity machine. The same words recur: destiny, toil, youth, culture, music, authentic, sacrifice – oh the sacrifice.
That publicity machine was also sedulous in courting useful idiots, none more useful than Lord Rothermere, who happened to own a newspaper and whose potential as messenger boy to the British establishment Hitler exploited, just as he exploited the New York Times Magazine, which on 20 August 1939 enthused about his love of chocolate and of gooseberry pie and his rapt attention to the petitions of ‘widows and orphans of party martyrs’.Then came news that in April Jonathan Meades is having a one-man show of treyfs and artknacks at the Londonewcastle Project in Shoreditch.
Treyfs? Artknacks? You will have to follow the link to find out.
A fascinating panel debate on the British General Election of 2015
To mark the publication of The British General Election of 2015, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) hosted a panel debate on the election and its consequences at the Mile End Institute on Tuesday.
Professor Philip Cowley from QMUL, one of the authors of the book, was joined by:
- Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, QMUL (chair)
- Matthew d'Ancona, Evening Standard columnist and chair of Bright Blue
- Lord (Spencer) Livermore, Director of Labour's 2015 election campaign
- Polly Mackenzie, former special advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister
This video is well worth your time.
Kenneth Branagh and Rupert Everett in Another Country
In the autumn of 1982 I was unemployed and living in Market Harborough. To cheer myself up I went down to London to stay for a few days with an old friend from university.
One of the things we did was go to see a play called Another Country at the Queen's Theatre. Which means that I saw the West End debut of Kenneth Branagh.
It was a tribute to him that, though Rupert Everett was a more flamboyant actor playing a more flamboyant role, it was Branagh we talked about afterwards.
You can see the two of them in this Newsnight report.
Incidentally, though the film of Another Country was good, the play was much better. In it, all the sex and the beating took place off stage, which made them all the more powerful.
Six of the Best 573
"According to a 2015 Prison Reform Trust review, children and young people who are, or have been, in care were more than five times more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. The most recent inspection report of Medway in 2014, which houses 12 to 17-year-olds who have been remanded or sentenced to detention, found 45% of youngsters there had care histories." Jameel Hadi writes on institutional abuse.
Patrick Barkham reports that more than 10% of children in England haven’t been to a natural environment in past 12 months.
"Trees in Leicester reduce concentrations of road traffic emissions in the city by up to 7% and have a “regionally beneficial impact on air quality”, results from an academic research project have found." Important (and more widely applicable) research from Michael Holder.
Twitter just killed its own product, says Austin Rathe.
Curious British Telly on the short Blue Peter career of Michael Sundin.
David Cameron has worked out how to deal with Jeremy Corbyn's emailed questions
Election campaigns throw up characters who are famous for a day and then forgotten.
Remember Gillian Duffy or Jennifer and her ear? Only just.
The US Presidential campaign of 2008 produced such a figure in the shape of Joe the Plumber.
He was Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who questioned Obama's economic policies at a neighbourhood meeting in Ohio.
The Republicans and the media painted him as the epitome of blue-collar America and he was often mentioned during the campaign.
In November 2008 I blogged about the way that Barack Obama dealt with this:
This is how you win elections.
In today's Spectator Fraser Nelson describes how Obama dealt with Joe:
Today David Cameron used the same tactic at prime minister's questions when Jeremy Corbyn used one of his emailed questions. It came from Rosie who was forced to live with her parents because she could not find or afford her own place to live."Joe’s cool," Mr Obama said. "I got no problem with Joe. All I want to do is cut Joe’s taxes. But Senator McCain isn’t working for Joe the Plumber. He’s working for Joe the Hedge Fund Manager."
As Lloyd Evans tells it for the Spectator:
He co-opted Rosie’s identity and began putting words into her mouth. Rosie wants this, Rosie wants that. He said ‘Rosie’ half a dozen times. Rosie wants a strong economy. Rosie wants lower tax thresholds. Rose wants a prosperous Britain where the young can purchase their homes thanks to the help-to-buy ISA.
Rosie – the way Cameron told it – is such a passionate supporter of Tory policy that she might as well declare herself a leadership candidate.I think we may see fewer emailed questions at PMQs in future.
Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 6
And so we reach the last video from Uncertain Truth.
This was a series of three programmes featuring interviews with Sir Karl Popper in 1988.
The first programme, where the other participant was Ernst Gombrich, looks at the understanding of history. It takes up two videos:
Watch part 1
Watch part 2
The second programme, where the other participant is Sir John Eccles, looks at language.
Watch part 3
Watch part 4
And this third programme where the other participant is Anthony Quinton, looks at human knowledge.
Watch part 5
As I said when introducing the first of these videos, Popper was one of the most important liberal thinkers of the 20th century.
This was as much for his development of an evolutionary understanding of human knowledge as for his more overtly political books.
He died in 1994 at the age of 92. I heard him speak in York round about 1981 when he gave an inaugural lecture for some good cause connected with the Rowntree family.
The Olney Pancake Race
From the Olney Pancake Race website:
On Shrove Tuesday every year the ladies of Olney, Buckinghamshire compete in the world famous Pancake Race, a tradition which dates back to 1445. The 2016 race will be held on Tuesday 9th February. The race starts at 11:55am.
Children from Olney schools also take part in their own races. Olney competes every year against the women of Liberal, Kansas, USA. This is a friendly competition in its 67th year in 2016.My photograph shows the sign on the churchyard wall in Olney that marks the finishing point of the race,
Channel 4 News report on Conservative spending in by-elections
This is the report from Michael Crick shown at the start of this evening's Channel 4 News.
