Jonathan Meades in Nazi Germany and Shoreditch

Time to catch up with one of this blog's heroes,

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

Unlike many earlier authors, neither Kitchen nor Meades tries to exonerate Speer of his crimes. Meades writes

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.

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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

The Liberal Democrats featured more prominently that you might expect and there were telling observations about all the parties.

This video is well worth your time.

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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.

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Six of the Best 573

Mark Valladares asks if using your preferred definition of liberalism a means to suppress reasoned dissent.

"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.

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