Partly pre-empting my next post – which is going to start with a bit of post-dormancy navel-gazing about what I’ve been doing while I haven’t been blogging – here’s a Web site I’ve just set up:
It’s for my book More work! Less pay!, which is out very shortly. It’s coming out in a prohibitively expensive [...]
More news on my book. I handed over the corrected proofs this morning, together with an index. Compiling the index was easier than I’d thought it would be, but still not exactly fun; it was one of those tasks that leaves you looking round for the next chunk of mental hard labour for several days [...]
I’ve written a book. The MS has just gone off to the publisher; it’s still got to be checked, copy-edited, re-checked, typeset, proof-read and probably several other stages I’ve forgotten about, and it probably won’t be out much before Christmas. But it’s a book, and it’s been written. By me.
It’s called ‘More work! Less pay!’ [...]
Cohenwatch left this alone, possibly because the numbers are solid and the argument seems pretty reasonable. Slightly shorter Nick:
The murder of Rhys Jones told you next to nothing about modern Britain, he [Ed Balls] told the Guardian. In the Sixties, people worried about mods and rockers ‘beating each other up with their bike chains’. In [...]
“There’s only one thing worse than a folk singer, and that’s a Stalinist folk singer.” – Ian Birchall
Hmm.
Several years ago I was enthusiastically involved in getting Red Pepper to publish a piece by Steve Higginson (of the estimable Soulpool), demolishing the myth of progressive, national-popular folk music.
When we look at the various collectors, mediators and [...]
From the ‘found while looking for something else’ file.
In May 2003 the Iraq invasion had just been declared complete; nobody knew quite how bad things were going to get. So the chances are that Danish academic Per Mouritsen wasn’t thinking about Iraq when he wrote this:
Peasants of Piemonte or Bretagne did not begin to accept [...]
The British land speed record currently stands at 300.3 mph. It doesn’t look as if Richard Hammond will be the driver to break it.
If ‘driver’ is the word. News coverage of the Hammond story has stressed how unlike a car, in any familiar sense of the word, was the thing that Hammond tried and failed [...]
Nick:
Larry Sanger, the controversial online encyclopedia’s cofounder and leading apostate, announced yesterday, at a conference in Berlin, that he is spearheading the launch of a competitor to Wikipedia called The Citizendium. Sanger describes it as “an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance.”The Citizendium will begin as a “fork” of [...]
Here are some of the things that happened when I was nine (give or take a couple of months either way), and which I remember. (I’m using the BBC site rather than Wikipedia, which doesn’t seem to have much British news from that far back.)
Apollo 11 (I remember watching the landing)
The introduction of the 50p [...]
Is it anti-semitic to criticise Israel? Is it anti-semitic to criticise Zionism? Is it anti-semitic, even, to oppose Zionism – to believe that the state of Israel (as established in 1948) was a thoroughly bad idea which should be replaced by something better?
To put it another way, does anti-semitism lead coherently to opposing Zionism – [...]
I hate it when my doctoral thesis gets topical. Here are some figures:
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
333
282
277
190
103
33
81
92
169
460
1110
802
258
141
3
8
5
28
21
25
15
Take a moment to read across the rows and get a feel for the shape of the series. Row one starts pretty high – almost one of these things per day – then declines year on year, plummets to almost nothing in 1980 [...]
Chris has a point:
Whereas Britain pursues overseas expansion, England stays at home. The great statements asserting the rights and the dignity of the ordinary man – and it was the Englishman G.K. Chesterton who said there’s nothing ordinary about the ordinary man – are all English: Magna Carta, the Putney debates, Gray’s Elegy in a [...]
The latest from Italy is that Prodi’s government has survived a vote of confidence in the Senate. Which is good, as Prodi would have had to resign if he’d lost. The result was never in much doubt – the Unione majority in the Senate is small, but it’s still a majority – but the seven [...]
This is the country where I grew up:
The half-sheet of neatly typed paper is still where it has been for the last 40 years, tucked under the perspex cover of a map table in an underground operations room beneath a nondescript suburb of York.”Thirty minutes after the above occurrence the DC is to check Display [...]
Since I started reviewing (eighteen years ago, mind-bogglingly enough) I’ve always wanted to get a review into the LRB. As of the current issue, I’ve finally succeeded. Well, almost.
On the back of the current LRB is a subs ad for the New Left Review. If you subscribe you can get one of two books free. [...]
I probably shouldn’t go to National Trust houses. Visiting one this afternoon I was accosted by an attendant, who wanted me to know that the strip of linen in a glass case on the wall was a garter which had been worn by Charles I. As I walked away, I couldn’t resist giving a quick [...]
A couple of Italian links.
Berlusconi to the US Congress, 28th February:
For my generation the United States represent a beacon of liberty and economic progress. I shall always thank the United States for saving my country from Fascism and Nazism, at the cost of so many American lives.
…
Allow me to conclude by sharing a brief story [...]
Better late than never:
Asked if he would press ahead and put the bill into its committee stages, as well as stay in office, if the bill received its second reading only with Tory support, he said: “To get through the legislation and say ‘now I should quit’ – I don’t think that is very sensible.”
…
John [...]
