The venerable Leonard Barden says BBC Two's Chess Masters: The Endgame has
provoked strong but sharply divided reactions, both among television critics and seasoned chess experts and amateurs.
And he points us to a 12-page and growing debate about the show on the English Chess Forum. Thanks to the person who posted this video there early in the debate.
The judges comment:
"Big Duck Bathrooms of Dennistoun have let us down, they have let themselves down, but, worst of all, they have let Michael Myers down."
Jago Hazzard looks at the 1949 plan to build a freight-only railway under the Thames. Two routes were considered: one ran from Farringdon to Loughborough Junction; the other ran from Hither Green, went under the river at Greenwich and surfaced in the marshalling yards of West Ham and Plaistow.
Neither was built, and the decline of bulk freight and the Port of London meant that this proved to be the right decision.
You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.
The new London Review of Books has a review by Alex Harvey of The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger. Published in 2023 - that's academic reviewing for you - this is a collected volume edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith.
I looked first to see what Harvey had to say about A Canterbury Tale:
The jump-cut at the start of A Canterbury Tale moves from a soaring falcon seen by Chaucer’s medieval pilgrims to a war plane patrolling rural Kent. Time is sped up and frozen; the East End land girl Alison drives a horse-drawn cart.
Powell grew up amid the ‘hop poles, oasts and orchards’ of the Kent countryside, as Alexandra Harris writes in her contribution to the collection. In A Canterbury Tale, he used the landscape to show an unchanging pastoral England. But since the film was scripted by Pressburger, an exile who knew the unrelenting force of modernity, it becomes ‘an act of continuation that is also a meditation on continuity’, as Peter Conrad put it.
On this theme, it is striking that in the film's prologue (spoken by Esmond Knight in the video above), a steam locomotive serves as a symbol of modernity:
Alas, when on our pilgrimage we wend,
We modern pilgrims see no journeys end.
Gone are the ring of hooves, the creak of wheel:
Down in the valley runs our road of steel.
No genial host at sinking of the sun
Welcomes us in: our journey's just begun.
But to the modern viewer that locomotive is likely to be the object of nostalgia - nostalgia, increasingly, for a landscape that viewer never got to see.
That distant shot of the train, incidentally was not filmed in Kent but in Surry - to the west of Dorking, on the line that runs between Guildford and Redhill.
Rachel Hewitt argues that telling boys and men that they're disadvantaged only hinders them further - and, anyway, it's not true: "If we really want to help boys and men be happier, then perhaps, as a society, we could forge a different and more positive outlook on masculinity, in which we focus less on how men are purportedly hard done by and emasculated compared to the last century, and more on the genuinely fulfilling opportunities that are open to them in this brave new world."
Liam Geraghty on a report that finds new housing estates are forcing their residents to rely on cars.Only a quarter of students at the University of Edinburgh are Scottish, with the result, says Melissa Knight, that they have found themselves the unwanted target of discrimination from English snobs who often look down on, and mock them due to their accents or working-class backgrounds.
Alwyn Turner reminds us of an earlier politician who had ambitions to take over a party led by Nigel Farage." As far as the media were concerned, Kilroy-Silk was 'UKIP’s star turn', its leader-in-waiting. But he didn’t wish to wait. The man who’d once called on socialists to act with ‘a tint of arrogance’ was now sixty-two and impatient. At the party conference in October 2004, he set out his stall in a typically assured performance."
"Gormenghast is an edifice of stasis: ultra-conservatism and unchangingness is in a sense the whole point of the castle, and its society. Yet it is a place where there is the most amazing grotesque diversity and variety. When Titus leaves it and enters modernity he encounters many things, but a kind of flatness, a sameiness enters the telling." After many years, Adam Roberts reads the Gormenghast trilogy again.
Let's continue the ancient tradition I established last week and post another track that's appeared on Liberal England before.
This cover of the Alice Cooper song made number 12 in the UK singles chart in January 1998. Which explains why it reminds me of a foggy day at Rugby station a couple of days before Christmas 1977.
One of my unfashionable opinions is that being a local councillor is a very good preparation for being a member of parliament.
You are forced to apply your instincts and ideology to an agenda that is not of your choosing, particularly if your party is in opposition.
Contrast that with the route to Westminster that the fashionable people approve of - working in a think-tank or becoming a special adviser. In those roles you are not rewarded for finding the weak links in your party's thinking: what gets you ahead us doubling down on its current pet ideas.
So what should you believe if you want to get on in today's Labour Party? The Guardian has the answer:
A radical blueprint for reforming the state is being drawn up by government officials, including a crackdown on quangos and thousands more civil service job cuts, the Guardian understands.
Proposals to restructure NHS England, with entire teams axed to save money and avoid duplication, could be replicated across a range of arm’s length bodies that spend about £353bn of public money.
Separately, No 10 and the Treasury are understood to be taking a close interest in proposals drawn up by Labour Together, a thinktank with close links to the government, to reshape the state under plans dubbed “project chainsaw”.
The project’s nickname is a reference to Elon Musk’s stunt wielding a chainsaw to symbolise controversial government cuts for Donald Trump’s administration.
This is not the first time we have seen Labour adopting Trumpian language. Anas Sarwar, the party's leader in Scotland, has already promised "our own Department of Government Efficiency" if it wins next year's Holyrood elections.
No doubt such language makes ambitious young Labour people feel all macho, but there are few signs that it appeals to voters.
h/t Euan Healey and Steven Fleming.
A Cornwall farmer has been left scratching his head after seven bras mysteriously appeared on gates on country lanes near his land. Michael Irwin, 65, spotted the first - a vivid red bra - two weeks ago.
It was tied to a gate on a rural road that he travels on frequently. Michael, who owns a farm between Lerryn and Lostwithiel, then spotted other bras appear in nearby locations in the days and weeks that followed.
If Chess Masters: The Endgame was designed to encourage people to play the game, then it worked with me. I watched two minutes of it before going online and playing chess myself.
I will give it a longer look, but it's clearly nothing like The Master Game, which players of my generation remember with gratitude'.
So here instead is the British grandmaster Daniel King analysing a win by the great Boris Spassky, who died last month.
Spassky is White here, and his opponent is the American grandmaster Larry Evans. Their game comes from the USSR v USA match at the Varna Olympiad (the world chess team championship) in 1962.
This game is a good example of what I wrote about him the day after he died:
If you play chess at all, I think you will enjoy this video.He was brave and fluent player, who made you feel that you could play attacking chess like that too.
They talk of the international situation, the need to increase the size of the British Army and the strange death of the Conservative Party.
As Mike observes, David Cameron suspended cabinet collective responsibility for the 2016 EU referendum, and the Tories never regained a sense of responsibility after it.
They spent a decade fighting a civil war rather than governing the country. Hence many of the problems we now face, including the underfunded condition of Britain's Armed Forces.
Cohen suggests that the media missed the biggest story of the 2024 general election - the gains the Liberal Democrats made in what used to be the heart of Tory England.
Mike Martin's Tunbridge Wells seat is perhaps the most startling example of this, and he says it's easy to imagine the Tories finishing third there in May's local elections, behind the Lib Dems and Reform.
There's a great exhibition on at the Leicester Adult Education Centre in Wellington Street at the moment. The Art School Dance Goes on Forever looks at the achievements of alumni of Leicester Art School in the 1960s.
Those alumni include Tony Kaye, a founding member of Yes; the members of the band Family; and the actor Charles Dance. Many more made their names in fields related to art.
The exhibition closes on 17 March. It's open Monday - Thursday, 8.30am - 8.30pm, Friday 8.30am - 4.30pm and closed on Saturday and Sunday.
I had intended to include a video about the exhibition here, but can't find one I can embed. So instead here's Family's lead singer Roger Chapman reviewing the week's new releases back in 1969.
It's a reminder that the idea the Beatles were above criticism is a modern heresy.
"As of 1900, about 18 per cent, or nearly one in five, American children died before their fifth birthday. The most common causes were infectious diseases - pneumonia, diphtheria, dysentery, measles, and other illnesses ran rampant through households, and children were especially at risk." Anna North reminds us of what life was like before vaccines.
"The four-part docudrama follows a group of mothers in Corby as they fight for justice after 19 of their children were born with birth defects caused by exposure to toxic waste – the result of the botched regeneration of the town’s former steelworks site." Lee Barron, the town's Labour MP, reviews Toxic Town.
Last night Mark Carney, the formconer governor of the Bank of England, was elected leader of the Liberal party in Canada, which means he will become prime minister. Canadian election results don’t often take centre stage in UK politics, but Carney was elected promising fierce opposition to President Trump’s talk of annexing Canada and in London Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is urging Starmer to fly to Ottawa this week “to stand in solidarity with the country’s new prime minister in response to Trump’s threats against Canada”.
In a statement Davey said:
It’s vital for both British and Canadian security that we stand strong together. With global instability rising, it’s never been more important to show a united front with our Commonwealth friends – and to stand together against Trump senselessly turning the screws on his allies, whether that’s Canada, the UK or Europe.
Responding to the trade war along the North American border, our prime minister must stand in solidarity against Trump’s bullying and visit Ottawa in a joint show of strength. Starmer must be clear that Trump’s threats against Commonwealth nations’ sovereignty are unacceptable.
The Guardian continues:
Davey won’t be expecting Starmer to take his advice. But he has touched a nerve. Starmer angered Canadians during his press conference with Trump in the White House last month by refusing to answer a question about Trump’s stance on Canada, claiming the journalist who asked about it was “trying to find “a divide between us that does not exist”.
And, with King Charles attending a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey this afternoon, there will be close interest in whether he says anything that might be seen as a comment about Trump’s plan to seize the country where he is head of state.
Lord Bonkers tells me that when Queen Victoria was once urged to visit Canada, she replied: "We are not a moose."
Good news about A Canterbury Tale, which now seems firmly established as my favourite film. It passes the Bechdel test.
The Bechdel test?
This has become an accepted measure of the representation of women in a film. It asks whether the work features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man.
A great many celebrated films fail this test, but A Canterbury Tale passes. It does so because of the scene above.
Sheila Sim, a Land Girl, goes to work for a woman farmer played by this blog's heroine Freda Jackson. Their wide-ranging conversation mentions a man at one point, but it's about many things.
A few years ago the Braybrooke Beer Co. set up a brewery at a farm outside the Northamptonshire village of that name to produce lager. The company was formed with the London market in mind, but you can buy their beers at the Beerhouse in Market Harborough and no doubt it has other outlets beyond the capital.
They have just opened a taproom at the brewery, and there is a surfaced path leading to it from the Brampton Valley Way - the old Market Harborough to Northampton railway. On Friday, I set out to walk that path.
I was surprised there was no signpost at the turn off from the Brampton Valley Way, and I wasn't convinced at first that I was going the right way. But if you leave the Way by a few muddy steps and set off diagonally across a field - see the photo above - you're doing fine.
Cross the bridge, and you will find a surfaced path - suitable for wheels as well as boots - and a pleasant landscape.
Well, it would. The headline was:
Naked boys as pit-ponies!
Unusually for the British Newspaper Archive, the scan of the story below is difficult to read in places, so let's go over to the House of Commons on 29 June 1926, where Ellen Wilkinson, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough East, has raised the same story:
My purpose in rising, although I realise that there are many on these benches much more qualified than I am to speak about the conditions of the miners' work, is to crave the indulgence of the Chair in order to reply to an attack made by the hon. Member for Frome (Mr. G. Peto) upon an article which I wrote in a Labour paper known as "Lansbury's Labour Weekly." ...
I wrote in that article of men working in Somersetshire mines dragging tubs of coal along narrow roads, which were too narrow for horses or pit ponies to work in, and that these tubs were attached to the men by means of ropes passed round their waists and fastened through their legs by means of a chain which is hitched on to the tub.
I also wrote that these men were naked. The point I was insisting upon was not the actual nakedness of the men, or otherwise, but the fact that in many cases, I do not say in all, the rope was rubbing the naked flesh of the men.
Since that article appeared, I have received a very large number of letters, both from men who are working under these conditions and from men who deny that these conditions exist. For the information of the House, I have brought with me one of these ropes. I am sorry to intrude into the polite environs of this House a thing of this kind. [The hon. Member produced a rope with chain and attachment.]
This is what is worn by the men. This is the rope that goes round the man's waist; this is the chain that passes between his legs, and this is the crook that is hitched on to the tub. This was worn, not 60 years ago, as stated by certain coal-owners, but on 30th April of this year by a miner.
And later she says:
A hundred years ago women were working like that and people said that should not he, and it was prohibited by law. The degradation of the human body is the same whether it is a man or a woman. It appeals to peoples' hearts more if it is a woman than if it is a man, but the mothers who have to wash the bodies of their boys when they come home from the pits are as hot and indignant about it as if it was their daughters.
When you consider that people are working under these conditions surely, in God's name, seven hours is enough. You are adding on another hour in order that more profits may be made, because it will not mean more wages. We know only too well that whatever the wages are, the rates are cut and cut until the minimum only is paid, and I feel that if these conditions are to go on in the name of profit, at least seven hours is enough.
Ellen Wilkinson's final comment reminds us that the bill she was speaking on aimed to increase the hours miners worked while reducing their pay. The General Strike had been called earlier in the year on just this issue.
The miners held out until November of 1926, but were eventually forced back to work on these inferior terms by hunger and poverty.
This is a track from Birds Requiem, a 2013 album by the Tunisian composer, singer and oud player Dhafer Youssef.
This is how the album is described on his website:
Without forgetting the artistic identity that he forged through his experience and permanent search for sonorities, Dhafer Youssef carries on transcending genres. His quest leads him to clarinetist Hüsnü Şenlendirici and Kanun player, Aytaç Dogan. Dhafer Youssef’s voice accompanies Hüsnü Senlendirici‘s clarinet and Aytaç Dogan’s Kanun. Nils Petter Molvaer’s trumpet reinforces the atmospheric mood. Eivind Aarset’s guitar, Kristjan randalu’s Piano, Phil Donkin’s double bass and Chander Sardjoe ‘s drums create a jazzy atmosphere.
“Birds requiem” is the name of Dhafer Youssef’s new album, released on October 2013. This last opus is a very personal album that has been prepared at a turning point of the artist’s life, and at that moment, a return to the origins occurred-his but also the origins of music.
The album, structured around the Birds Requiem suite, (“Birds Canticum”, “Fuga Hirundinum”, “Archaic Feathers” and “Whirling Birds Ceremony”), is constructed as music for an imaginative movie.
And if this sounds like the sort of thing you hear late at night on Radio 3, that's almost certainly where I came across it.
I've heard stories about Steve Winwood, as a young teenager, had played with the some of the American blues greats when they visited the UK.
Now I've found some detailed information in an interview with him from 1982 - it's on his own website.
In the first extract here he talks about his involvement in those years with Jamaican musicians in Birmingham
As for Chris [Blackwell], I met him in 1964 at Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham, which has always been a big center for Jamaicans in England; they used to hold their dances there, and naturally Chris was in on the ground floor in terms of Jamaican ska and rocksteady. Business-wise, he and Island were the ground floor.
Anyhow, I'd been playing at Digbeth since I was 14 with the Muff Woody Jazz Band, my brother's group. And that was where I met Spencer Davis, too. But my own Jamaican connection goes back to Digbeth Hall in 1961, when I jammed there with Rico, the trombonist who had worked with the Skatalites and all the other great early Jamaican acts.
I was just 13 but I used to go there and play with Owen Grey, Tony Washington, and Wilfred 'Jackie' Edwards. Jackie, you'll recall, wrote the Spencer Davis Group's first number 1 hit in England, Keep on Running, and a followup, Somebody Help Me. I wrote When I Come Home with him for the group.
And the second, on American musicians starts with the interviewer:
There must have been some unheralded live backup work in the early days, when the Spencer Davis Group and the early Yardbirds were doing gigs at haunts like the legendary Crawdaddy in Richmond, Surrey.
Sure! I did backups for Sonny Boy Williamson - as everybody did - but also for T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim. John Hammond, too.
I met John on a train, while going down from Birmingham to London; this would have been about 1963 and I was 15. He told me he had a gig in Birmingham the next week at the College of Advanced Technology and I showed up and played piano behind him.
Those kinds of spontaneous musical meetings were special back then, and definitely helped shape my growth.
We join the LeiceExplore crew again and they're still in Shropshire.
First they find remnants of the town's canal basin near the railway station - I'll confess I had no idea they were there or even where the basin had been.
Then it's off to Longdon-upon-Tern to see the oldest iron aqueduct in the world. It was built by Thomas Telford and it's still in place over the Tern.
The canal is long closed and the aqueduct is drained, but you can walk along its trough with the blessing of officialdom.
Subscribe to this excellent YouTube channel now!
"Perhaps we should think about the social workhouse, which is productive of stigma, fear, and forcing unwell people into work. This isn't primarily to make money out of the disabled and the ill, but to reinforce the discipline wage labour depends on. Clamping down on benefits is Labour's way of telling their bourgeois backers that the management of class relations is safe with them" A Very Public Sociologist on why Labour won't leave the disabled and long-term sick alone.
"A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way." Gaby Hinsliff says gen Z is logging off.
"I do remember O’Toole coming up to me. He’s taller than me, and I’m quite tall. And he goes [grabs by the shoulders], “Get into your light, son.” And he picked me up and plonked me where the light was because I wasn’t in the [right spot]. A lot has been said about Peter O’Toole, but he was a fabulous guy." Timothy Dalton reminisces to Vanity Fair.
Andy Marshall has been photographing the churches of Romney Marsh.
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this very Leicestershire story.
Have the Tories finally noticed that they lost dozens of seats to us at the general election last year? Quite a few of them were sort where they used to weigh their vote rather than count it.
I needn't have worried.
The article is written by a former Tory activist and parliamentary candidate who has joined Reform, and it's about what his old party would have to do before his new one would even consider forming a pact with them.
Its author Dan Barker writes:
I have a question for all those Conservatives who are calling for a pact with Reform UK: If you are serious about ‘uniting the right’, then what may I ask are you going to do about your Liberal Democrat problem?
When I say Liberal Democrats, what I mean is the faction that call themselves ‘One Nation Tories’ (Thatcher’s ‘Wet Liberals’) who are aligned politically with the Liberal Democrats somewhere left of centre and possibly left even of the current Starmer Cabinet. They are arguably the single faction within the Conservatives most responsible for the party’s historic decline and ineptitude.
They are the dominant faction in the party and have chosen or heavily influenced the selection of many of the recent leaders and prime ministers. They proudly describe themselves as ‘radically liberal’ – whatever that means – it doesn’t sound conservative in the slightest.
Perhaps it is this very same ‘radical liberalism’ that is to blame for Net Zero, mass immigration on steroids, the bloated state, historically high taxes, the wokery and the war on freedom of speech that has prospered and flourished under the last 14 years of successive Conservative governments?
The Conservative Party's strength used to be that it had no time for the left's politics of purges, recognising that its ideology was a broad and rather nebulous one. Now its being driven by just that cast of mind.
Momentum's answer to any critic of Jeremy Corbyn was to tell them to "Fuck off and join the Tories". Now the self-appointed True Conservatives - who are often members of a different party - tell anyone who questions their views to "Fuck off and join the Liberal Democrats".
I never did find a video of Jim Callaghan singing 'There was I Waiting at the Church' to a bemused TUC Conference in 1978. (He was mocking the press, who had turned up expecting him to call a general election.)
But here is his successor as Labour leader, Michael Foot, singing a song from the Twenties that appeared on the B-side of the Bonzos' first single 'My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies'.
h/t Alwyn Turner
The Lewes seat, which was held by Norman Baker between 1997 and 2015, was recaptured from the Tories last year by James MacCleary.
Perryman calls it hypocrisy because:
Labour publicly identified Lewes as a ‘non battleground’ seat .... The candidate and his team were instructed to minimise campaigning; instead they were sent to seats where Labour could win. Which party precisely did they think this would benefit?
And the snitching?
The 2024 tactical voting campaign in Lewes was organised by the local Lewes Compass Group. Compass nationally, despite, its very public support for tactical voting, is not a Labour Party-proscribed organisation.
It is cross-party, yet at its core are a whole host of Labour members, including councillors. At least three Cabinet members I can think of have spoken on Compass platforms.
The local campaign went beyond what is permitted under Labour rules. I have never displayed a poster advocating a vote for any party other than Labour ....
But not everyone is as tuned in to navigating the Labour rule book as me. Our ‘snitch’ didn’t have the good sense to give a friendly piece of advice to his or her fellow members that they were breaking Party rules. Instead they were busy compiling their evidence to secure expulsions.
Nobody has ever owned up to this cowardly behaviour, so in our local Labour Party we have a snitch entirely unwilling to justify their actions politically.
Labour List also has the story - apparently Clause I.5.B.vi of the Labour Party Rule Book is the one you have to watch out for.
I voted Labour in Harborough, Oadby and Wigston last year. That was partly from a slim hope that they might defeat our very online and increasingly radicalised Conservative MP.
But it was more from a feeling that it was hypocritical of me to be so keen that Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats in places like Lewes if I wasn't prepared to reciprocate myself.
BBC Sport wins our Headline of the Day Award with this unexpected Catholicism and cricket mashup - the ECB is the England and Wales Cricket Board.
Noah Berlatsky and Ilana Gershon argue that undemocratic workplaces sowed the seeds of Trumpism: "Many American workplaces are hierarchical. Decision-making is opaque. Mechanisms of accountability are either nonexistent or weak and deceptive. Yet, at the same time, many workers are enthusiastically told how democratic their workplaces are, much to their frustration. Workplace culture in the US teaches employees that arbitrary rule is normal and that democracy is a deception and a lie."
John Elsom reminds us that, before Volodymr Zelenskyy became president of Ukraine, he played the president of Ukraine in a television comedy: "Vasyl is played by the comic actor, Volodymr Zelenskyy, with a gift for deadpan humour. As president, he cycles to work every morning to avoid the official car, but shyly takes off his cycle clip before entering the government building. He is instructed on how to behave by an apparatchik ... in the pay of the global oligarchs. Vasyl is taught how to take photo-calls, answer press conferences, wear suits and greet ambassadors."
"I have been a doctor for more than 30 years and a neurologist for 25 of those. I have recently grown particularly worried about the large number of young people referred to me with four or five pre-existing diagnoses of chronic conditions, only some of which can be cured." Suzanne O'Sullivan questions the trend of detecting health issues in milder and earlier forms, and the assumption that is always the right thing to do.
Peter Conrad believes Dickens is a greater writer than Shakespeare.
"Hall needs to know more about what Sharpey and the other chaps were up to. In the lecture theatre we see a student played by Edward Fox, before getting in to the original footage of the French scientist played by Roger Delgado who did pioneering experiments on isolation and sensory deprivation." Discontinued Notes watches Basil Dearden's 1963 film The Mind Benders.
