Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Six of the Best 209

"Clegg should have sat next to Cameron - laughed off the inevitable jibes that would have headed his way - and in the unlikely event he was allowed to make an intervention used the opportunity to explain why he disagreed with the PM and the Euro-loony tunes behind him. But also made it clear that disagreement was healthy and the in the nature of a coalition between two different parties." Living on Words Alone gets in about right on yesterday's events.

Richard Kemp gets it about right too: "For the last 20+ years we haven’t been so much educating our kids as getting them to pass exams. They used to be the same thing – now they are not."

Who were the top five Victorians? The Victorianist recently ran a poll on Twitter. I voted for John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Josephine Butler and William Gladstone. Follow the link to see how the overall voting turned out.

The Hairy Bikers have been to Kayal, one of Leicester's most celebrated restaurants, reports Eyes on the Prize.

A Penguin a Week looks at one of T.H. White's less well-known books: Farewell Victoria.

"As the first new bridge across the Thames in decades, the competition to design the Millennium Bridge attracted a large number of wild design ideas, some of them more sensible than others. Firmly in the latter category was the proposal knocked up by those merry pranksters at FAT for a crossing that tapped into the zeitgeist: it was inspired by the late Princess Diana, with a verdant grass surface modelled on her family’s Althorp park and the lyrics of Elton John’s turgid re-tread of ‘Candle in the Wind’ etched into the balustrades. We might well laugh now, but if you’d asked the general public in the heady days after her death, they’d surely have voted for it." Londonist looks at some of the city's unbuilt buildings.

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