Sunday, September 20, 2015

Six of the Best 539

Peter Black fears that the Liberal Democrats' election post mortem is being written by the usual suspects and will miss the point.

Seth Thévoz has conducted for the Social Liberal Forum a detailed study into the effectiveness of the Interim Peers Panel System for electing Liberal Democrat nominees to the House of Lords. You can download the whole report from the SLF website.

"One suspects that in today’s online world, Fischer’s paranoia and personal flaws would have tripped him up long before he became champion." Kenneth Rogoff, once one of the world's best young chess players and now a leading economist, reviews Pawn Sacrifice, the new Hollywood biography of Bobby Fischer.

Running Past discovers the former home of the GPO film unit, where W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten worked together in the 1930s.

The Witch, The Weird, and The Wonderful has tales of drowned churches and ghostly peels of bells.

"Thackray’s handsome face and strong Roman nose, his vertical posture and watery, wisenheimer eyes – with the merest hint of vulnerability – made him a housewives’ favourite back in the day, though Thackray was also an anomaly, impossible to categorise. That is perhaps the reason the national treasure epithet evaded him in life; his cult hero status has only inflated since he died in 2002." Jeremy Allen remembers the great Jake Thackray.

1 comment:

Frank Little said...

Thanks for the link to the post about the GPO film unit, which reminds me to add it to my list of successful public enterprises as a counter to those Thatcherites who believe that only commercial enterprises can innovate.