John Rogers takes us on a fantastic stroll around South Kensington

John shows us Exhibition Road, the French district of Kensington and Benny Hill's blue plaque.

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"I am speaking out today because many more asylum-seeking children are at risk due to plans to withdraw support and forcibly remove children whose families have failed asylum claims." The children’s commissioner Rachel de Souza says no child should be made destitute to enforce harmful immigration rules.

Zoe Grunewald finds that Brexit has made worse the very problems it was promised it would solve: "What comes in the next decade depends entirely on whether Britain’s mainstream politicians can finally do what it has spent the previous decade refusing to: tell the truth about what Brexit did, who bears the cost, and why the man promising to fix it helped cause it all in the first place."

"That Tory share was its lowest in all 17 sets of full London borough council elections ever held. It was also smaller than every vote share won by the Conservatives in the Greater London administrative area – formally created in April 1965 – in the 16 general elections held since that year." Barnaby Towns finds that the Conservatives are still going backwards in London.

Susanna Crossman sets out to learn more about the beliefs and practices of the folk healers called 'fire-tamers' who operate an "alternative, unofficial and ancient grassroots system of care" across France.

"He swiped, slogged and occasionally savaged, under the guise of scoring 'easier' runs against the new ball given how this pitch is playing. Instead, his 30 off 20 balls created a febrile storm that swept up Jacob Bethell, Harry Brook and Ben Duckett." Vithushan Ehantharajah watches Ben Stokes' last Sunday as England's captain.

Moreau Vazh finds that Witchfinder General, despite its place in the folk horror canon, most closely resembles a Sam Peckinpah Western.

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"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

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Chris Dillow lays bare the stupidity of Westminster politics: "If your final shortlist for a job comprises Mandelson, George Osborne (and maybe Bear Grylls) but not anyone with direct relevant experience such as career diplomats then you’ve probably not even bothered to do a detailed job description; you’ve not asked 'what’s the shape of the hole we want to fill and who is that shape?' One of the most prestigious jobs in government seems to have been filled with less care than an investment bank would take over the hiring of a junior analyst."

"Every child is met at the door with a handshake and direct eye contact. This is one of the strategies we use to 'fill the emotional piggy bank' - a deliberate, personal connection that ensures every child feels seen as a human being, not just a data point. We’ve doubled down on the 'analogue' joys of childhood. We try to prioritise the outdoors and Forest School, getting muddy, play and physical movement. Every one of our pupils plays a musical instrument every single day." Primary school headteacher Ruth McManus on educating digital-native children.

Alissa Walker brings good news from France: "Paris's school streets are effectively sculpting out instant parks in the locations where they'll provide immense public health benefits to the city's most vulnerable populations. But it's true, they really stand for something else entirely: a city brave enough to prioritise children."

Amanda Cole has found there's not just prejudice against regional accents by people in the South East of England, there's also prejudice against the wrong sort of South-Eastern accent.

"The Ipcress File (the book) came out around the same time as Dr No (the movie). Reviews of the novel pointed out the contrast between the glamour of James Bond and the grime of Deighton’s spy world: there are no Aston Martins or high-rolling casinos in The Ipcress File, just ‘a little grey rusting Morris 1000’ and a grimy strip-joint on Wardour Street." Thomas Jones explores the world of Len Deighton.

Emma Linford sees Great Expectations as an early exploration of the effects of romance fraud.

Cuckoo takes one look at UK and flees to France

Things are worse than the judges thought. Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Suffolk pages of BBC News.

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"To everyone's surprise, Orbán conceded early – before 9.30pm – and cheers erupted from all corners of Budapest’s centre. One small but mighty party was organised by the centrist Momentum Movement. On the large screen was the prime minister glumly telling his supporters that it was over, and the defeat was 'painful'. In the crowds were dozens of people giving him the finger." Marie Le Conte was in Budapest when Viktor Orbán fell.

Eyal Weizman on the destruction of Gaza: "Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries."

"France builds 300,000 homes every year. If that number sounds familiar, it's because that's the target that the UK misses year after year. So far this century, a new tramway has opened in France every six months. Is this a coincidence, or are they linked?" Thomas Ableman describes what happened when a group of transport and housing aficionados took British policymakers to France to see first hand the country’s fast growing tram network.

Matthew McManus says the right wants voters to be stupid: "In Poisoning the Minds of the Low Orders, his great book on early modern conservatism, Don Herzog notes how British conservatives relentlessly argued that the lower orders ought not to be educated lest it provoke 'insubordination'."

Diana Resnik reports on two new studies that suggest wind turbines pose very little risk to birds.

 "I’m always amazed by the technical knowledge that CFF kids seem to have, too. In our next film, The Cat Gang, a small boy's suspicions about another gang of smugglers are raised by one of the villains wanting a battery for his car. 'Most modern cars have 12 volt batteries, so why does he want a 6 volt battery?'. He’s about eight..." Bob Fischer and Vic Pratt review a new DVD compilation of Children's Film Foundation gems.

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"As need has grown and reform and resources have stalled, 1.9 million people in England alone provided a 'full-time' (defined as 35 hours or more) week of care in 2023-24 – that’s 70 per cent more than 20 years ago. Others have to fit caring responsibilities around their jobs: dropping off the kids at school, going to the office and then helping their elderly parents bathe and eat." Frances Ryan asks who will care for the carers.

Ari Berman names the far-right conspiracists who are urging Trump to take control of the mid-term elections. 

Tao Wang says a study of  the prohibition of absinthe in France in 1915 can teach us about modern day blaming and shaming. "Scapegoating operates as a powerful social mechanism. It often turns uncertainty, fear or political conflict into social blaming directed at certain persons or groups, based on thin, selective or simply false stories being told or repeated as if they were true."

Caitlin Chatterton argues that though female fans can make a musician's career, they are not taken seriously: "Perennial sexism in the music industry has often seen female fans stereotyped as hysterical. Rooted in Ancient Greek, 'hysteria' has long been used to portray women as somehow innately unstable, and therefore incapable of critical thought. It’s what kept us out of politics for so long, and it’s why our opinions are still being discredited."

"Though supported by the Parish Council and pressing need, this modest plan for six council houses aroused fierce opposition. William Maclean Homan, the town’s historian, argued it would cause Winchelsea to become a 'third-rate modern village'. He favoured, instead, a proposal to build private rented housing on low-lying land away from the town at the bottom of the hill on a site rejected by the Council because of its poor drainage." Municipal Dreams on the battle to build council housing in Winchelsea.

Adam Roberts wonders why no one reads Walter Scott any more: "Back then, everybody read him. He was the first global superstar of the novel. It's the Rule 34 of 19th-century literary studies: Everybody read Scott, no exceptions. ... Dickens's great dream, when he began writing fiction, was to do what Scott did."

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Jessica Valenti sounds the alarm about the Heritage Foundation's plan for American women: "Like the conservative movement more broadly, the organisation wants young women to believe this is all being done for their benefit: that work is soulless and unfulfilling, that feminism has made women miserable, and that the real path to happiness is being a stay-at-home mom. The latest right-wing mantra for women? 'Less burnout, more babies.'"

The government’s proposed model for mandatory reporting of suspected child sexual abuse bears no resemblance to the frameworks used in the 82 per cent of countries that have enacted such legislation, argues Tom Perry.

Jonathan Cook believes the jury was right to acquit the Palestine Action defendants.

"It was the only post-war building on London’s South Bank to remain unlisted, refused protection on six separate occasions by successive culture secretaries, who since 1991 had repeatedly rejected Historic England’s (formerly English Heritage) recommendations." Richard Waite on the Listing of the South Bank Centre – that's the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery and their associated terraced walkways and stairs – after 35 years of refusals.

"The shifting appeal of The West Wing during the past quarter century raises a sobering question: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms losing popularity in 2026?" Karrin Vasby Anderson and Nick Marx track the political drama's move from bipartisan hit to a polarised comfort watch.

Mansel Stimpson enjoyed Nouvelle Vague as I much as I did: "The casting ... which uses mainly relatively unfamiliar faces is one of the film's great successes. It is quite easy to accept Guillaume Marbeck as Godard and Aubry Dullin catches the essence of the young Jean-Paul Belmondo. Even more surprisingly given that Breathless contains an iconic performance by Jean Seberg, we find this film’s best-known name, Zoey Deutch, creating a Seberg in whom we really do believe."

Nouvelle Vague – The blog post does not describe the film: the film bends towards the blog post

I saw Nouvelle Vague at the Phoenix in Leicester this afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed it. The film tells the story of the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard's first feature Au Bout de Souffle in 1959 and recreates a whole era: the black-and-white cinematography, the fashion, the music.

It manages both to laugh at and to laugh with Godard's pretensions and eccentricities, making him a compelling figure despite everything. Do not be surprised if you find me wearing dark glasses, smoking Gitanes and issuing gnomic, Godardesque pronouncements.

The blog post does not describe the film: the film bends towards the blog post.

Ed Davey: Donald Trump is behaving like an international gangster and Starmer’s Mr Nice Guy diplomacy has failed

It's easy for politicians in opposition to talk tough, but Mark Carney and Emmanuel Macron have proved that you can do it while leading a government too.

Part of a prime minister's job is speaking to the nation and speaking for the nation, and I fear that, at this time of crisis, Britain is stuck with a PM who is unwilling or unable to do either. And his whole government is wearing Starmer's lack of personality like a shroud.

Anyway, Ed Davey spoke about Donald Trump in the Commons yesterday and has an article in today's Guardian:

Donald Trump is behaving like an international gangster. His threats to Greenland this week have crossed a line, blackmailing America’s closest allies and threatening the future of Nato itself. From leaking messages with other world leaders to whining about the Nobel peace prize, the US president has gone from unstable to seemingly unhinged. And our government needs to wake up.

For months, Keir Starmer has pursued a strategy of quiet appeasement. He told us that by avoiding confrontation the UK could carve out a special status that would shield our industries from the coming storm. Only a few months ago, Trump hailed the “special relationship” at Windsor Castle after being lavished with a state banquet. Now, thanks to his actions, it is nearly in tatters. Starmer’s Mr Nice Guy diplomacy has failed.

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd

I posted a video of the South Bank Show film on the staging of Sweeney Todd a few days ago and have been obsessed with Stephen Sondheim's musical ever since. I didn't see Sweeney in 1980, but I have strong memories of watching that film about that production, with the result that I cannot quite accept anyone but Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock in the lead roles.

Someone has made the video above by pulling out some of the scenes of the finished show from the film, and if you are as obsessed as me you will want to listen to the audio recording of the whole of the closing performance of that first London production.

The closing performance came after four months, and a lot of money was lost. It was an expensive production, including a full orchestra, and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was a huge venue to fill.

Stephen Sondheim was not then, at least in Britain, the acknowledged master of musical theatre that he became. Side by Side by Sondheim had recently been a success in the West End, but it was a revue and had been staged in a theatre less the half the size of Drury Lane. Nor was Sweeney Todd's subject matter calculated to bring the coach parties in.

But it was the lukewarm response of the critics that got most of the blame - you can hear Quilley mention them in his brief speech at the end of the audio recording. And even in the ecstatic response of Michael Billington, you can make out the factors that helped keep the crowds away:

Sweeney Todd is the reversal of everything we traditionally expect of a musical. It has a powerful and gripping story, hardly a single extractable tune, a fierce sense of social justice. Yet, after seeing it on Broadway 18 months ago and now at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, I would call it sensationally effective. 

Indeed, burning a boat or two, I would say it is one of the two (My Fair Lady being the other) durable works of popular musical theatre in my lifetime.

Even if that was going it a little, he was a better predictor than most of his colleagues. Sweeney Todd is now accepted as a stone cold classic.

A true story?

In one of his few narrator's incursions into the South Bank Show film, Melvyn Bragg says that the legend of Sweeney Todd is based on a true story that happened in Paris around 1800 and first appeared in print in Britain in 1846.

But The Singing Organ-Grinder has found a version of the legend that sets it in 17th-century Calais. And Charles Dickens assumes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) that his readers will know and smile at stories of people being turned into pies in London:

Tom's evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many standard country legends as doing a lively retail business in the Metropolis.

So I suspect that Sweeney Todd and his Continental equivalents are urban legends with a long history.

Not the first musical

Searching the British Newspaper Archive, I discovered that Sondheim's was not the first musical about Sweeney Todd to be staged in London. In 1959, a musical called The Demon Barber was staged at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

The Stage didn't much like it:

A pompous introduction to the programme of "The Demon Barber," at the Lyric, Hammersmith, states that this new musical has roots which "reach to 'The Beggar's Opera', the music hall, and D'Oyley (sic) Carte". Be that as it may, the result is a feeble adaptation as a musical of the Sweeney Todd story, the blood and thunder gone and replaced by burlesque which flies wide of its mark.

It seems no one else much liked it either, as a member of cast recalls:

My first theatre job in London was in 1959 at the Lyric Hammersmith. I was Jonas Fogg the madhouse keeper (who else?) in Donald Cotton and Brian Burke’s The Demon Barber. It was quite an elaborate little musical about Sweeney Todd which Stephen Sondheim had never heard of. Sondheim didn’t know of this version when he composed the 1979 musical/opera Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

It closed on Christmas Eve after 14 performances. Not very long after, this exquisite theatre was demolished at a time when borough councils felt it was their duty to continue the work of Reichsmarschall Goering in the destruction of London. They brought a new ferocity to the task, and many of London’s theatres that had survived the Blitz were gleefully pulverised by the advocates of Progress.

The Lyric was cynically reconstituted, but it was never the same.

The writer is Barry Humphries. At least the swift demise of The Demon Barber left him free to appear in Oliver! the following July.

Don't worry. I'll have found a new rabbit hole soon.

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"By restricting jury trials, removing protest rights and expanding surveillance, Labour is entrenching an authoritarian legal infrastructure that a far-right government will not hesitate to exploit." Karl Hansen says Labour is building Farage's state for him.

Phoebe Weston reports on the French ski resorts that are closing as the snow line in the Alps edges higher: "In France, there are today 113 ski lifts totalling nearly 40 miles (63km) in length that have been abandoned, nearly three-quarters of them in protected areas."

Catherine Rampell says Trump is misusing Norman Rockwell's art to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas: "The works have been endlessly parodied since their introduction in 1943. In the internet age, they’ve become ubiquitously memed. (Freedom of Speech, for example, is nowadays widely known as the 'unpopular opinion' meme.) But originally, they served as wartime propaganda, meant to help rally support for America and its cause during the years of war against the Nazis."

"Take Me High's unexpected legacy is to act as a kind of Brummie Rorschach test: what do you see in its depiction of the angular 'new' Birmingham of 1973? An ugly, car-worshipping mess that, like Cliff's career, needed desperate reinvention? An ambitious feat of post-war planning? Or a nostalgic vision of your childhood? It’s a question that becomes more poignant with each landmark razed and every area redeveloped beyond recognition." Shaun Patrick Hand has discovered the Cliff Richard film from 1973.

"Raynor’s efforts simply render the magnificent landscapes of Devon and Cornwall as joyless, grey backdrops to her own ceaseless complaining. The South West Coast Path should sue for defamation of character." Finlay McLaren takes aim at The Salt Path.

Andy Marshall chooses and photographs his all-time best pubs.

The Shropshire ley line quest reaches All Saints', Worthen, and the story of Mary Anne Talbot

More ley line adventures in Shropshire with Third Rate Content. This time they're at All Saints', Worthen and, though they don't find her grave, tell the tale of Mary Anne Talbot, an Englishwoman who wore male dress and became a soldier and sailor during the French Revolutionary Wars.

If you want some scepticism about ley lines, see my first post on this one and the comments.

The Orange Bicycle: Hyacinth Threads

Orange Bicycle, under various names, followed the well-worn path from skiffle to psychedelia in the Sixties. As Robb Storme and the Whispers, they were the first group to play behind the Iron Curtain.

An early member of the band was Lewis Collins, who became famous as Bodie in The Professionals.

Hyacinth Threads, a 1967 single, continued their pattern of being more notable in mainland Europe than at home, and made number one in France.

They folded in 1971. Their keyboard player, Will Malone (who certainly earns his money here) became a producer and arranger - he was responsible for the strings on The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony.

Another band member, John Bachini, went on to work in television, He received an out-of-court settlement from Celador Productions, ITV and others after claiming one of his game show formats had been plagiarised to create Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

That's on Wikipedia, so we know it's true.

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"The miscarriages of justice are extraordinary. One victim is a gay make-up artist with no apparent gang affiliations, just some tattoos related to traditional Epiphany celebrations. Another is a 27-year-old delivery driver with a work permit who lived in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and children: he was arrested as he stepped outside his house. A former professional goalkeeper living in Phoenix, Arizona, was detained because of a tattoo showing his support for Real Madrid." John Perry on the victims of Trump's disappearing of alleged gang members.

Britain is not alone in struggling to build major infrastructure projects: it's a problem that many countries with systems of common law share. Dan Davies, in an important report, asks why this is and looks at what can be done.

Lottie Elton says water companies are using the same deceptive tactics as Big Oil and Big Tobacco.

Research shows that obtaining a degree tends to make students more socially liberal, little is known about what drives this effect. Elizabeth Simon, Daniel Devine and Jamie Furlong investigate.

Elroy Rosenberg marks the 50th birthday of Picnic at Hanging Rock: "Weir’s film is a haunted repertory of beautiful dreams, heraldic visions, memories gained and lost. If Lindsay had ensured her ambiguous ending would be respected, she could do nothing to prevent a cast and crew of great artists from feeling their way into the gaps of her story. The result was an art film with an Australian touch, ever beguiling all these years later – a film which, after five decades, still belongs to its viewers."

Hugh Scofield searches for the French hotel where Rumer Godden and her family stayed in 1923 - a holiday that inspired her novel The Greengage Summer.

The comforting lie de Gaulle told France after the second world war

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson has a piece in the new London Review of Books. It's a review of Julian Jackson's France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain.

Pétain, a hero of the first world war, headed the collaborationist Vichy regime after the German invasion during the second. After the Allied victory, he was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Because of his age (he was 89), this was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in 1951.

Ascherson writes of the detailed charges bought against Pétain:

Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust. 

But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.

Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation. 

Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been let down only by a small clique of traitors. This new myth plastered over the fact that Vichy and its policy of keeping the Germans contented had been accepted, with intense and bitter reluctance, by most of the population during the early war years.

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"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.

Le Grand Meaulnes and the urban legend of the disappearing diner

The latest Boggart and Banshee podcast touches on those stories about vanishing restaurants. 

You may know how they go. A family travelling in a remote area and getting hungry, to their delight, they comes across an unexpected restaurant. Not only that: the food turns out to be wonderful.

But when they look for it on a journey back or try to take friends to enjoy it, it proves impossible to find. If they ask the locals, they deny any knowledge of such a place.

Commenting on such a tale, the co-presenter Simon Young says:

It reminds me somewhat of these great British fairy experiences involving glamour, where people, perhaps, are out and about at night and they come across a fair, or they come across a glorious feast or they come across a building they don't normally see. They enjoy the experience of being there and then when they come back the next day there's nothing there, it was all moonlight, it's all disappeared.

Hearing that, I thought at once of Alain-Fournier's  1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes, which is also known in English as The Lost Domain and by various other titles.

Meaulnes, an older boy who joins the narrator's school at the start of the novel, is the novel's hero. And soon Meaulnes reports to him just such a 'glamorous' experience - I'll let Julian Barnes take this post forwards:

When Meaulnes – the wanderer, the adventurer, the pathfinder – first stumbles upon the lost chateau, there is some kind of fête champêtre going on, with the partygoers dressed in costume from the 1830s. He overhears children explaining how, just for the time of the festivities, they are "allowed to do as we like". So the impossible dream is of a life in which we may stay children and yet run things – to play at being grown-up: this is, indeed, the novel's definition of freedom. ...

At the fête, Meaulnes falls instantly in love with Franz's sister, Yvonne de Galais, who eventually rebuffs him with the words: "We are two children; we've been foolish." But this is, of course, the logical extension of the dream: to be foolish without being punished for it, to enjoy adult love while remaining at heart a child. 

Le Grand Meaulnes is one of those books where it is the atmosphere you remember most of all, and I share Barnes's view of its conclusion:

Yet I was also left with a slight regret – that Meaulnes and Seurel ever solved the mystery, ever tracked down the lost estate in the first place. The sense of that magical lost house, which may or may not actually exist (Meaulnes has taken a blow to the head before discovering it), is so compelling that part of you doesn't really want to be handed its cartographic coordinates.

This ability to conjure up a compelling situation or atmosphere, without being quite clear how to resolve things by the end of the book or film, often seems to me characteristic of the decades after the second world war.

If it can be said of Alain-Fournier, who died in the opening weeks of the first world war, then he was something of a pioneer.

Eric Cantona spotted walking goat outside old school Bermondsey boozer

Thanks to a nomination from an eagle-eyed reader, Southwark News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were unanimous in their opinion that there was only one video that could accompany this story.

Take it away, Sid.

J.L. Austin: The philosopher who made D-Day possible

J.L. Austin - John Langshaw Austin - was a hugely influential figure in British philosophy in the 1950s, more through his teaching at Oxford than through his limited publications. If you want to explore this side of him, there is a good entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

But Austin, who was only 48 when he died, had another career. He was the officer who brought together the intelligence that made the Normandy landings possible.

Reviewing a new biography of Austin - J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer by M.W. Rowe. - in the London Review of Books, Thomas Nagel writes:

 In March 1942 Austin was promoted to captain, left MI14 and was appointed head of the Advanced Intelligence Section of General Headquarters, with this purpose. 

‘Although it was not evident at the time,’ Rowe writes,

Austin’s appointment would have far-reaching consequences, as this tiny section of six or seven men would become, in the words of one of his future deputies, [Austin’s] ‘little empire’. Growing vastly in size and efficiency, the section would frequently change its name ... its quarters ... its purpose (acquiring information about the French coast, discovering information about the armies defending Germany); and its country (England, France, Germany). But it would be led by Austin alone and to great effect throughout the conflict. I know of no other personal fiefdom in Second World War British Intelligence with such an important, long and varied history.

The group was known informally as the Martians, and retained its separateness even when in 1944 it became part of SHAEF, the joint British-American command for Operation Overlord, headed by General Eisenhower. ‘Estimates of the section’s final number of personnel vary,’ Rowe says, ‘but it was somewhere between three hundred and just under five hundred.’ 

The group performed multiple tasks. One was to ‘compile an archive of all coastal intelligence – to a depth of thirty miles – which might be relevant to an invasion. Its specialist field of study was man-made defensive features – gun positions, mortars, anti-tank obstacles, pillboxes, observation posts etc – but its other task was to synthesise and disseminate information from other intelligence agencies.’ 

The data came partly from aerial photographs, in whose interpretation Austin became legendary; from French resistance networks, whose voluminous transmissions by clandestine courier and carrier pigeon were invaluable; and from secret commando raids. And Austin was cleared to receive Ultra, the signals intelligence intercepted by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. 

His unit also developed detailed analysis of the beaches along the French coast: their gradients, tidal boundaries, the character of the sand, what was under it and what weight it would support, the reefs and rocky barriers – everything relevant to the possibility of landing heavy armour and heavily armed troops. And it maintained an up-to-date tabulation of the numbers, quality, equipment and leadership of the German defensive units on the coast, or close enough to reach it within a few days in the event of an invasion. 

As Rowe writes, ‘Austin’s section synthesised and disseminated information from multiple agencies,’ becoming the unit with ‘the most complete overview of the entire intelligence picture. And because the section prepared intelligence briefing packs for raids and reconnaissance missions, it also became the intelligence organisation which had the closest links with fighting units. Both factors ensured the Martians became the hub, the nerve centre, of invasion intelligence.’

Never underestimate how practical philosophers can be.