"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
It was in the final group match that Geoff Boycott’s bowling became invaluable. We had always planned that he would bowl – it was not an off-the-cuff gamble, and he had already taken two wickets against Australia. But against Pakistan he took the decisive last two just as they looked capable of winning. In the past, Geoffrey has been reluctant to bowl due to his back injury and his desire to apply himself to batting. But in this competition he visibly enjoyed it and was more useful than I could have ever hoped.
I once read that Brearley had a theory that batsman hated the idea of getting out to Boycott so much it made them play him with exaggerated care and slowed the scoring rate.
Sky News says Philip Lee, the Conservative MP for Bracknell, was asked on an unnamed podcast whether he could quit the Tories and join the Liberal Democrats.
It quotes his reply:
"At the moment I'm increasingly feeling politically homeless.
"The party I joined was the party of John Major and John Major, I think, is probably feeling like this judging by his contributions in recent weeks."
"I'm really not comfortable about my party pushing for no-deal Brexit without proper consent of the public.
"Purely on the national interest, I think it's wrong to do this. But party politically I think it's narrowing our base in a way that I don't see how we win elections.
"And if you don't win elections in a democracy you don't have power and you can't do things you want to do. It's just simple reality.
"I'm sort of sitting here, looking on and - yeah - I'm going to spend the summer thinking a lot."
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for him to join us.
A good example of an early-20th century former Church of Christ. Built circa 1924 to the designs of architects G. Lawton Brown and Percy C. Jones, the church makes good use of brindle mix brickwork and a prominent 3-storey corner tower that has a strong presence within the street scene.
With its William Morris touches, it is more appealing than most churches of this period.
And there is more. The Register entry ends:
The church replaced a temporary corrugated iron church, erected in 1908.
So this is another candidate for the original home of the nearby tin tabernacle that now houses the city's women Freemasons.
Oh, and let's hear it for the number on the shop next door.
Delivering Focus is good for the brain and cheaper than gym membership, argues Geoff Reid.
Alex Marshall rediscovers Boris Johnson's forgotten novel: "Sonia Purnell, a former colleague of Johnson’s at The Daily Telegraph who has written a biography of him, said 'Seventy-Two Virgins' had proved invaluable to her research. 'He is a very secretive person, but he allows glimpses of himself.'"
Woodstock’s 50th anniversary is involving a surprising degree of litigiousness, reveals Kenzie Bryant.
Ameila Bryant looks at the fashion for buying up and developing old camera films.
"From its opening moments, with Leonard Bernstein’s interpretation of Britten’s 'The Young Person’s Guide to The Orchestra' to the very end, with 'Cuckoo' from 'Songs from "Friday Afternoons," Op. 7,' Britten’s music permeates the score." David Salazar considers the composer's influence on Wes Anderson's film Moonrise Kingdom.
Yesterday I tweeted a list of television programmes that only I seem to remember:
Television programmes I remember that no one else does:
Gophers!; Adventure Weekly; Well Anyway; Mystery Hall; Over Sea, Under Stone; American children's series that went on for ever in the 60s and had a water tower; Captain Zeppos; The Best of Football; If You Were Me
The former was a situation comedy with John Bird and John Fortune from 1976 - years after their fame in the original satire boom and more years before their rediscovery when they appeared with Rory Bremner.
The latter was a serial for children, shown on BBC1 at teatime in 1968 and 1969. In it a gang of children ran their own newspaper and I think it has links with the better remembered Here Come the Double Deckers.
But the programme that got most attention was one that no one else remembered: Over Sea, Under Stone.
This is the first book in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, but is very different in tone from the rest of the series. It starts as a children's holiday adventure of the Blyton or Saville variety, but later takes a supernatural turn.
And it really was dramatised by the BBC in 1969. Although it was, as far as I recall, a fully acted production, it was screened under the Jackanory brand. This was a show which otherwise featured an adult reading its young audience a story.
On Twitter, Matthew Kilburn said it was screened at a time when the BBC children's department wasn't meant to do drama, so badging it as Jackanory was a way of smuggling it past the suits.
Over Sea, Under Stone is on IMDB, but there is no entry for the series as a whole - here is the link for part 1.
The cast is notable, containing both Graham Crowden and Colin Jeavons. David Wood, recently in If...., is credited as "Storyteller", so maybe there was a gesture towards Jackanory's usual format before the drama broke out.
Of the children, only Roland Pickering who played Barney had much of a career as a child actor.
I have never heard anyone else mention this dramatisation and I fear the tapes were long ago wiped.
On the walls was some of the original artwork from the Keywords books with which my mother taught me to read before I went to school.
They first came out in 1964, so they must have been the latest thing when she bought them.
And I learnt that most Ladybird history books were a collaboration between sometime Liberal candidate L. Du Garde Peach and the Leicestershire illustrator John Kenney.
A plaque in the latter's honour was recently put up in Kibworth, though a letterhead in the exhibition has him living in Smeeton Westerby.
It began when an Asian worker at one of the company's Leicester factories was mistakenly given the pay packet of a white friend and discovered she was being paid more.
A BBC News report says the Transport and General Workers Union refused to support the Asian strikers because its local negotiator believed they had "not followed the proper disputes procedure" and "have no legitimate grievances".
The strikers stayed out for 14 weeks, but a shutdown of the factory by its American owners ended the strike. A year later they closed the factory and a few years after that manual typewriters were museum pieces.
This exhibition is well put together, with lots of video interviews with people involved. It's themes of race and gender and white resentment resonate today.
The MP, aged 37, said he was 'not well and in the process of receiving medical help' and would resign following the MPs’ summer recess, which is due to end on Tuesday, September 3.
Mr O’Mara: "Please let everyone be assured that I will be tendering my resignation via the official Parliamentary process as soon as term restarts.
"I am not in any fit state to continue and nor would that be appropriate if I was. I reiterate my apology to my constituents, the people of Sheffield and the people of the UK as whole."
As the paper says, beside his health problems O'Mara has
endured a damning week after his former chief of staff Gareth Arnold resigned via a foul-mouthed rant on the MP’s own official Twitter account and a 20-year-old woman employed by the politician accused him of sexual harassment.
O'Mara gained Hallam for Labour at the 2017 general election, defeating Nick Clegg in the process.
He was suspended from the Labour Party when social media posts he had made before being elected came to light. He was readmitted in July 2018, only to resign a few days later and announce that he would in future sit as an Independent.
If O'Mara does resign his seat the Liberal Democrats will be presented with another by-election they have every chance of winning.
It was remarkable that Labour won the seat at all. Hallam has traditionally been a safe Conservative seat: they held it even in 1906 and 1945.
But Richard Allan gained Hallam at the 1997 general election and he and then Nick Clegg held it for the Lib Dems for 20 years.
It is a prosperous constituency - pleasant suburbs and Peak District villages - and about a third of the voters are graduates. In other words, it is Remain country.
And don't believe it is full of students waiting to wreak revenge on the Liberal Democrats again. Many of Hallam's student voters were moved into Sheffield Central before the 2010 general election,.
All in all, if the Lib Dems could have chosen were the next by-election will fall, they might well have chosen Sheffield Hallam.
He sat as Labour and then SDP MP for Leyton between 1974 and 1983 - he was one of the last Labour MPs to make the jump - but it is not his politics that I remember him for.
As a television presenter he was able to make philosophy accessible to the intelligent general viewer.
The clip above shows him talking to A.J. Ayer's about the latter's once scandalous Language, Truth and Logic - Ayer is amusingly candid about the book's faults.
It forms part of a longer interview about logical positivism, and you can find links to many of Magee's programmes on philosophy on Open Culture.
Today it is fashionable to decry 'talking heads' television, but if the heads are interesting enough there is nothing more riveting.
I was going through a series university interviews looking to get a place to read philosophy while it was being broadcast, so I was immensely grateful for it.
A second reason why I am grateful to Magee is that he introduced me to the thought of Karl Popper.
Magee's short book on Popper is well worth seeking out. It presents a Popper who supports social reform, rather than the Thatcherite one later admirers detected. As the left has recently begun to find virtues in Popper again, this view of him may be coming back into fashion.
I no longer believe that Popper defeated Hume's scepticism over induction. But he did show that we don't rely on induction and provided a much better model of how human reason works.
When I wrote the entry on Popper in Duncan Brack and Ed Randall's Dictionary of Liberal Thought, I had no idea that Magee had been evacuated from Hoxton to Market Harborough during the war and lived literally round the corner from where I lived as a teenager.
Logan Street was near the edge of Harborough, and I thought of myself as living a long way from my school in the centre. Each journey there or back was like an odyssey. I would set out through the garden, going out of the back gate and down the lane into Highfield Street.
In walking the length of Highfield Street I might pick up a friend or two. We would turn right into East Street; and there almost immediately in front of us on the next corner, was the shop that sold things that mattered.
If any of us had any money we would go in and buy sweets or a comic. In the same shop there was a post office, where Auntie drew out the money to keep me, and where later I was to start spending some of my pocket money on savings stamps to help win the war.
We would encounter schoolmates in the shop, so an enlarged gang of us would emerge, and then, perhaps, start arguing in the street over sweets or comics, or something that had happened the previous day.
We might have a fight there and then, or two boys would go at it while the rest of us formed a ring around them and watched; or the general argy-bargy might carry us round the corner into Nelson Street.
Here the space widened so we would forget about the fight and start a game. But we had to keep moving towards school, so our game would carry us on past the Catholic church and down towards the Coventry Road.
There on the pavement we would encounter local children about to go to their own school, beside the church, so we would set on them and terrorise them for a bit, perhaps chasing them into school.
Finally we would arrive at our own school, behind the Baptist church, and carry on our games and fights in the playground until the bell rang.
This is a walk I still do in the reverse direction when I go to cook for my Mum. The shop closed in the New Labour years when it ceased to be a post office, but I bought sweets there myself in the Seventies.
Magee's school 'behind the Baptist church' must have been on the site now occupied by Manor Court and the B&M discount store.
All in all, a remarkable passage to find in a book I bought because I was grateful for the author's influence on my own thinking.
It's too hot to write, but I can't let the accession of Boris Johnson pass without saying it is all the fault of Ian Hislop and Have I Got News for You?
You'll have to register with the London Review of Books site to read it all, but back in 2013 the novelist Jonathan Coe wrote an important article while reviewing Harry Mount's The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson.
I am going to do no more than quote a few passage from it and from an article by Steven Fielding to which it points us.
So here is Coe:
When Humphrey Carpenter interviewed the leading lights of the 1960s satire boom for his book That Was Satire, That Was in the late 1990s, he found that what was once youthful enthusiasm had by now curdled into disillusionment.
One by one, they expressed dismay at the culture of facetious cynicism their work had spawned, their complaints coalescing into a dismal litany of regret.
John Bird: ‘Everything is a branch of comedy now. Everybody is a comedian. Everything is subversive. And I find that very tiresome.’
Barry Humphries: ‘Everyone is being satirical, everything is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’
Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’
And, says Coe, that observation by Cook was developed into a Beyond the Fringe sketch about a bunch of young, would-be radical journalists who won’t admit they have sold their soul to a rapacious newspaper proprietor:
COOK: Whenever the old man has a cocktail party, there’s about ten of us – young, progressive people – we all gather up the far end of the room and … quite openly, behind our hands, we snigger at him.
BENNETT: Well, I don’t know, that doesn’t seem very much to me.
COOK: A snigger here, a snigger there – it all adds up.
The sketch makes it clear that laughter is not just ineffectual as a form of protest, but that it actually replaces protest.
And if you do seek out the full article you will find that Michael Frayn, in his introduction to the published script of Beyond the Fringe, made the same point at the time.
The idea that a corrupt elite is screwing a noble people is powerful and pervasive and by no means new. It is therefore no surprise that it is reflected in comedy. It is certainly a view of politics that is popular amongst neo-liberals.
It was at the heart of the popular 1980s situation comedy Yes Minister which repeatedly showed viewers that their political leaders and civil servants were feather-bedding themselves at the tax-payers’ expense.
This was why Margaret Thatcher loved the series: it expressed her view that, as representative politics was a moral hazard, it should be replaced as far as possible by the market.
Put like that, satire sounds distinctly right wing.
True, as Fielding points out, few comedy writers and performers are neo-liberals and many were disappointed with New Labour.
However, the cumulative effect of the same jokes ridiculing politicians and highlighting their supposed foibles can only further reinforce mistrust in the public realm, a mistrust that some political forces seek to exploit – and neo-liberals are amongst the nicest of those forces.
Comedy has always relied on stereotypes. There was a time when the Irish were thick; the Scots careful with their money; mothers-in-law fierce and ugly; and the Welsh stole and shagged sheep. The corrupt politician is one such stereotype, one that is neither racist nor sexist and seemingly acceptable to all.
You'll have to read both article and assemble all the pieces of the argument for yourself - it's this damned heat.
But if you do, you will see why the ascension of Boris Johnson is the fault of Ian Hislop and Have I Got News for You?
Later.
Reader's voice: This is all very well, but why is Ian Hislop singled out in the headline?
It's the heat. For Hislop you need to read Martin Kettle:
And what is Hislop's principal message? Week in and week out, it is that most pretty much all politicians are corrupt, deluded, incompetent, second-rate and hypocritical. Hislop's message is delivered with enviable deftness and wit, and very often it is irresistible. But it is also good-naturedly merciless. And extremely repetitive.
There is never any sign that Hislop allows of exceptions; or that he has a political hero; or even, with the occasional honourable mention for Vince Cable, that there are politicians whom he respects.
The impression he always gives is that today's politicians are uniformly unworthy of their inheritance, not to be compared with some previous golden age of statesmanlike effectiveness.
Jo Swinson has won the Liberal Democrats' leadership election, polling 62 per cent of the 76,429 cast.
I voted for Ed Davey because I had a clearer idea of what his leadership would mean and broadly supported his approach.
It may be that Jo fought a front-runner's campaign and saw no need to upset anyone by being too specific, but I never did get a clear idea of what the liberal movement she advocates would look like.
And the emphasis her campaign put on the appeal of her own personality has given her a lot to live up to.
But Jo becomes leader at an immensely exciting time. To co-opt another of her favourite phrases there need be no limit to her ambitions.
There are, however, some important strategic puzzles to be solved. How many seats can the party fight to win? What sort of seats offer us the best prospects? Which other parties' voters should we be targeting?
I wish Jo every success as leader and in getting those decisions right. If she does, there is no knowing what she may achieve.
Layla Moran writes for the Guardian: "Genuine supporters of Palestinians’ rights are fighting for equality, justice and freedom, aims that are in diametric opposition to any form of antisemitism. True champions of these causes both fight for Palestinian rights and also against any form of racism, including antisemitism."
"Liberalism’s main problem is that its vision of a life well lived has been corrupted - not by too much licence and self-expression, but by an overemphasis on economic freedom that has undercut its own promise." Samuel Moyn channels Edwardian New Liberalism.
Chris Dillow explains the rise of Jeremy Corbyn: "His popularity - especially with young graduates - rests upon material economic conditions. The degradation of professional occupations and huge gap between the top 1% and others have radicalised young people in erstwhile middle-class jobs".
Sarah Winman and Rachel Ferriman visit the Canal Club in Bethnal Green, a community space under threat from Tower Hamlets Council.
Turning roadside verges into wild flower meadows is an appealing idea, but Sophie Leguil is worried by the sowing of non-native species.
Tim Holyoake has been to Rutland Water (and will be hearing from Lord Bonkers' lawyers in the morning).
Market Harborough comes out top of a league table of the most 'liveable' places in England, reports the Guardian.
The table was produced by the former Treasury economist, Chris Walker for Your Housing Group.
Positions were calculated by balancing the affordability of homes with factors like employment opportunities and the performance of local schools.
I recall that, years ago, David Boyle produced a report on 'clone town' Britain - the way that every high street is now home to the same chains.
Market Harborough was mentioned as being on the cusp. It had the national chains, but had retained a lot of independent local shops too.
That is, of course, the best place to be, but the problem is that such a state of equilibrium is hard to maintain. But somehow we have defied economic gravity and kept that perfect mix.
The Guardian is suitably euphoric about Market Harborough, but the Old Grammar School, despite what it says, is neither a covered market nor a museum.
Mike McCahill's Guardian review makes me want to see The Edge:
The Edge’s second half provides an unexpected analysis of the cost Flower’s militarised push for glory took on his troops, seeing off 10 years of post-match interview spin to pursue a more candid line of testimony.
Wicketkeeping warrior Matt Prior concedes: “Life as a professional sportsman doesn’t necessarily lend itself to you being a good person - because it’s about winning.” A painfully vulnerable Jonathan Trott breaks down in tears.
This was the Spencer Davis Group's first single after the Winwood brothers left.
They were replaced by the guitarist Phil Sawyer and the keyboard player and singer Eddie Hardin. One of the musicians who auditioned but did not make the cut was a young pianist called Reg Dwight.
Time Seller is very 1967 and I suspect it was written before some of the songs we now assume influenced it.
Oddly, it sounds most like a superior version of the sort of song Dave Mason turned out for Traffic before he was ejected from the band for writing Hole In My Shoe.
