A website on Alec Guinness's two BBC series as George Smiley

Here's what we need: a website devoted to the BBC productions of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People.

Guinness is Smiley explains:

The aim of this website is to publish fresh material about both series, identify some of the filming locations and signpost visitors to the wonderful content that is already out there. This website is not a commercial endeavour and will hopefully be of interest to fans of both productions.

I have my dad to thank for my love of these series.  He watched each episode beside me when they were first broadcast, but I understood only a little of what I saw back then. As an adult I have seen them many times and find them endlessly compelling and fascinating. The intricacies of the plot and the quality of the acting keep me coming back time after time.

Lord Bonkers had a similar reaction:

Yes, I miss Paddy Ashdown. I miss his correspondence – those envelopes marked "Top Secret: Burn Before Reading" that arrived by every post – and I miss his company. Despite Ashdown's best efforts, I never could quite get my head around Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. "What exactly was Toby Esterhase up to?" I would ask him, and "So did old Smiley do right by Ricki Tarr in the end?" 

Now Paddy is gone there is no one in the party to explain this to me. I tried asking Ming Campbell the other day, but he just told me Sir Percy Alleline was a fine upstanding fellow and that he wouldn’t listen to a word against him.

The Joy of Six 1575

Zöe Franklin celebrates the 98th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, which gave women equal voting rights with men and calls for further reforms: "Today, barriers remain for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and others who are underrepresented in public life."

Abandoning the triple lock on pensions  is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.

Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.

"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.

"It’s become a cliché to talk about Ballard’s prescience – the so-called 'seer of Shepperton'. But it’s also an inescapable fact that even in his 80s, he could identify currents in our culture that were yet to break. " Louis Pattison finds that J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which depicts an England’s sliding towards fascism, makes uncomfortable reading today. 

Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."

Dysfunctional council to be abolished after years of controversy and "all out civil war"

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Leicester Mercury.

I know things can get pretty het up on the city council, but the authority in question here is Witherley Parish Council. 

The village of Witherley lies on the Leicestershire-Warwickshire border near Atherstone, and we are able to bring you exclusive video of its most recent attempt to conduct a parish council meeting.

Good news about the Family Farm Tax

Farmers have been complaining for some time that the price of farmland has lost any connection with the income that be derived from farming it. And The Agri Brigade column in the new Private Eye suggests they have a strong case:

Average UK farmland prices have more than quadrupled this century, from just under £2,000 an acre to well over £8,000 an acre, according to statistics from land agents Savills. 

Over that time, farm profitability has remained poor, but farmland's IHT-free status drew many ultra-high-net-worth individuals into buying land as a convenient way of minimising their tax liabilities – the so-called "Jeremy Clarkson effect". 

By doing so, these buyers pushed up the price of farmland way beyond what many ordinary farmers can afford to pay for it (UK farmland prices are four times higher than those in France, for example).

For this reason, I argued back in January that it was the lack of inheritance tax on farmland that had caused causing farmers' problems.

But now, from the same Eye column, comes good news:

Evidence is emerging that the controversial withdrawal of 100 per cent Inheritance tax [IHT] relief on farmland is having the intended effects of cooling a previously overheated market and deterring those who are more interested in minimising their tax bill than producing food. ...

In 2025, the proportion of farmland bought by what Strutt & Parker describes as "lifestyle buyers" fell to 11 per cent down from 16 per cent the year before. At the same time, the proportion of farms bought by farmers rose to a seven-year high of 59 per cent. 

During 2025, the Knight Frank Farmland Index showed that bare agricultural land sold in England and Wales fell by an average of 5 per cent, the first time since 2017 that prices had fallen this much over a 12 month period.

The Eye speculates that, because they tend to represent the interests of their wealthier members, the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association (formerly the Country Landowners Association) will continue to campaign against inheritance tax on farmland.

But I hope we Liberal Democrats will quietly drop our campaign against what, strangely, we called the "Family Farm Tax".

David Alton, Andy Burnham and telescopic radicalism

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It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself. – Bleak House, Charles Dickens.

Mrs Jellyby goes in for what Dickens call "telescopic philanthropy", in that she devotes her energies to promoting a philanthropic project in far-off Borrioboola-Gha while her own children fall into the grate. We've all known political households like that.

You can also have telescopic radicalism. In the distant era when David Alton was a Liberal, then a Liberal Democrat, and a Liverpool MP, one commentator pointed out that he was idealistic about issues that were a long way away, but hard-headed when they were close to home.

It seems we now have a telescopic radical for a prime minister. 

Yesterday, Andy Burnham wrote a courageous article for the Guardian, explaining the sanctions his government is rightly imposing upon Israel for its illegal actions in the occupied territories.

But, back in Britain, masked, uniformed fascists are roaming the streets and closing down ports without a word from our new prime minister.

Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal shows the danger of the profit motive in the juvenile justice system

If you want to see the danger of introducing the profit motive into the detention of young offenders, watch this video on Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal.

In the first decade of this century, two judges in Luzerne County, Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella, accepted millions of dollars in bribes to lock up children and teenagers for trivial offences from the owners of for-profit detention centres. At least 2,300 young people were wrongly imprisoned.

And get a load of cuddly Uncle Joe Biden at the start of the video.

The Joy of Six 1574

Liz David-Barrett argues that, by making rule-breaking a selling point, Reform UK is signalling it's open for influence trading: "It is no coincidence that some of Reform’s biggest donations have come from individuals in cryptocurrency, keen to ward off the threat of regulation."

"Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm." Tom Wall reveals the vast scale of England’s £255m illegal care industry.

"Eight in ten of the UK public think mobile phone thefts have increased since 2010 and around six in ten believe both vehicle-related thefts and burglary have increased. In fact, all are down by 50 per cent or more over that time period." Bobby Duffy says that, though crime is falling, the public doesn't feel safer.

Nik Popli takes us inside the attempt to remake the Democratic Party in the US.

"Everyone who knows Muir’s work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined, by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political nightmares." Andrew Frisardi mourns the eclipse of Edwin Muir's poetry.

Mari Wilson on how she made Just What I Always Wanted.

Bryan Ferry: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Bob Dylan glammed up sounds good. This is on Ferry's 1973 debut album These Foolish Things, and it reached no. 10 in the singles chart the same year.

Geoff Marshall asks: What are Britain's least served stations?

Geoff Marshall says in his YouTube blurb:

So we quite often talk about Least Used Stations ... but what about the Least SERVED - the stations the get the fewest services with just a small number of trains per week?

Since it's been 10 years since I rode Stockport/Stalybridge with Karl, we headed out to Lincolnshire to ride the line to Skegness to tick off three Least Served stations, and find out what the least served stations in the country are.

I'm so old that I can remember when Stockport to Stalybridge had a proper service and was a useful route. And when I rode the line to Skegness, it was on a Jolly Fisherman excursion train behind a pair of Class 20s.

Kent Police has admitted ignoring intelligence on Dover disruption

Kent Police has admitted receiving intelligence about a planned disruption in Dover four days before it took place, reports Metro:

A woman has said she warned police about the masked mass protest in Dover days before it happened, despite officers calling it 'spontaneous'.

Kent Police has been criticised for its 'slow response' after hundreds of masked protestors in balaclavas wearing all-black halted traffic at the port on Saturday.

The force defended their handling of the 'spontaneous protest', but Metro has spoken to an anti-racism campaigner who said officers should have been more prepared.

In a statement to Metro, Kent Police admit getting a tip-off late on Friday evening that a protest could take place in the town the following day – but that intelligence was not fully assessed.

Maz Garside, from Portsmouth, claims she told Counter Terror Police about action planned in Dover involving men in balaclavas, led by Tommy Robinson's 'right-hand man' Daniel Thomas, on the Tuesday before the protests.

And Hope Not Hate has posted an account of demonstrators massing in a Kent village the evening before the protest and talking freely about their plans in the pub.

Matthew Scott, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent has issued this statement:

Kent Police has acknowledged that an opportunity was missed that could have enabled the Force to mobilise sooner and bring the disruption to an end more quickly. Matthew Scott, Kent’s Police and Crime Commissioner, said: 

"I welcome an independent learning review by the College of Policing. I have asked that this examines how information is triaged by the Force and the communications strategy the Force deployed in response to the event. I look forward to receiving the findings of that review. I will ensure that Chief Constable is held to account for any findings and recommendations that it makes. 

"It is essential that we understand how this happened, and that lessons are leant. 

"This is separate to the response of Officers, Staff and Specials on the ground, who did the best they could, in the circumstances they were presented with, to bring the disruption to an end as soon as they did."

Traffic Cop Nick Lovatt sacked after committing more than 20 driving offences

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The Derby Telegraph wins our Headline of the Day Award.

On one occasion, the fellow officer who stopped him is reported to have said:

"Who do we think we are, sir? The police and crime commissioner for Nottinghamshire?"

Meanwhile in Staffordshire: The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance took place today. I can't find a video of the proceedings, so here's a short one from 2016.

Wikipedia explains:

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is a folk dance which takes place each September in the village of Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, England. 

It is performed by ten dancers, accompanied by a musician playing an accordion and a youth with a triangle. Six of the dancers carry reindeer horns; the remaining four take the roles of a hobby horse, Maid Marian, a fool, and a youth with a bow and arrow. 

On Wakes Monday the performers dance around the parish all day, beginning early in the morning at the parish church where the horns are stored.

That entry also has plenty on the dance's history and possible significance.

Edward Woodward adds: Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!

New public square in Telford honours women who worked in Shropshire's coalfields

Betty Harris Square Telford. Photo: Telford Council

A new square has been named in honour of women who worked in Shropshire coalfields, reports BBC News:

The area in Telford has become Betty Harris Square, after her experiences "as a 'pit girl' became one of the most powerful accounts of women's working lives during Britain's industrial past", the council said.

It added while she was not from Telford, her story represented thousands, many whose names were unknown, who worked in east Shropshire coalfields.

More than 1,000 people voted for the name after residents were invited to vote from a shortlist of influential women connected to the area's history.

This gives me the excuse to quote from Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles Masterman:

The Coal Mines Act went through with little trouble except for a struggle to keep pit-brow lasses their right to work. Masterman had made enquiries into the question when he had been to Lancashire ... and had also received a deputation of the lasses themselves, sturdy, strapping girls obviously in far better health than the majority of factory or shop girls; and was determined they should not go. 

He laid down the principle: that women should not be forbidden any type of work unless it was proved to be (1) unhealthy, (2) in a situation dangerous to morals, (3) of a degrading and degraded character, and that a Parliament in which women were not represented should be chary of excluding them from any work they wished to do.

I knew I had used that quote on here before and, I thought, quite recently. When I searched for it, it turns out to be eight years ago. Who knows where the time goes?

The Joy of Six 1573

Who are the goons in balaclavas who turned up in Dover and Portsmouth? Hope Not Hate explains: "In 2016, he [Danny Tommo] pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was sentenced to two years in prison after taking part in an armed attempt to abduct a man during a drugs-related dispute."

Rosemary Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should fight the Holborn and St Pancras by-election hard and answers her critics in the comments.

Cathy Young pays tribute to Gloria Steinem: "The vision Steinem shared in 1971 of a humanist and egalitarian future may have been simplistic in its idealism. But in 2026, it’s a far more humane vision, and better for it, than what her right-wing detractors have to offer."

"During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was 'not a Scotchman' and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan's racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military." Martin Spychal has researched the career of Peter McLagan, whom he calls "Scotland’s first Black MP".

"She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea: Dolly seemed to consciously 'do' Dolly. A songwriter, musician, actress, philanthropist, advocate, mogul and more, she was always pivoting between different aspects of herself, and twirling those impressive embellished skirts and dresses all the while." Niela Orr celebrates the life and music of Dolly Parton.

The Secret Cricket Coach asks where the hell Rob Key is: "For years he was paid to tell us what was right and wrong with English cricket. Now he is responsible for much of it, but recently we haven’t heard much from him. England have had a difficult period, questions are being asked about behaviour, standards and leadership, and it is Joe Root who seems to be answering them. I find that quite strange."

Joan Littlewood on Brian Murphy's This is Your Life

I've written several times about Joan Littlewood and her extraordinary influence on British theatre. Here is a short clip of her, recorded for Brian Murphy's This is Your Life.

In the run up to it, you hear what an extraordinary struggle it was for someone from the working class, like Murphy, to get training as an actor.

And after it, there's confirmation that Joan Littlewood didn't just have connections with ITV comedy (half the cast of On the Buses came from her Stratford East company), she had them with BBC comedy too.

I've written about the 30 years of slog Nigel Hawthorne experienced before he became famous overnight in Yes Minister. As I say in that post, he once said he owed his career to Joan Littlewood – she had cast him as Field Marshall Haig in a touring production of Oh! What a Lovely War.

I'd also read that Jimmy Perry, one of the writers of Dad's Army, had spent time at Stratford East, and here he is confirming it.

The successful British economy of the 1970s

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This is from a House of Lords Library paper on The UK Economy in the 1970s that was published a couple of years ago:

Despite the macroeconomic turbulence of the 1970s, annual GDP growth still averaged 2.7% and living standards rose significantly. Growth in real household disposable income (RHDI) per head was either low or negative for much of the decade, but grew rapidly in 1972–73 and 1978–79, leaving RHDI per head almost 30% in 1979 than it was in 1970. This was a greater increase than was experienced in either the decade before (the 1960s) or the decade that followed (the 1980s).

This enhancement in living standards was underpinned by strong wage settlements, with 1976 and 1977 the only years in the decade where wage growth did not outstrip inflation.

If you have taken your view of the decade from Dominic Sandbrook's What My Housemaster Told Me About the Seventies, you may be surprised by these figures.

Church could get first toilet in more than 700 years

To the great relief of the parishioners of St Giles's at Hartington in Derbyshire, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Adrianne Lenker: Real House

Matt Mitchell wrote on Paste in 2024:

As soon as I finished listening to Real House, the opening track from Adrianne Lenker's new album Bright Future, for the first time, I paused the music and immediately called my mother—not to say “I love you” but to hear her voice and remember the gift of connection we hold together even in distance. 

The song, easily Lenker's rawest and intimate yet, rebels against mystery, refusing to be enshrouded by opaqueness. It’s a plainspoken, minimal and articulated collection of reflective vignettes – an archival of 22 years of Lenker's life as she remembers them. She conjures images of braiding willow branches into a crown, trying to build a portal to another world, dreams of flying, a mother and daughter's shared laughter in a hospital, a family coming together to say goodbye to their aging dog. 

Lenker's only muse on Real House is the past, and there are no cryptic metaphors. It's, as she calls it, "an autobiographical, condensed montage of the most pivotal moments in my childhood up until the moment of my dog’s death."

Lenker is also the lead vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter of the band Big Thief.

If you're in the mood for songs about children's dogs dying, I chose Shannon by Henry Grose on a Sunday long ago.

Dangerous Exile (1957): Richard O'Sullivan and Vaughan Wilkins

The death of Richard O'Sullivan gives me an excuse to mention one of this blog's more obscure heroes, the mid 20th century historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins. Because, as a boy, O'Sullivan appeared in the only film to be made from one of Wilkins's novels.

Dangerous Exile, which was directed by Desmond Hurst and released in 1957, was based on the novel A King Reluctant. 

It tells the story of the escape of the young son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from France to Wales and the attempts of the Revolutionary government to recapture him. The boy is played by Richard O'Sullivan.

I saw the film on BBC1 some decades ago, and don't recall it being particularly outstanding, but the adult cast is interesting: Louis Jourdan, Belinda Lee, Keith Michell, Martita Hunt and Finlay Currie. And I do remember a scene, carried over from the novel and containing the surprising nastiness of which Wilkins was capable, in which O'Sullivan is plied with brandy by his Revolutionary guards to make him assent to all sorts of obscene stories about his mother's sex life.

You didn't hear it from me, but Dangerous Exile can be watched on more than one of the dodgy Russian website that carry old British films.

The Joy of Six 1572

"How did a former lawyer-turned theologian become Reform UK’s lead ideologue and political heavyweight on so many issues? To understand that, you have to follow a covert combination of faith and finance, of evangelical doom-mongering and disruptive tech and media, from the two real kingmakers in right-wing British and American politics – the deeply religious and deeply wealthy owners of GB News and Palantir: Sir Paul Marshall and Peter Thiel." Peter Jukes and Nafeez Ahmed map the strange rise of James Orr.

Elaine Craig has researched family carers' attitude to the use of restraint in mental hospitals: "A mother discovered her son was restrained 33 times in six weeks. Another was told her distressed daughter is 'aggressive' as six staff pin her to the floor and inject her with medication. Through tears, families describe images they cannot forget: bruises, broken bones, loved ones left sitting in urine-soaked clothes, isolated and afraid."

"Students in England’s least deprived areas are three times as likely to enter GCSE PE and drama as those in the most deprived areas. There are also large disadvantage gaps in music, food preparation and nutrition, design and technology and the separate sciences, with the pattern continuing into A-level subjects such as geography." Jabed Ahmed reports.

Garrett M. Graff on the 17 minutes before America changed: "The earliest moments of the 9/11 attacks did not unfold in the way you’ve been taught to think of them: a plane striking a tower, a city looking up in horror, a nation gripped by panic. Instead, for the briefest of windows, the unfolding drama of September 11, 2001, wasn’t yet a calamity but merely a strange accident."

Greg Cwik celebrates the "gleeful terror" of Tim Curry's Pennywise.

"Several residents had paid the considerable sum of three guineas for the privilege of accompanying the celebrity aeronaut on his ascent. As Coxwell now battled to complete his preparations, some of these passengers decided to vent their disapproval at the delay by climbing into the basket and staging a protest. According to Coxwell, one passenger, using 'gestures and foul language', even proceeded to incite the crowd still further by telling them that the aeronaut was refusing to continue with the display." Margaret Brecknell discovers Leicester's balloon riot of 1864.

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.

Richard O'Sullivan's This is Your Life from 1974

The actor Richard O'Sullivan has died at the age of 82. He was never out of the studio as child star in the Fifties and early Sixties, and became a sitcom heartthrob of the Seventies.

Talking Pictures TV is currently running the children's show Dick Turpin that he made at the start of the Eighties. O'Sullivan retired from acting after suffering a stroke in 2003.

This edition of This is Your Life was filmed just as O'Sullivan's adult career had taken off because of his starring role in ITV's Man About the House.

Look out for an appearance by a barking mad Trevor Howard.

That Channel 4 News report on Reform UK and illicit funding in full

 From this evening's Channel 4 News...

Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens on 19th-century poverty

Here's a book review that features my favourite writers on Victorian poverty – the two Charlies. That's Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens.

The book reviewed is Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 by Elizabeth Hurren, the reviewer is John Prebble, and it appears in the London Review of Books for 5 October 2012:

Like everyone who has written about Victorian poverty, she’s obstructed by the problem identified by the Liberal politician Charles Masterman in 1902. "We are very silent," the collective poor say in Masterman's From the Abyss; "so very silent that no one to this hour knows what we think ... or why we think it."

That remains true even now. From all the multitude of workhouse voices, not one has yet been recovered that says "this is how it was," "this is what we did," "this is how I felt." Victorian poverty is mute either because, in Masterman's words, it was "living for the most part with no articulate expression", or because it was too ashamed to speak. 

The Victorians who wrote about it were strangers in its midst: either middle-class missionaries, philanthropists and sociologists perceiving the London slums as "the undiscovered country of the poor" and "the dark continent ... within easy walking distance of the General Post Office", and casting themselves as intrepid explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. 

And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto martyred surrogates in other hells – the workhouse, Yorkshire schools, Lancashire mills, slums like Tom-all-Alone's. Dickens confronting his own past is Oliver Twist confronting his. Having escaped into bourgeois security, Oliver revisits the town of his childhood, but he sees the workhouse only from outside, and his old acquaintances only as faces at the windows.

Robert Sherard, as we saw a few months ago, was the grandson of the fearsome Lord Harborough and Oscar Wilde's first biographer. 

The Joy of Six 1571

"This is Britain at the end of the hottest summer on record. So, it beggars belief that the Conservatives have chosen this time – or would choose any – to try to scrap the world’s first legally binding framework to cut carbon emissions. Legislation born in Britain and adopted by over 60 countries around the world including Germany, France, Mexico and countless others." Pippa Heylings condemns the Tories' scorched earth policy.

Anna Merlan tells us what ICE's scrobbling of Milo Yiannopoulos tells us about America's far right: "But while Yiannopoulos’ deportation contains an extremely rich vein of schadenfreude – he previously called for deporting 'millions and millions of people' and joked about masturbating while witnessing ICE raids – it’s also indicative of how power, punishment, and influence currently work in the MAGA movement, and broader crackup within that feud-heavy world, where fragile alliances are constantly being made, broken and remade anew."

Simon Ophir on assisted dying, the House of Lords and democracy: "I have delivered palliative and end-of-life care to many patients, including this man. It cannot help everyone and I know that even with excellent palliative care many patients are terrified of death. It is this experience, more than anything else, that makes me so determined to see the assisted dying bill reach the statute book."

"Lloyd George was much driven by his experiences as a child and as a youth, growing up amongst the mostly poor, non-conformist natives of North Wales, groaning under a dominant, minority, privileged class of wealthy, mostly Anglican English landlords and churchmen. He witnessed and early on complained bitterly against unjust evictions of tenants who ‘voted the wrong way’, of tenants who had to pay tithes to a church they did not believe in. Even at school he protested at injustice." Paul Spackman, author of a forthcoming biography of David Lloyd George, is interviewed by Nicholas Alderton.

Ishaan Selby discusses T.H. White's The Goshawk: "While White is generally seen as a misanthropic figure, I read his difficult kinship with the goshawk as an example of a kin relationship that formed outside of hereditary bonds and through a queering of domesticity; one that shows a difficult love and connection outside the bounds of the human."

"What burns on that clifftop isn’t Christianity losing to paganism. It’s a re-enchantment scheme running out of road, with nothing left to offer but a fire. Choose your priests wisely." Moreau Vazh reconsiders The Wicker Man.

Restoration of Gone to Earth to be shown in London Film Festival

From the London Film Festival website:

Long overshadowed within Powell and Pressburger's canon, this major new restoration reveals the visual splendour and dramatic intensity of one of their most misunderstood films.

Powell and Pressburger’s passionate Technicolor melodrama stars Jennifer Jones as the free-spirited Hazel, who refuses to be bound either by her clergyman husband or the predatory squire who pursues her. 

The untamed Shropshire landscape is at one with Hazel’s primal spirit, making this one of the filmmakers' most rhapsodic odes to the English countryside and among their most intoxicatingly sensual achievements.

The showing of Gone to Earth is on Wednesday 7 October (6pm) at the National Film Theatre.

Lib Dem policy is light on politics not on outside expertise

The Liberal Democrats are getting a new think tank, reports Politico.

The Britain Project, though it will not be formally affiliated to the party, will be launched at the Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference later this month:

Tim Leunig, the group’s policy director, who recently became a Liberal Democrat peer in Britain’s unelected House of Lords, said: "We are here to help them."

"But we’re also here to ask them tough questions because: who knows? They might be a minister one day, and then the civil service will ask them tough questions."

And Lord Leunig does sound a little like a cross between a regimental sergeant major and a dyspeptic Oxbridge admissions tutor throughout the piece.

You are probably wondering who is funding The Britain Project. Politico says the names of the individual donors will not be revealed, but I wonder if that arrangement is wise or tenable.

My experience on the party's federal policy committee (FPC) led me to conclude that the Lib Dems were not short of expert input into their policy – or at least outside input, as much of it was from campaign groups – but short of political input.

What happened was that reports written by a working party and then brought to FPC. Much as happened at Conference, there would be a debate on one controversial idea, but the rest of it would be nodded through.

I remember questioning one recommendation and being told by the chair of the working party that the RSPCA would condemn us if we said anything different. It sometimes felt as though we did not so much make policy as buy it in.

There was sometimes talk of an alternative model, a select committee model, where a small group of FPC members would take evidence from outside bodies and then write the final policy themselves. #

This still seems to me a better model, because it offers the possibility of policy that is at once informed by outside expertise and Liberal in its effect.

Politico says many Lib Dem MPs are interested in being involved with the new think tank, which may be a reflection of the thinness of the party's policy offer in recent years, but it's still encouraging, given how little engagement they had with FPC when I was on it.

I hope, however, that The Britain Project will contribute to party policy and not write it.

Back to Sandy Campbell and Tsar Nicholas II

My great great grandmother's brother Sandy Campbell, as we have seen, was the subject of an article in The Sphere (13 October 1900). This photograph was one of those that accompanied it, and was captioned:

Sandy Campbell looking our for deer on Lochnagar 

These field-glasses were presented to Mr. Campbell by the Czar when his Imperial Majesty visited Glassalt Shiel

 According to A,N. Wilson's Victoria: A Life, the Nicholas II did not much enjoy his visit to Balmoral in 1896:

Nicholas hated Balmoral; he hated being surrounded by all his wife's extended German family; and he disliked being taken out for sport in the freezing wet weather. They had no luck in finding a stag and only managed to shoot a brace of grouse.

Perhaps the Tsar's gift to Sandy was a veiled criticism of his competence as a ghillie?

The Rolling Stones: Paint It Black

This topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and is one of those Sixties singles where the sitar, played here by Brian Jones, sounds at home.