Thursday, September 22, 2022

The Joy of Six 1076

Sarah O'Connor, in a Twitter thread, fact-checks five key assertions from Britannia Unchained (which was co-authored by our new PM and chancellor) and finds them all untrue.

Putin’s Western apologists don’t reflect the usual conflict between left and right, argues Quillette, but offer an example of the two poles making common cause against the centre.

Jeff Sparrow argues that the stronger resistance to fossil fuels grows, the more laws spring up to contain activists: "In Australia, where fossil fuel lobbyists exert tremendous influence over the major political parties, the trend has probably gone further than anywhere else."

"Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the end of her reign, did everything he could to escape from 'the gruesomeness' of public ceremonies. The result was that the few ceremonial occasions under Victoria often involved embarrassment: marching columns that concertinaed, coffins carried the wrong way, words that were misread and ceremonies that were botched." Adrian Wooldridge examines how the British crown learnt to do pageantry in the 20th century.

"So profound was the PM's passion of the moving picture, her first words on being introduced to Lord Attenborough were 'Why didn't you come years ago?' 'Because I wasn't asked, darling,' Dickie replied." Richard Luck on Margaret Thatcher's ambitions to revive the British film industry.

Simon Matthews reviews a new biography of Aleister Crowley: "Along the way we meet W.B. Yeats, who scorned Crowley as a writer, Clifford Bax, Dennis Wheatley, Gerald Yorke (personal representative of the Dalai Lama), Tom Driberg, Anthony Powell, Arthur Calder-Marshall and Clifford Bax."

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