The Joy of Six 1127

"The row over LTNs isn’t a culture war, it’s a microcosm of a much more fundamental question. How does a society built on fossil fuels shift its behaviour quickly enough to have an impact on the looming climate change catastrophe? It’s a question that’s not going to go away." Flip Chart Fairy Tales on the outcry over Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

James Ball says the government's online safety bill will annoy voters and may lead to messaging apps withdrawing their apps from the UK.

Norman Lebrecht argues that Arts Council hostility has added to the problems caused for opera by Covid and Brexit: "A climate of hostility towards opera was created. A state of siege set in and confidence sank. In mass media, opera was once again presented as a pastime for the privileged." 

Sixteen-year-old Jack Cornwell, who died after being wounded at the Battle of Jutland, was posthumously awarded the VC. Alex Churchill finds that his decoration was the result of newspaper clamour for a hero after the losses at Jutland and that the photograph of Cornwall that was used everywhere was actually of one of his brothers, because no photograph of him existed.

Richard Luck thinks The Day of the Jackal is an assassination movie without equal.

Think of Benjamin Britten and you think of Suffolk, but John Finn takes us to he several Islington houses where he and Peter Pears lived when they had to be in London.