The Joy of Six 1329

"Buying stuff we didn’t know we wanted, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t know has become a cultural obsession, made worse by the fact that prices are going up and incomes are flat lining." Neal Lawson says Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves must abandon their Trumpian obsession with economic growth.

Alexandra Hall Hall finds signs of Trumpist culture wars and a woeful lack of realism in Kemi Badenoch's set-piece speech on foreign policy. "Does she really believe that other countries around the world won’t see through the double standards if we turn a blind eye to abuses when they are committed by 'our allies', such as Israel, whilst simultaneously arguing we all need to take a tougher stance towards Russia?"

"'Trump' is a quintessentially Dickensian name, its crude monosyllable suggesting not only trumpeting or boasting but trumping in the sense of winning, as well as trumping something up in the sense of inventing falsehoods." Terry Eagleton sees Donald Trump as a Dickensian rogue.

Carrie-Anne Brownian has no time for a popular myth about the Victorians: "Until fairly recently, I believed, as many people do, that the Victorians constantly posed corpses as though they were alive, and used lots of fancy tricks to achieve this. ... If someone in a Victorian photo has a creepy look, odds are, it’s a postmortem photo! Except that’s a total myth, perpetuated by people who uncritically believe everything they hear or read."

Ray Newman reads I Saw Two Englands by H.V. Morton, and finds a portrait of the English pub at the outbreak of the second world war.

"The 1960s saw several landmarks in Leicester’s popular music scene. Having paid his dues in local pubs and clubs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gerry Dorsey finally hit the big time as Engelbert Humperdinck and became a global star." Colin Hyde reviews Leicester’s music scene, from dance bands to hip hop.