Why and how is the DLR being extended to Thamesmead?

Here's Jago Hazzard to explain. Real horrorshow, my droogs.

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The radical instability of The Once and Future King

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

This is the final episode of Series Two, and our guest Elizabeth Elliott is helping us explore Camelot in The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Published in 1958, The Once and Future King adapts the famous stories of King Arthur and his Round Table. 

Beginning with the childhood of Arthur in the first book, The Sword in the Stone, White’s version of the familiar stories are complex examinations of leadership, nobility, romance and war. Of White’s novel, Burgess writes, "This is not remote and fabulous history: the lesson of the breaking of the Round Table is for our time."

So says the YouTube blurb for this video.

I love T.H. White's writing, but The Once and Future King is what literary theorists call an unstable text. We can't even agree how many books there are in the sequence. Is it four, or should The Book of Merlyn, which wasn't published until 13 years after White's death, be included to make it five? Is it for adults of children? The first book, The Sword in the Stone, is surely written for children and shows White's love of John Masefield, but the later books seem far more adult in their tone and themes.

And then there is his rewriting of the first two books. I'm far more familiar with the original versions, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. Maybe we all construct our own personal versions of The Once and Future King?

Anyway, this is a good discussion of The Once and Future King and some of these issues.

Anthony Burgess's time in Leicester now marked by heritage panel

Over a pint of Tiger, somebody told me that Anthony Burgess used to drink in our pub. The story sounded implausible - that Burgess had been a familiar face at the Black Horse, Aylestone in the 1950s - but I filed it away mentally.

Long ago, Phil Beesley kindly wrote me what is still one of my favourite guest posts on this blog. It hold of his discovery that Anthony Burgess had once lived in the Leicester suburb of Aylestone and set one of his novels - The Right to an Answer - there.

Today a friend (thanks, Herbert!) sent me this photograph. It shows that Burgess is now remembered in Aylestone with one of the city council's heritage panels.

I don't go into Leicester as much as I used to, but I shall certainly go and see it one day soon.

The Joy of Six 1268

In an article stuffed with quotes from unnamed 'senior' Lib Dems, Harriet Symonds looks for possible future fault lines in our larger parliamentary party. Nimby vs Yimby? Tuition fees? Gender? Maybe we should stop using terms like Nimby and Yimby (and Terf and Gammon) - giving your opponents nicknames does nothing for the clarity of your thinking or your ability to win over uncommitted voters.

Sienna Rogers talks to Shockat Adam, the pro-Gaza Independent candidate who defeated Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South.

"The Government’s approach relies heavily on the private sector to deliver against its ambitions. But historically, direct public investment has been key: at the post-war housebuilding peak in 1968, nearly two-in-five homes were built through the public sector, compared to just under one-quarter of homes in 2023." The Resolution Foundation considers whether Labour will achieve its housing ambitions.

Anthony Burgess hated the Beatles but had more in common with them than he realised, argues Michael Shallcross.

Judy Stroud on the reintroduction of dormice to Rockingham Forest: "During the clearance of over 600 acres of the Purlieus between 1862 and 1868 dormice were sometimes found when men were grubbing up the tree roots.  No evidence of dormice was found there during the late 20th century but the wood met the criteria for a successful reintroduction. This took place in 2001 and monitoring by the Forestry Commission has shown a long-term success, with dispersal within the wood from the initial release site."

Bob Lynn introduces us to Mary Webb, the Shropshire novelist and poet whose work, steeped in nature and mysticism, found fame only after her untimely death.

After Bath by Vaughan Wilkins: Shades of Bertolt Brecht and Anthony Burgess

Back in the Eighties there was a big house in the village of Marston Trussell, some three miles from here, that used to open as a second-hand bookshop on Sunday afternoons.

I walked there once and came away with two books. One was a paperback copy of  de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which I was never to read but kept on my shelves, as you do, in the hope of absorbing its contents by osmosis. And the second was After Bath, the only children's book by Vaughan Wilkins.

Wilkins usually wrote historical novels and was obviously popular between the 1930s and 1950s. At one time every second-hand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books edition of his Fanfare for a Witch, so I started seeing if I could find his other books.

I don't know what children made of After Bath when it was published in 1945, but the interesting thing about it to me today is how much it of its period.

The villains after the gremlins, who are armed with bombs and machine guns and given to torturing people. They are like a cross between Nazi stormtroopers and Chicago gangsters, which immediately put me in mind of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

As drawn by Audrey Pilkington in the book, the gremlins have bowler hats and long noses, which look forward to Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

The plot of After Bath is a quest by four siblings to restore magic to a city. After several clashes with the gremlins, they find all they need do is apply to the Magic Control Board, where a benevolent bureaucrat gives them their wish once they have filled in the right forms.

Wilkins doesn't strike one as a Labour supporter - in 1943 he published a pamphlet called Looking Back to See Straight for the Individualist Bookshop in Fleet Street - but you couldn't get a more Clement Attlee hero than that.