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Antonia Quirke’s thoughtful, elegiac essay on the battered Richard Burton and his battered overcoat in the Spy Who Came in from the Cold was worth the price of the FT earlier this week. Luckily for you, they have for some reason left her superb piece ungated on their website.
Archive for the ‘Britain’ Category
February 7th, 2013
Category: Britain, National Security
So advises Jemima Khan regarding Julian Assange in The Times today [£]. She is the latest in a long string of former Assange supporters to have a wakey wakey moment about the WikiLeaks wide boy, and deserves credit for going public rather than slinking away silently and without apology as have many other people who [...]
January 28th, 2013
Cameron’s hopeless plan to renegotiate undefined EU reforms and hold an in/out referendum in Britain on the results.
October 16th, 2012
Category: Britain, Climate change
A map of UK tidal and wave power, produced by the sucessors to William’s office.
October 14th, 2012
That would be William of course, who was re-dubbed William the Conqueror after his victory at Hastings 946 years ago today. Alan Massie reflects on how the Norman Conquest changed the law and history of England, as well as its language: So, if you were to begin by asking, in Monty Python style, “what have [...]
September 10th, 2012
Progress in tidal power.
August 30th, 2012
Category: Britain, Strange world
An American friend who favours abolishing the UK House of Lords suggested a blistering public awareness campaign revealing that “It’s archaic, filled with eccentrics, and brimming with peculiar rituals and quaint customs”. He was disappointed to learn that such a message would be taken as a ringing endorsement of the institution by most British people. [...]
August 10th, 2012
The great director Sir David Lean is remembered mainly for lushly coloured 70mm epics with big international casts, sweeping stories and long running times (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago). But he had a fine career before those triumphs during which he made tightly constructed black [...]
August 6th, 2012
“Oh yeah?”, Baron de Coubertin might have said to the Bard. London beat out Paris’ bid to host the Olympic games. Biff! Then, President Hollande mocked the Brit’s poor performance in the early events. With France ahead in the medal count, he jibed “The British have rolled out the red carpet for French athletes to [...]