Embed from Getty Images Released in 1978, Just a Gigolo is remembered as something of a disaster. That despite a cast that included Marlene Dietrich, David Bowie and David Hemmings, who also directed the film. Hemmings wrote in his memoirs Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations: Before Bowie confirmed that he would play the part, I had to go to Montreux, where he then lived, and convince him that he should. He was, as I had expected, hugely stimulating to deal with - clever, funny, original and with a very special natural elegance. He had a face that always looked beautiful on ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

Embed from Getty Images For years after he published Things Can Only Get Better in 1998, John O'Farrell was everywhere. Though he was funny, I found him annoying. That was because, while trading as a satirist of all parties and all politicians, he was in reality a Labour loyalist. He fought Maidenhead (and Theresa May) for Labour at the 2001 general election and popped up again as their candidate in the 2013 Eastleigh by-election. It was not so much that O'Farrell ignored Labour as a humourist, it was that he used humour to deflect criticism rather than expose the party. ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

On the face of it, it looks like a fairly straightforward triumph for the Tier 3 team, away at the Tier 5 wannabe giant killers. In truth, for the first hour or so, it was rather more even, as a bobbly, hard pitch with some interesting features gave Needham Market a few puzzles to solve. With seemingly very few home fans in the ground, the two teams kicked off in bright, even warm, sunshine with little active crowd support. It was quickly evident that Needham's preferred style of play, involving balls to feet, wasn't too clever, with erratic bounce and ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on A liberal amongst the country gentry...

Henry Mance has interviewed Vince Cable for the Financial Times. There is a lot about dancing, but some politics did slip through: Cable became a Liberal as a teenager, rebelling against his far-right father. He married Rebelo, whose family was of Indian origin, at a time when his home town of York was virtually "monocultural"; the couple was ostracised by his parents and hers for several years. For him, leftish liberalism was a choice, and he does not take it for granted. "I'm just as radical now as I was at the beginning," he says. The anti-immigration sentiment around the ...

Posted by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England

My current ear-worm/guilty pleasure #587. This really is a brilliant track. Just imagine if the drummer had turned up to do this without his cymbal!

Posted by paulwalternewbury on

One of the advantages of Needham Market FC's rise to Non-League's Tier 3, is that there's none of this messing around with preliminary rounds. Oh no, it's straight into the First Qualifying Round, with only four ties to be negotiated before the potential of a glamour tie against the likes of Blackburn Rovers or Charlton Athletic.And so, I've come down to East London, to see if the Marketmen can safely negotiate the first hurdle, away to Clapton. It's only a game of football, right? But life is seldom that simple... Clapton were, once upon a time, a power in amateur ...

Posted by Mark Valladares on A liberal amongst the country gentry...

Welcome to the US National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, where there's a giant freezer filled with 20km of ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic. Here's why.

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

I am way behind in bookblogging - my last review here was seven weeks ago! So I'll hope to work through some of the backlog over the next while, going backwards rather than forwards. I'm starting off with a mini-project which I carried out in the last week: the most popular three works by Belgium's only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mariuce Maeterlinck. (The total tally is eleven, ten men and and an institution, four for Peace, four for Physiology or Medicine, and one each for Chemistry, Physics and Literature.) Maeterlinck lived from 1862 to 1949; he was ...

Nibley Lane, from its junction with Badminton Road to its junction with Westerleigh Road, is expected to close for cleaning from 9.30am until 2.30pm on Tuesday 5th September for street cleaning to be carried out.

Posted by Paul Hulbert on Focus on Sodbury, Yate and Dodington

I was killing time between meeting on Monday so I popped into the National Portrait Gallery. I have to confess that one of the reasons I chose that above other central London venues was because it is one of the few places that will accept my Brompton bike into their left luggage complete with its Harris Tweed bag. I went to see the BP Portrait Awards for 2017 Exhibition, after checking that Mary Wollstonecraft had made it safely back from her loan visit to Russia. I have viewed the annual exhibition in previous years when I have been waiting for ...

Posted on birkdale focus
YouGov

The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory - West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza - continues and deepens week after week. The occupation is of course illegal under international law - as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions which were adopted after World War II. As a reaction to Germany's colonising activities in Eastern Europe, they specifically prohibit the colonisation/absorption of land conquered in war (in this case 1967) into the territory of the conquering country. Just this weekend Netanyahu has confirmed his determination to continue the settlement enterprise and never to give back any land that has been stolen. This has been ...

Posted by John Kelly on Liberal Democrat Voice

There's trouble in the Council administration in York as the Conservative leader of the Council required two senior Liberal Democrat coalition members to stand down temporarily pending an investigation on which there is precious little detail. The rest of the Lib Dem group boycotted a meeting of the Executive in protest on Thursday night. From The Press: Cllr Andrew Waller, a one time council leader who is now executive member for the environment, tweeted: "Lack of meaningful response to questions today following the actions of Cllr Carr&snr officers mean that I will not be at Executive tonight." A statement from ...

Posted by The Voice on Liberal Democrat Voice

miss_s_b | The Blood is the Life for 01-09-2017 I posted The Blood is the Life for 01-09-2017 to my dreamwidth blog [IMG: comment count unavailable] comments

Sat 2nd
11:00

My tweets

Fri, 12:40: Alas, the price has gone up with the rentr�e! (@ Chang Noi Thai Food Truck (Fridays) in Brussels) https://t.co/wMNNi08PWV Fri, 12:56: She thought she was Irish — until a DNA test opened a 100-year-old mystery https://t.co/jxfbiYob6V Wow. Fri, 16:05: Game of Thrones season 7: each character's strategy, ranked by political science https://t.co/FzF4sD6OBn LOL. #fb Fri, 16:11: Elections to UN #HumanRightsCouncil coming up - but there's not much choice or scrutiny of the candidates. https://t.co/AqTlDcQtJE Fri, 18:21: RT @ColinParryPeace: Today is my son Tim's 37th birthday. He never got to enjoy the 25 that followed his 12th, but he ...

The two links above are informative. The first lays down clearly the madness of Brexit and the ridiculous hole that 52% of the electorate jumped into based on the lies and misrepresentations of the rich and powerful. The second highlights a funding stream cut off by the process of Brexit, in this case social housing investment. You really could not make up the situation that UK finds itself in because of the EU Referendum vote to become isolated and irrelevant. I never thought my country would seek to harm itself like it is doing. So sad for future ...

Posted by Cllr. Tony Robertson on Sefton Focus

My parents were fine with it. I say fine, they may not completely understand it, but they accept me for who I am. Dad once said he didn't accept gays going to church because it went against the Church's teachings. He seems to have no issue with it now. I guess that's a positive change. It does seem to be an antithesis of views to be homosexual and to also be a church-attending Catholic. The Catholic Church has long been known for its opposition and downright oppression of LGBT communities. Pope Benedict said that homosexuality was a moral evil. That ...

Posted by Matthew Metcalf on Matthew 'Mec' Metcalf - The Mec Journal

The days are getting shorter, the football has started and the first few "x days to Christmas" signs have already been in the shops for distressingly long.

Posted by Mark Pack on Mark Pack

Jim Naughtie introduces Margaret Hodge My spiritual home in August is usually Charlotte Square in Edinburgh at the heart of the Edinburgh Book Festival. This year, I didn't manage to get there at all until the very last night. I showed up at 6pm after work without much hope of getting tickets for anything at that late stage. How wrong could I be? I managed to buy returned tickets for both Margaret Hodge, the former Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and the amazing foreign correspondent John Simpson. Margaret Hodge was there to talk about her book, Called to Account, ...

Posted by Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice

Some time ago, I arranged a site visit to the entrance of Blackness Library where a council officer kindly discussed safety at the entrance with representatives from West End Community Council and myself. The issue was around safe access up and down the steps particularly in the dark during the winter months on the late opening evening. It was agreed to provide two new handrails and I am pleased that these were put in place recently - see below :

The New Statesman reports on new techniques that once more underlines why the UK Government's so-called solution to bovine TB is flawed and unnecessary. The science as proven by the Krebs report has already demonstrated the ineffectiveness of a cull, now an experiment on a farm in Devon has pointed to the most effective way of tackling the disease in cattle. They say that the Save Me Trust, instead of using the government's current method, are deploying a three-part testing system which has allowed them to identify and isolate infected cows more accurately and quickly: "We can do incredible things ...

Posted by Peter Black on Peter Black
eUKhost

"Anonymous," who comment regularly on this blog, concludes his contribution to the previous post with: What if [the Leave voters] did understand? What if they aren't stupid, or brainwashed? What if they just disagree with you on a fundamental level? This is a serious, and politically delicate, point which deserves more than a comment in reply. Here it is. Unlike Michael Gove, and I suspect most of the public when they pause to think seriously about it, I have not "had enough of experts." Indeed, I tend to trust them in many aspects of my daily life. In many cases ...

Posted by Peter Wrigley on Keynesian Liberal

Russ Ballard was the lead singer and guitarist of rock band Argent. He wrote perhaps their best known song "God gave rock and roll to me", which was later taken up by Kiss. He's had great success as a song-writer. He wrote rock songs such as "Since you've been gone", which was a hit for ... Continue reading Russ Ballard and "Fly Away" – one that got away

Posted by paulwalternewbury on