During Covid lockdown in 2020, the actor Simon Russell Beale, who lives in the town, recorded some readings from the work of my man Richard Jefferies for the Marlborough Literary Festival. You can still find them on the festival's website. The extract below is from one of those readings. It's taken from Jefferies' essay Wild Flowers, which is included in his collection The Open Air, published in 1885. If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it not seem to ...
I review Andrew Lownie's Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York in the latest Liberator. Here he talks about what the revelations contained in the latest batch of Epstein files mean for the Royal Family - Andrew and Fergie in particular.
Peter Mandelson (Photo- CNN) The resignation of Peter Mandelson from the Labour Party and from the House of Lords, in the shadow of renewed scrutiny around Jeffrey Epstein, is significant - not because it closes a chapter, but because it underlines how unfit our political system is to deal with elite misconduct, reputational damage, and accountability. The media reaction has been as predictable as it was inevitable, with many gleefully inferring criminal guilt by association and extending that to the Prime Minister, who is of course associated with Mandelson. There should indeed be questions to be asked of Keir Starmer, ...
Timothy Snyder reports from a frightened city: "In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a "large deportation" promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians." "I think the way he is trying to interfere with our democracy, generally our country, is quite outrageous. For the richest man to come here with his totally unfounded and ...
"A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living". These were the words of John Dewey, from his 1916 book, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Without prior knowledge of Dewey's work, I found that he captured my belief in democracy and its purpose in just one sentence. I have never believed that democracy is simply ticking a box or a group of people simply making decisions on behalf of others. It is about individuals making a collective decision about how their country should be run, what their ...
I will be honest with you - I have never been impressed by Peter Mandelson. From the apocryphal moment when he confused mushy peas for guacamole on a fleeting visit to his North East Constituency whilst an MP there has always been, "something of the night" about him! I believe that he is one of the people that has brought politics into disrepute and that was before all the stuff that has come out about him and Epstein. Mandelson was a mover and shaker between the 10-year Government of Tony Blair, but he was always mired in controversy about the ...
Keir Starmer showed poor judgement by appointing Peter Mandelson as the ambassador to the UK, however, the new release of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein suggests that his error was just the latest in a long line of poor judgement calls going back to the early days of Tony Blair's first administration and most probably earlier than that. It has been revealed that the former cabinet minister was apparently disclosing highly sensitive government information to Epstein over a significant period of time. The Guardian says that Mandelson was business secretary during Brown's premiership, when he appears to have leaked an ...