Send your comments on Clive's blog posts to clivecomments@aol.com
Upright citizens - not just blackguards and bravoes but the village Hampden too - did not shrink from force to get their way. There was a continual hubbub of verbal violence: newspapers, cartoons, and street ballads attacked their targets with scabrous insults and Billingsgate scurrility; political sermons thundered from pulpits. Casanova was astonished when Drury Lane patrons, finding a different play performed from the one billed, threatened to wreck the theatre unless the manager, David Garrick, abjectly apologized: "On your knees," they yelled; Garrick knelt. Even so Drury Lane was wrecked by riots in 1743, 1750, 1755, 1770, and 1776.
Roy Porter, English Society in the 18th Century.
Quite possibly the most pretentious establishment in the known universe. It's so chic, in fact, that it doesn't even bother to put its name above the entrance. Inside, the lighting is so painfully dim you risk tripping over the super-cool media types hanging around in the bar.
Singing Dirty Low Down & Bad. Contemporary blues doesn't get much better than this.
...I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. I love plot, and how can you plot a novel if you don't know the ending first? How do you know how to introduce a character if you don't know how he ends up? You might say I back into a novel. All the important discoveries - at the end of a book - those are the things I have to know before I know where to begin. I knew that
Cookham at the turn of the century was, like many Thames-side villages, strongly imbued with a spirit of independence, of a kind which is more usually associated with islands. Surrounded as it was by floods that cut the village off from the outside world, its isolation, which for us was so attractive, was seldom disturbed; only when the regular summer visitors arrived to take up their rooms in the beflowered hotels and cottages. True, the railway had been there for some years but, unlike the motor car, it had not much altered Cookham's way of life. Folk sitting in their cottages could still call out "Good night!" to Sammy Sandalls or to Mr Plumbridge with nothing more by which to recognise the passer-by than the sound of his feet on the ground.
Gilbert Spencer, Stanley Spencer.
Unfortunately, I won't quite be in striking distance of Sète, birthplace of one of one of my heroes, Georges Brassens. A few weeks ago, around the time of the French elections, I posted an animation inspired by his early hit, La Mauvaise Réputation. Here he is in person, singing Le Gorille, a ditty about an over-sexed primate that escapes from its cage and goes off in pursuit of a rather pompous judge. Not surprisingly, the song scandalized some listeners back in the early 1950s.
Jake Thackray, a huge admirer of Brassens, once...
John Naughton stumbles across a website which imagines what celebs might look like without the clever lighting. Yes, that is Madonna, as only the milkman has ever seen her.
Advertisement
1 Yes campaign launch will cause problems — for the independence movement - Ysenda Maxtone Graham
2 Obama vs Balls - edited by Graham Storey, Margaret Brown and Kathle
3 Cameron's attack on Balls is strangely endearing - Lloyd Evans
4 Susie Squire to take over as Tory press chief - James Forsyth
5 What Farage's offer means for David Cameron - James Forsyth
For the full blogroll click here.
1,700 Unusual Christmas Presents Request Catalogue 01935 815 195 Quote SPEC10 for 10% discount www.presentfinder.co.uk
Pimilco based Florist with online ordering Web: www.olivebranch.net Tel: 020 7630 1868 Fax: 020 7233 8844
62 Shore Road, Warsash, Southampton, SO31 9FT Telephone: 01489 578867 Web site: www.ruffs.co.uk
Apollo Magazine | Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms
Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP
All Articles and Content Copyright ©2012 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved
Taken on the way home from visiting my Dad in hospital.
