Andrew Marr & Gordon Brown

Did the host cross the line into bad taste? Polis director Charlie Beckett thinks not:

As Guido himself pointed out, it was mainstream media that was also indulging in this very personal speculation...So by the time Marr got around to putting this bit of gossip to the Prime Minister, it was already up and running. In that sense I think it was a legitimate question. Brown was obviously surprised and upset by the question but he answered it very clearly: ‘No’. In that sense Marr was doing his job, which is partly to allow politicians to categorically kill off untrue allegations...

I  am deeply fascinated and concerned about the PM’s character. I think the country is, too. It is an issue. His leadership style is bizarre. It has had a deep effect upon this government’s effectiveness and his Party’s catastrophic decline in the polls. Brown’s reaction

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Among the Lubavitch

Englishman in New York revisits his youth as he mingles with believers on the streets of Crown Heights.

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Notebook

“I liked your father, General,“ he said more earnestly, “and if the word of his grandson is not to be taken against that of half-caste muleteers, we shall have reached a stage of altruism in this country so complete that I do not think we can survive…

“Yes," he said on the doorstep of "The Coffee House", I look on this as the plumb centre of the universe. Others may claim the North Pole, Rome, Montmartre – I claim the Coffee House, oldest Club in the world, and I suppose by plumbing standards, the worst.”

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Upbeat

I have a feature in today's Sunday Times on the "Spirit of Jazz" exhibition which opens at the Getty Images Gallery in the West End next month. Jamie Cullum selected the shots. This one -  capturing showman Lionel Hampton at London's Empress Hall back in 1956 -  is among my favourites.

[Credit:  Jack Esten/Keystone/Getty Images]

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Us, them

It's getting harder and harder to persuade people in this country to learn a foreign language. Lamenting our "deliberate descent into parochialism", the Economist's Charlemagne scans the schools stats:

One column reports on upper secondary students in EU countries who do not study foreign languages at all. This line in the table shows a line of tiny numbers: lots of zeroes, a couple of low percentages (eg, 3.9% of Spanish teenagers learn no foreign languages at school, a blip for Ireland (18.8% without language lessons) and then comes Britain, where more than half of all schoolchildren in upper secondary education (51.4%) learn no foreign languages at all.

This is, of course, the result of a deliberate government policy. In 2003, foreign languages became voluntary for pupils in England and Wales over 14... The British government would also doubtless argue that years of compulsory French lessons left pupils

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