Splinters

As I spent part of my childhood being bored rigid by Jehovah's Witnesses, and part of my late teens having exactly the same done to me by would-be evangelists from the Militant Tendency, I find it hard to take an interest in the strange after-life of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Still, the blog coverage of Boris's newly appointed cultural advisor, Munira Mirza [left] is pretty diverting. The director of the Social Affairs Unit weighs in:

While the Revolutionary Communist Party has ostensibly dissolved itself, its former personnel are still much in evidence and are still operating as a tight-knit group...Munira Mirza herself runs what in less charitable times would have been described as a front organisation - the Manifesto Club. Its strap-line is "history is still young". This might seem just an anodyne bit of snappy copy, but it fits rather well

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Hitchens & Israel

His contrarian thoughts on the nation's 60th anniversary: 

I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. Do I think it ridiculous that Viennese and Russian and German scholars and doctors should have vibrated to the mad rhythms of ancient so-called prophecies rather than helping to secularize and reform their own societies? Definitely. Do I feel horror and disgust at the thought that a whole new generation of Arab Palestinians is being born into the dispossession and/or occupation already suffered by their grandparents and even great-grandparents? Absolutely, I do

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Still supreme

Motown star Mary Wilson talks to a journalist during the opening of "The Story of The Supremes" at the V&A in London. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the exhibition explores the singers' influence on today's music, and the role they played in changing racial perceptions. [Photo credit: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images]

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That poll

The results are in from The Debatable Land's quest to find the most over-rated and under-rated American presidents. Ronald Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower came top in the respective categories. (Which is exactly the choice I made, as it happens.) Alex Massie is at pains to stress that his voting sample was fairly evenly divided between Left and Right. Perhaps he should do one on prime ministers next.

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Deathly

Btw, Alex also records the full details of a Senate resolution which would have made a perfect appendix to one of Evelyn Waugh's minor masterpieces. Let's hear it for the National Funeral Director and Mortician Recognition Day.

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