The tarting-up of Northern Irish villages on the route between Belfast International airport and Lough Erne, the resort which hosted the G8 summit, has been likened to the ‘Potemkin villages’ employed by the Soviet Union in the 1920s to impress foreign visitors. But is the concept of a Potemkin village itself a deception?
— The origin of the term lies in a visit by Catherine the Great to the Crimea in 1787, when Grigory Potemkin, governor general of Russia’s southern provinces, is supposed to have constructed fake villages along the Dneiper River to impress the royal party.
— The story is now disputed, with some suggesting rumours were spread to discredit Potemkin.
— Historian Aleksandr Panchenko has taken a slightly different line, suggesting that the mock-ups did exist, but were not an attempt to deceive, but an impression of what Crimea could one day look like.
Long memory of the law
Former TV presenter Stuart Hall, who has been jailed for 15 months for sexual offences, achieves an unfortunate record, in being jailed 45 years after the first of the offences took place. Some others convicted a long time after the event:
— Ian Phipps, jailed April this year for the rape of a 14-year-old girl in 1986
— Paul Hutchinson jailed in 2010 for the murder of Colette Aram, 16, in 1983
— Brian Field, 65, jailed in 2001 for murder of 14-year-old Roy Tutill in 1968
— Last year nine war criminals in Italy and one in Germany were jailed for offences committed in the second world war
Worthwhile Canadian initiative
The appointment of Mark Carney as Governor of the Bank of England has led to comparisons between the British and Canadian economies during the recession.
When Deal or No Deal hit our TV screens in 2005, it soon became a national obsession. I remember hotfooting it from the train station to my house, desperate to make sure I didn’t miss it. This was the most infatuated I’d been with a TV show since I was child. Noel Edmonds, the show’s presenter,
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