Volcanoes

Thursday

The Spectator

How often do volcanoes erupt?

Under control UK air space is to be reorganised – the first wholesale change since the 1950s – to improve flight times and reduce delays. It was Britain that pioneered air traffic control with the world’s first control tower – a timber shed on a platform 15ft above the ground – at Croydon Aerodrome in 1920. The tower was given responsibility for all aircraft airborne, with which it had basic radio connections. From 1928, control centres in Norfolk and Kent allowed radio signals to be ‘triangulated’ for the first time, allowing the position of an aircraft to be determined even if the pilot was lost. Battle ready The government seemed

Wednesday

James Delingpole

A Soviet version of Martin Parr: Adam Curtis’s Russia 1985-1999 –TraumaZone reviewed

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the one where he frightens off his fans by abandoning the trademark flourishes that made him so entertaining and instead goes all pared-down and raw and grim. If you don’t know or remember what those trademark flourishes were, let me refer you to a cruelly funny pastiche which you can easily find on YouTube called The Loving Trap. This sends up poor Adam as a pioneer of the collage-umentary, a genre resembling ‘a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretence to narrative coherence’ which ‘vomits grainy library footage onto the screen to

Thursday

Adam Nicolson

Geology’s dry, rocky road

There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it be poeticised? Has the oh-my-oh-me-ism of recent nature books got out of hand? Can one not see a blackbird now without considering the nature of consciousness and the tragedy of existence? In short, shouldn’t the nature writers calm down a bit and become ‘more honest’, as one contributor to this row put it? Egregious sentences were quoted out of context. Angry and hate-filled expressions were used. The tone seemed wildly out of whack with the slightly technical question at hand — how to describe plants, places and animals — but