"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"describing a place and society they're not familiar with." !!! ???
Kind of one of the whole frigging points of a novel.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
I don't read Dickens but I like the idea that some people still do. My parents got the full set hoping us kids would read them. Something I find slightly moving looking back. All part of them doing their best for us.
Its funny what kids pick up.
This morning while driving the kids to school, Taylor Swift's new song, the Fate of Ophelia, came on. My youngest piped up that the song was was based on a book by Shakespeare. I asked how she knew that, and she said she'd read it.
Not the original version of Hamlet, we'd got the kids when they were little (she's still little to be fair) a set of books of Shakespeare reimagined for kids. She'd read it and recognised Ophelia from that.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
But that is very much a head in the clouds, philospohical, conversation, like talking about whether an acceptable fuel consumption for an ICE vehicle is 400mpg or 1000mpg. The Conservatives were maundering on about "10s of thousands" for more than a decade, whilst doing little practival and achieving even less.
So we end up with more and more extreme Planet Zarg rhetoric from the likes of Farage and Kemi and Jenrick trying to out-nutter Nigel (which is very difficult) creating straw men, the practicalities are not addressed at all, and they end up wanting to throw out the values which have given us 80 years are relative peace and stability.
Practically, we had net migration of 0 plus or minus tens of thousands (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) for almost all of those 80 years. Its only from the late 90s onwards that's not been the case.
Yes - generally I agree. However, we start from here !
Personally I think politically the outcome will be determined by a combination of how quickly and effectively (including possibly not at all) the measures from the current Government have an impact, and how quickly and effectively that feeds through to general consciousness (including those groups that will be saying "nothing has happened" even if something has happened).
To my eye we need clear and obvious 'improvements in numbers' by the year ending December 26 at the latest, when we will get the numbers through sometime during 2027. Technically it could be one year later, but I think that it needs 12-18 months to start having an impact on popular consciousness and then needs another year to reinforce the impression.
2024 net immigration is already well down on the 2022/3 peak. 2024 numbers are less than half 2022. 2025 figures will be lower still.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is my nomination for best first sentence. What ? Why ? Where ? You have to know more.
Well I'm going to have to rethink my low opinion of President Donald Trump. It's hard enough to agree one Ukraine peace deal but it appears he's managed to agree two. One with Ukraine and one with Russia.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure".
I cannot remember when my mother died. Probably the 1990s, give or take a decade.
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
What rubbish. The government sets the rules in which the OBR works to and has complete freedom to change, scrap or ignore them if it wants to.
However, as Truss found, that is not a free lunch and the government should expect to pay higher borrowing costs as a result.
I feel like the OBR is the only thing stopping this country having a fiscal trajectory as bad as France or the US.
It is a significant restriction on the CoE though, the unelected head of the OBR having a significant influence on the CoE's policy making. It may be net positive but it is giving significant power to an unelected and effectively unaccountable group.
I was very confused as to who had influence over the Church of England when I read this...
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
On what he had every reason to believe would be the last day of his undistinguished political career Roger Barlow awoke in a state of sexual excitement and with a gun to his head, the one fading as he became aware of the other. Johnson, Boris. Seventy-Two Virgins.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure".
Someone I knew had his novel commissioned on the strength of his opening line:
"It was one of those things that children always forgot, the moment they were old enough and big enough to reach the light-switch"
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
I don't read Dickens but I like the idea that some people still do. My parents got the full set hoping us kids would read them. Something I find slightly moving looking back. All part of them doing their best for us.
Its funny what kids pick up.
This morning while driving the kids to school, Taylor Swift's new song, the Fate of Ophelia, came on. My youngest piped up that the song was was based on a book by Shakespeare. I asked how she knew that, and she said she'd read it.
Not the original version of Hamlet, we'd got the kids when they were little (she's still little to be fair) a set of books of Shakespeare reimagined for kids. She'd read it and recognised Ophelia from that.
Taylor was recently over here filming the music video for another single from the album at a shopping centre in Croydon.
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
What rubbish. The government sets the rules in which the OBR works to and has complete freedom to change, scrap or ignore them if it wants to.
However, as Truss found, that is not a free lunch and the government should expect to pay higher borrowing costs as a result.
I feel like the OBR is the only thing stopping this country having a fiscal trajectory as bad as France or the US.
It is a significant restriction on the CoE though, the unelected head of the OBR having a significant influence on the CoE's policy making. It may be net positive but it is giving significant power to an unelected and effectively unaccountable group.
I was very confused as to who had influence over the Church of England when I read this...
The Chancellor Of The Exchequer is responsible for wittering on in a pointless manner about great issues. While everything carriers on below them, without noticing.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Also very good (although I sense not really my thing). And quite a nice contrast to your other one.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
Exquisite maybe but is Dickens really the great writer we crack on about ? This section is the one often quoted because perhaps it is a parody of itself. Sorry but I prefer the Brontes, Thackery, well just about anyone really. What is Pickwick Papers beyond four tedious fops running around southern England in search of a plot, which they never find ?
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
Exquisite maybe but is Dickens really the great writer we crack on about ? This section is the one often quoted because perhaps it is a parody of itself. Sorry but I prefer the Brontes, Thackery, well just about anyone really. What is Pickwick Papers beyond four tedious fops running around southern England in search of a plot, which they never find ?
I find Dickens quite variable. To my mind his best book, one I have read several times and would read again, is Great Expectations. A genuine page turner!
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Indeed. Trouble is that somehow we need to alight on a deal that both Russia and Ukraine can swallow.
There is no deal that Russia can swallow because they've failed to achieve anything like what they expected to achieve at a cost far, far greater than they expected.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is my nomination for best first sentence. What ? Why ? Where ? You have to know more.
It is a wonderful first line. It scans like good poetry,
I think Labour wins the next GE - as long as they stick with Starmer.
The Reform lead isn't that big, they're slipping back and 4 more years of relentless attacks from everyone will see them fall further. Plus huge tactical voting against them.
The Labour Government is unpopular - but look how well Starmer polls on PM head to head vs Farage and Badenoch. Ultimately, that will be what is decisive.
The risk for Labour is changing leaders.
Streeting would also win the GE for Labour - but members won't make him leader.
The huge risk for Labour is the members electing Rayner. If she gets the 20% of MPs then she is highly likely to win as members love her. But she's not credible as PM - it will be Truss Mark 2 - the public will not elect her as PM.
If Rayner wins, I think the Conservatives win the next GE - especially if they replace Badenoch with a more attractive leader. But I think even Badenoch beats Rayner.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
Israel started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict. The Assad regime fell. Syria was not attacking Israel. Israel marched through a UN buffer zone and took Syrian territory, while also bombing Syria.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Indeed. Trouble is that somehow we need to alight on a deal that both Russia and Ukraine can swallow.
I think the focus atm isn't a deal, it's the two sides trying to steer Trump's reaction to no deal. Russia's goal is for him to blame Ukraine and withdraw US support. For Ukraine/Europe the goal is he blames Russia and maintains (or even increases) support.
They shouldn't have been included in the first place
Why? I find it an odd view from a Conservative.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically **this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
If anyone wants to buy a luxury car with their own money then of course they should be able to do so.
What they shouldn't get is a grant to do so, and a tax exemption to do so.
If we want to make vehicles VAT free to help people get about then that should apply to absolutely everyone. Or absolutely everyone should be paying VAT and of course there should be more VAT (as it is a percentage) on luxury vehicles.
Giving people a tax break on VAT that is more than most working people's car costs outright is absurd.
Hadn't picked up on the VAT rules around this. That's a fair point.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
Exquisite maybe but is Dickens really the great writer we crack on about ? This section is the one often quoted because perhaps it is a parody of itself. Sorry but I prefer the Brontes, Thackery, well just about anyone really. What is Pickwick Papers beyond four tedious fops running around southern England in search of a plot, which they never find ?
There's a richness, vitality and humanity in Dickens which is compelling.
The Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first novel, is really the last gasp of the 18thC picaresque novel. Not much, if any, plot "just" a series of adventures. But Sam Weller, who basically takes over the book, is an immortal character, and some of the set-pieces such as the election, are hugely entertaining, as well as being valuable historical accounts. For a Dickens beginner, not a bad idea to start here.
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
Israel started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict. The Assad regime fell. Syria was not attacking Israel. Israel marched through a UN buffer zone and took Syrian territory, while also bombing Syria.
Syria started the war with Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas both started fighting Israel and Hezbollah were operating within Syria even prior to the fall of Assad. The Assad regime fell to be replaced with proscribed Islamists terrorists* that supported wiping out Israel too.
* The UK Government's definition at the time, not even counting Israel's views.
Your repeated, false, insinuations that Syria is a poor defenceless nation attacked unprovoked, are entirely fallacious and false.
Listening to the debate in the house there is a combined attack on Farage and Reform over Gill and their Russian connections so much so I think this may become far more of a problem for Farage going forward
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
Locations of cemeteries along the Ukraine/Republic of China border
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
Israel started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict. The Assad regime fell. Syria was not attacking Israel. Israel marched through a UN buffer zone and took Syrian territory, while also bombing Syria.
Syria started the war with Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas both started fighting Israel and Hezbollah were operating within Syria even prior to the fall of Assad. The Assad regime fell to be replaced with proscribed Islamists terrorists* that supported wiping out Israel too.
* The UK Government's definition at the time, not even counting Israel's views.
Your repeated, false, insinuations that Syria is a poor defenceless nation attacked unprovoked, are entirely fallacious and false.
List attacks by Syrian military on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Oh, there aren't any.
OK, list attacks by the Syrian opposition (who took over Syria in 2024) on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Still none.
Even the Israeli government makes no claims of Syrian attacks as being the casus belli.
Yes, the Assad government had been supporting Hezbollah, who have periodically attacked Israel, but the Assad regime had just fallen. Israel attacked the new government, who had been fighting against Hezbollah, who supported Assad.
"Yesterday, the Ukrainian team returned from Geneva and provided a complete report along with an updated framework. Communication with the American side continues, and I am grateful for all of America’s efforts and personally for President Trump’s efforts."
I think Labour wins the next GE - as long as they stick with Starmer.
The Reform lead isn't that big, they're slipping back and 4 more years of relentless attacks from everyone will see them fall further. Plus huge tactical voting against them.
The Labour Government is unpopular - but look how well Starmer polls on PM head to head vs Farage and Badenoch. Ultimately, that will be what is decisive.
The risk for Labour is changing leaders.
Streeting would also win the GE for Labour - but members won't make him leader.
The huge risk for Labour is the members electing Rayner. If she gets the 20% of MPs then she is highly likely to win as members love her. But she's not credible as PM - it will be Truss Mark 2 - the public will not elect her as PM.
If Rayner wins, I think the Conservatives win the next GE - especially if they replace Badenoch with a more attractive leader. But I think even Badenoch beats Rayner.
Rayner is clearly politically important and valuable to Labour, but she was a useless cabinet minister. I too that it would be a similar story if she were PM.
But the next election is anyone's guess; a complete lottery of circumstance.
Listening to the debate in the house there is a combined attack on Farage and Reform over Gill and their Russian connections so much so I think this may become far more of a problem for Farage going forward
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
I read Bleak House every two years, and it has never done me any harm.
I was an Eng Lit undergraduate in the dinosaur age. To me it was like being on holiday to be told to go away and read Middlemarch and then talk about it. It was assumed before you started that you could read Middle English reasonably fluently, that you knew enough about the classical and Christian background to comprehend how western cultural history worked, and that you could manage in Latin, and that while reading Middle English texts and Shakespeare etc you also learned Anglo-Saxon. Dickens you read for fun in the holidays.
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
Comiserations. But at least you've created smeething. More than most of us have done.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure".
Just worked out I'm going to be affected by the two grand NI pension change. The BBC news is going on about it like it's an issue for only ~ 100k earners, I'm on basic rate ! How little is the average person putting in their pension ?!?!
The Washington Post say it is a 19 point plan that European leaders have proposed and that Russia is likely to reject the deal.
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
Why do we need 19 points?
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries. 2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine. 3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
I've got a proposed 3-point peace deal as well.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries. 2) Israel pays compensation to Syria. 3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
Who started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict again?
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
Israel started the 2024 Israel/Syria conflict. The Assad regime fell. Syria was not attacking Israel. Israel marched through a UN buffer zone and took Syrian territory, while also bombing Syria.
Syria started the war with Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas both started fighting Israel and Hezbollah were operating within Syria even prior to the fall of Assad. The Assad regime fell to be replaced with proscribed Islamists terrorists* that supported wiping out Israel too.
* The UK Government's definition at the time, not even counting Israel's views.
Your repeated, false, insinuations that Syria is a poor defenceless nation attacked unprovoked, are entirely fallacious and false.
List attacks by Syrian military on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Oh, there aren't any.
OK, list attacks by the Syrian opposition (who took over Syria in 2024) on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Still none.
Even the Israeli government makes no claims of Syrian attacks as being the casus belli.
Yes, the Assad government had been supporting Hezbollah, who have periodically attacked Israel, but the Assad regime had just fallen. Israel attacked the new government, who had been fighting against Hezbollah, who supported Assad.
You need a casus belli to start a war, Syria and Israel are already at war, so no casus belli required.
Yes Israel took advantage of their enemy falling to secure a better footing, that's just smart, when you're at war and your enemy shows a weakness during the conflict. If Putin fell and Ukraine reacted to take some land to help them with the war, would you object to that?
You are again, falsely, insinuating that the new regime is peaceful. This is a new regime we proscribed as terrorists.
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
Comiserations. But at least you've created smeething. More than most of us have done.
Thanks. No doubt you will (given the urge) when you're free of workaday concerns. I did it in a period between jobs.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
Exquisite maybe but is Dickens really the great writer we crack on about ? This section is the one often quoted because perhaps it is a parody of itself. Sorry but I prefer the Brontes, Thackery, well just about anyone really. What is Pickwick Papers beyond four tedious fops running around southern England in search of a plot, which they never find ?
I find Dickens quite variable. To my mind his best book, one I have read several times and would read again, is Great Expectations. A genuine page turner!
I agree with that. Generally I prefer the more comedic books but I also think Copperfield is the best. Despite the title, which deterred me from reading it until I'd read almost all the others, I've always enjoyed Bleak House too, where this thread started.
If anyone has never read Hard Times - well done, you've done something more worthwhile instead!
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
I read Bleak House every two years, and it has never done me any harm.
I was an Eng Lit undergraduate in the dinosaur age. To me it was like being on holiday to be told to go away and read Middlemarch and then talk about it. It was assumed before you started that you could read Middle English reasonably fluently, that you knew enough about the classical and Christian background to comprehend how western cultural history worked, and that you could manage in Latin, and that while reading Middle English texts and Shakespeare etc you also learned Anglo-Saxon. Dickens you read for fun in the holidays.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth".
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
Exquisite maybe but is Dickens really the great writer we crack on about ? This section is the one often quoted because perhaps it is a parody of itself. Sorry but I prefer the Brontes, Thackery, well just about anyone really. What is Pickwick Papers beyond four tedious fops running around southern England in search of a plot, which they never find ?
There's a richness, vitality and humanity in Dickens which is compelling.
The Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first novel, is really the last gasp of the 18thC picaresque novel. Not much, if any, plot "just" a series of adventures. But Sam Weller, who basically takes over the book, is an immortal character, and some of the set-pieces such as the election, are hugely entertaining, as well as being valuable historical accounts. For a Dickens beginner, not a bad idea to start here.
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
Comiserations. But at least you've created smeething. More than most of us have done.
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
With all due respect, I rather think that your second paragraph makes for a more interesting opening for your novel than your actual opening.
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
Just worked out I'm going to be affected by the two grand NI pension change. The BBC news is going on about it like it's an issue for only ~ 100k earners, I'm on basic rate ! How little is the average person putting in their pension ?!?!
Yep - it's going to impact a lot of companies who will suddenly be putting 15% - 23% less into pensions depending on what is announced.
It does mean I will be working less going forward - don't need to earn that much and if I can't throw as much into the pension little need to do so.
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
With all due respect, I rather think that your second paragraph makes for a more interesting opening for your novel than your actual opening.
Maybe write a second novel about writing the novel?
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
With all due respect, I rather think that your second paragraph makes for a more interesting opening for your novel than your actual opening.
Maybe write a second novel about writing the novel?
It would be less traumatic than "Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less".
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
Ugh! The stench was disgusting! SeanT managed to summon up enough strength to pick himself up off the filthy floor of the dark and dingy room he found himself in. And then he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left buttock, and his trousers started peeling apart! SeanT screamed in anguish, but the relentless agony soon blacked him out and he fell back onto the grubby cobblestones. Only then did the malicious Bum-throbber crawl out of SeanT's trousers, another victim for it to feed on...
Exquisite maybe but is Dickens really the great writer we crack on about ? This section is the one often quoted because perhaps it is a parody of itself. Sorry but I prefer the Brontes, Thackery, well just about anyone really. What is Pickwick Papers beyond four tedious fops running around southern England in search of a plot, which they never find ?
I find Dickens quite variable. To my mind his best book, one I have read several times and would read again, is Great Expectations. A genuine page turner!
I agree with that. Generally I prefer the more comedic books but I also think Copperfield is the best. Despite the title, which deterred me from reading it until I'd read almost all the others, I've always enjoyed Bleak House too, where this thread started.
If anyone has never read Hard Times - well done, you've done something more worthwhile instead!
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Quite - the level of derangement is hilarious. Because of course all other politicians were saintly youngsters.
The problem is, less that he was a twat when he was young. Lots of people are. The issue is there's reason to think he's just as much of a twat now he's old.
No one is pretending that "all other politicians were saintly youngsters", or indeed that any of us were. Times and mores change, and we change with them - but it's not at all clear that Farage has changed in the slightest. He certainly seems very unwilling indeed to say that himself.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
I read Bleak House every two years, and it has never done me any harm.
I know it's quite long, but I'm surprised it takes you that long.
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Ah, the great global Jewish conspiracy.
You unpleasant little man
Read it again and you will see Roger is debunking interference from Mossad in Tel Aviv. Diaspora votes arise organically and have long been a factor in Eurovision.
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
Just worked out I'm going to be affected by the two grand NI pension change. The BBC news is going on about it like it's an issue for only ~ 100k earners, I'm on basic rate ! How little is the average person putting in their pension ?!?!
A scarily small amount. Personally I put nothing in but I have a very fore-sighted employer...
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
Shame they couldn't find someone better than a Ted-Talker for the Reith lectures though.
Assume from your confident verdict that you listened to it? Some uncomfortable thoughts for everyone, you may even have enjoyed his skewering of liberal complacency and the EU/Europe.
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
I’m not a lefty but the chancellor should be setting her budget irrespective of what some government scoring system says it needs to be. It’s a combination of making up silly rules and having a fairly pointless organisation marking her homework
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
What percentage of sixth formers became prefects though?
My novel that I failed to get published because none of the people in the industry have any taste started with, "Something funny happened today. Funny peculiar, I mean".
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
Comiserations. But at least you've created smeething. More than most of us have done.
Sadly, he hasn't.
(UK, dialect, obsolete) To smooth. 1586, Ambrogio Calepino, Dictionarium Latinum: "A polishing, Smeething or hiking"
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
Sounds wonderful, Burges - definitely the best of times.
Except dickens was paid by the word so wrote way too many of them - it was the worst of times
Just had a read of his Wikipedia. How could they not know he would say things like that?
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
Shame they couldn't find someone better than a Ted-Talker for the Reith lectures though.
What he said is true though
The greater the truth, the greater the libel.
Where are we on that million squillion Trump v BBC lawsuit btw?
Dunno, since Trump seems to have forgotten about it (I HAVE THE SMALLEST ATTENTION SPAN), but a Florida court just kicked out a similar bollocks Trump libel suit against the Guardian.
They shouldn't have been included in the first place
Why? I find it an odd view from a Conservative.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically **this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
Because the biggest saving is proportional to the value of the car (VAT).
A better solution would be to cap the value of the benefit rather than exclude some cars but that’s probably not as simple to do
"Reform UK's support has surged in London while backing for Labour languishes at a record low in the capital, according to a new poll. The latest Savanta survey released today found Nigel Farage's party were supported by 23 per cent of voters in London, up from 15 per cent in June. This put Reform ahead of the Tories, who were down one percentage point to 20 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent (-2) and Greens on 10 per cent (-3). Support for Labour was at 32 per cent, which is the joint lowest recorded by Savanta - who have polled London voters since 2020 - following the same result in June."
I think Labour wins the next GE - as long as they stick with Starmer.
The Reform lead isn't that big, they're slipping back and 4 more years of relentless attacks from everyone will see them fall further. Plus huge tactical voting against them.
The Labour Government is unpopular - but look how well Starmer polls on PM head to head vs Farage and Badenoch. Ultimately, that will be what is decisive.
The risk for Labour is changing leaders.
Streeting would also win the GE for Labour - but members won't make him leader.
The huge risk for Labour is the members electing Rayner. If she gets the 20% of MPs then she is highly likely to win as members love her. But she's not credible as PM - it will be Truss Mark 2 - the public will not elect her as PM.
If Rayner wins, I think the Conservatives win the next GE - especially if they replace Badenoch with a more attractive leader. But I think even Badenoch beats Rayner.
Four more years of unpopular and inept decisions. Labour’s vote share in local elections is now hilariously bad.
Comments
Kind of one of the whole frigging points of a novel.
This morning while driving the kids to school, Taylor Swift's new song, the Fate of Ophelia, came on. My youngest piped up that the song was was based on a book by Shakespeare. I asked how she knew that, and she said she'd read it.
Not the original version of Hamlet, we'd got the kids when they were little (she's still little to be fair) a set of books of Shakespeare reimagined for kids. She'd read it and recognised Ophelia from that.
What ? Why ? Where ? You have to know more.
NY Times headline
Johnson, Boris. Seventy-Two Virgins.
"It was one of those things that children always forgot, the moment they were old enough and big enough to reach the light-switch"
Which one though !!!
The Church of England….
Order Order
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgexj5271l1o
Starmer and the EU have played a blinder if the reports are true.
1) Ukraine and Russia withdraw back to their respective 1991 boundaries.
2) Russia pays compensation to Ukraine.
3) Putin and his leadership face justice.
What are the other 16 points required?
What should the odds be for Labour most seats at the next election?
BFX offering 3.85.
1) Israel and Syria withdraw back to their respective 2024 boundaries.
2) Israel pays compensation to Syria.
3) Netanyahu and his leadership face justice.
It wasn't Israel, was it?
Don't attack another country if you aren't prepared to lose the war you start.
They have an opportunity to take on Farage and Reform over their links with Russia as a consequence of Gill's imprisonment
The Reform lead isn't that big, they're slipping back and 4 more years of relentless attacks from everyone will see them fall further. Plus huge tactical voting against them.
The Labour Government is unpopular - but look how well Starmer polls on PM head to head vs Farage and Badenoch. Ultimately, that will be what is decisive.
The risk for Labour is changing leaders.
Streeting would also win the GE for Labour - but members won't make him leader.
The huge risk for Labour is the members electing Rayner. If she gets the 20% of MPs then she is highly likely to win as members love her. But she's not credible as PM - it will be Truss Mark 2 - the public will not elect her as PM.
If Rayner wins, I think the Conservatives win the next GE - especially if they replace Badenoch with a more attractive leader. But I think even Badenoch beats Rayner.
Which is very unlikely. But Russia being the sole objector is a win in itself.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce86d771x7jo
The power of instagram.
(Tbf, I appreciate that the impact of ever-growing numbers of visitors has to be mitigated. Sad, though.)
Who knew?
Shocked!
The Doctor was extremely credible on WATO.
By contrast Tim Mongomerie in his defence says "He's one of the most supportive politicians of Israel!"
This has got some way to travel
The Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first novel, is really the last gasp of the 18thC picaresque novel. Not much, if any, plot "just" a series of adventures. But Sam Weller, who basically takes over the book, is an immortal character, and some of the set-pieces such as the election, are hugely entertaining, as well as being valuable historical accounts. For a Dickens beginner, not a bad idea to start here.
* The UK Government's definition at the time, not even counting Israel's views.
Your repeated, false, insinuations that Syria is a poor defenceless nation attacked unprovoked, are entirely fallacious and false.
Essentially, following the Stonehenge model? (150k visitors pa or so)
Could Betfair be persuaded to offer odds on its being introduced before the next election ?
Alternatively - https://youtu.be/-hVniYanWbw?si=SAm2pe05mB7x5me1
100k words, 10k cigarettes, 1k coffees, 0k interest - apart from one reader at Bloomsbury who said some bits made him giggle.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15324345/Poll-Reform-oust-Sadiq-Khan-London.html
OK, list attacks by the Syrian opposition (who took over Syria in 2024) on Israel in 2024 or 2023. Still none.
Even the Israeli government makes no claims of Syrian attacks as being the casus belli.
Yes, the Assad government had been supporting Hezbollah, who have periodically attacked Israel, but the Assad regime had just fallen. Israel attacked the new government, who had been fighting against Hezbollah, who supported Assad.
https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1993303700249448764
"Yesterday, the Ukrainian team returned from Geneva and provided a complete report along with an updated framework. Communication with the American side continues, and I am grateful for all of America’s efforts and personally for President Trump’s efforts."
But the next election is anyone's guess; a complete lottery of circumstance.
I was an Eng Lit undergraduate in the dinosaur age. To me it was like being on holiday to be told to go away and read Middlemarch and then talk about it. It was assumed before you started that you could read Middle English reasonably fluently, that you knew enough about the classical and Christian background to comprehend how western cultural history worked, and that you could manage in Latin, and that while reading Middle English texts and Shakespeare etc you also learned Anglo-Saxon. Dickens you read for fun in the holidays.
But at least you've created smeething. More than most of us have done.
How little is the average person putting in their pension ?!?!
There were many strikes from within Syria to Israel, here is just one source listing some of the incidents prior to Israel's major operations: https://israel-alma.org/weekend-update-july-12-14-2024-0200-pm-northern-arena/
Yes Israel took advantage of their enemy falling to secure a better footing, that's just smart, when you're at war and your enemy shows a weakness during the conflict. If Putin fell and Ukraine reacted to take some land to help them with the war, would you object to that?
You are again, falsely, insinuating that the new regime is peaceful. This is a new regime we proscribed as terrorists.
@Mexicanpete may get his wish that Gill damages Farage and Reform by association
If anyone has never read Hard Times - well done, you've done something more worthwhile instead!
You unpleasant little man
https://fightingfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Escape_from_the_Sorcerer
review:
https://ffreviewermalthusd.blogspot.com/2020/09/escape-from-sorcerer.html
free download!
https://fightingfantazine.co.uk/product/issue-6-may-5th-2011/
It does mean I will be working less going forward - don't need to earn that much and if I can't throw as much into the pension little need to do so.
Lib Dem Top Trumps:
https://www.aldc.org/2024/11/lib-dem-deck-get-your-top-trump-style-lib-dem-mp-playing-cards/
Rutger Bregman
@rcbregman
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.
They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
https://x.com/rcbregman/status/1993246411291603301?s=20
"Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Dutch title: Gratis geld voor iedereen) promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas: a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutger_Bregman
Shame they couldn't find someone better than a Ted-Talker for the Reith lectures though.
Personally I put nothing in but I have a very fore-sighted employer...
Some uncomfortable thoughts for everyone, you may even have enjoyed his skewering of liberal complacency and the EU/Europe.
Don't understand why Farage doesn't just apologise for things he said in his youth and now regrets. Unless he's worried it will lose him support?
(UK, dialect, obsolete) To smooth.
1586, Ambrogio Calepino, Dictionarium Latinum:
"A polishing, Smeething or hiking"
A better solution would be to cap the value of the benefit rather than exclude some cars but that’s probably not as simple to do