Entries by Michael

An event that didn’t quite happen

Been to see ‘Greenwich Degree Zero’, the installation by Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy at the Beaconsfield Gallery in London (and later, Rod tells me, in various other venues), which reconstructs an event in 1894 when a French anarchist was killed when the bomb he was carrying detonated outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Except […]

Memories of an Opinion Poll

A bunch of recent television programmes about Harold Wilson brings back to mind an experience I had in 1965, when I had a job between school and university with National Opinion Polls. In the 1964 General Election which brought Wilson to power, his preferred foreign minister, Patrick Gordon Walker, lost his seat. Wilson named him […]

Not civil war?

Iraq: maybe it isn’t civil war, but then it’s anarchy. Absence of law and order. That’s what Bush and Blair have achieved.

Oh What a Lovely Democracy

Oh What a Lovely Democracy If the treasurer of the Labour Party didn’t know about those loans; and if the people who loaned the money were then put up for peerages; and if peerages are given by No.10; then the conclusion is obvious: who knew was No.10. Adorno used to speak about the coincidence which […]

If I’d started

If I’d started this blog a few weeks earlier, I would no doubt have used it to report on my recent trip to Tehran for the Fajr Film Festival, but since not, my diary of the visit has instead been published in the first online edition of Vertigo Magazine. I still find it difficult to […]