Personal, Whimsy & Caprice

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live

Satire lives. I thought that everyone had been enjoying Tina Fey’s totally brilliant impersonation of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live for the past few weeks. But several people I know haven’t seen it and more than that, the Governor of Alaska’s genuine appearance on SNL last night has just been reported on Radio 4 …

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Reporting America, Reporting Britain

The Eccles Institute for American Studies hosted a fascinating talk at the British Library on Monday evening. Entitled ‘Alistair Cooke: Reporting America, Reporting Britain’ and commemorating the centenary of the great journalist and broadcaster’s birth, the panel reflected on the differences and similarities in journalistic culture both sides of the Atlantic. (Really a terrible pic, …

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My Old Boiler

It certainly has a Tardis-like charm and has provided me with a lot, an awful lot, of hot water. But it’s 23 years old and has been replaced by an upstart combi boiler. If your boiler says ‘Made in West Germany’ on it, may I suggest it’s time to bid farewell?

The Guardian on Class and Diet. Would you like Fries with that?

Using Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food as a hook, the Guardian published an interesting piece about how class is a key determinant of diet and always has been. There’s much lefty hand-wringing about working folk munching on takeaways and high-calorie, high-fat food with little nutritional value. Not so much angst though that they wouldn’t take …

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The Brighton Trunk Murders: A Very Modern Tale.

The Brighton Trunk Murders are the stuff of legend. In Brighton, people still talk about the unrelated murders of two women whose remains were left in trunks in 1934. The crime involving the pregnant decapitated torso with ‘pretty feet’ was never solved. In the other case, Tony Mancini was acquitted of the murder of Violette …

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