April 13, 2014

So it looks like we’ve identified the new Con Coughlin. Here’s a piece in the Torygraph that blames everything SIS might have done wrong in the Bush years on Tony Blair, built entirely on a single SIS source. When I first saw it, it weirdly didn’t have a byline, although it since acquired that of…

Read More Coughlin 2.0

@yorksranter On the one hand, it seems bonkers. On the other, the Mail's reaction explains why he did it… — Stian Westlake (@stianwestlake) April 6, 2014 We refer of course to this Daily Hell story, in which best mate of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron, is supposedly astonished and deeply shocked to hear…

Read More Check the meetings register in a month’s time

The UsVsTh3m crowd really gave me the horrors with this app, at least when it was returning UK No.1s. Mine has a fast start – Odyssey, in July 1980 – but then plunges into two Spice Girls tracks and, Christ!, Wet Wet Wet. And Frankie Knuckles has left the building. This of course was an…

Read More Music.

So I recently read Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and also Svetlana Alexeivitch’s La fin de l’homme rouge : Ou le temps du désenchantement . The first is well known to readers, the second is a kind of oral history of the end of the Soviet Union as seen by self-identifying…

Read More Joint review: two books on Russia, and sausages