Monthly Archives: November 2013

Vincent Hanna: Master William Pitt, the Even Younger, are you disappointed? Pitt the Even Younger: Yes I’m horrified. I smeared my opponents, bribed the press to be on my side, and threatened to torture the electorate if we lost. I fail to see what a more decent politician would have done. Blackadder the Third, Dish and Dishonesty What was Britain’s most famous rotten borough? Old Sarum? […]

The rotten part of the constitution

Amongst the seemingly essential accoutrement for a dictator is the acquisition of a short and snappy title. The trend was set by Adolf Hitler becoming der Führer – a term that literally translates as leader but which also has an almost mystic sense of being a guide. Plenty of other dictators had similar names, but few were as effective as this Germanic invention and some sound […]

Leading by example

Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 5 November 2013 One of the most incongruous images present in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar is Josef Stalin as a DJ. The Soviet dictator loved to put music on for his guests and “presided over the American gramophone … putting his favourite records on”. Green Lanes was, for much of its history, a drovers’ road […]

Fordlandia! Where civilisation conquers the wild and untamed heart of the great Amazon rainforest. A city forged in adversity, the triumph of will and the product of the daring imagination of Henry Ford. This is America’s new frontier; a wilderness transformed by technology, labour and innovation into the prosperous hub of the world’s rubber production. To some it was a daring vision, a glimpse of the […]