Ian Chapman-Curry
Episode 592 of This American Life (Are We There Yet?) wasn’t so much This American Life as This Greek Refugee Camp Life. Ira Glass and Miki Meek presented stories from refugee camps across Greece. The resulting programme showed the power of telling individual stories. It humanised the crisis like nothing else I’ve come across. The stories were varied. We had teenagers desperate to get back into […]
This American Life | Are we there yet? Stories from the camps
What is the most exclusive club for professional chefs? Those with Michelin stars? Those with three Michelin stars? What about Le Club des Chefs Des Chefs? This isn’t a mutual admiration society for chefs, but a grouping of those elite kings of the kitchen who cook for the world’s leaders. Whether it is the President, the Queen, the Holy Father or the Chancellor, somewhere behind the scenes is an […]
Power kitchens and the world of culinary diplomacy
As the Grand Old Party winds down in Cleveland, Ohio, Republican supporters can take some comfort from the direction of polls in recent days. Although most polls and predictions continue to give Hillary Clinton a decent lead, it isn’t quite the commanding or comfortable position that she held a few weeks ago. More worrying for the Democrats is that the polls have narrowed in the key […]
US Presidential election – weekly polling round up – I
Three axis politics [table id=2 /] Static version
Politics in 3D
. This week, on the Vaguely Interesting Podcast, we go back to the 1930s and visit the Croydon Airport to meet the Englishman who started the Spanish Civil War. Just after seven o’clock in the morning on 11 July 1936, Captain Cecil Bebb prepared his plane for take-off. At a quarter past seven, Captain Bebb, along with his navigator Major Hugh Pollard and two female friends, […]
The Englishman who started the Spanish Civil War
What happened when steam engines were placed in the tunnels of the world’s first underground railway? The Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863 and, for the first 45 years, it ran steam trains. There are few sounds as emotive as the chug, clatter and whistle of a steam train. Now that the national network is powered by diesel and electricity, we are free to romanticise the age […]