Category UK

Henry George and a land value tax in Scotland

From Farmers Weekly, a British magazine: A land value tax could be introduced in Scotland as part of the country’s ongoing reform journey. The proposals are included in the Land and property taxation in Scotland: Initial scoping of options for…

Tearjerkers in translation

It is said that the 1967 song Comme d’habitude, the French precursor to My Way, was …a bleak reflection on the breakup of his [Claude François’s] affair with [France] Gall. François co-wrote the lyrics with Gilles Thibaut; Jacques Revaux composed…

La vie martienne

Everyone knows that, in 1968, David Bowie – or rather David Jones as he was known then – wrote English lyrics to the French melody that would later become a global hit with Paul Anka’s English text. My Way. Anthony…

Poor Icarus

Turning away from Auden’s Icarus, if only for a moment. What follows is my approximate prose rendering, line by line, of a poem written in Russian in 1984 or a little earlier. Its  author, Dmitry Shagin, is a major figure…

Everything falls into place

Philip Kennicott writes in The Washington Post: There is [a?] painting called “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” once thought to be by Pieter Bruegel, now believed to be a high-level copy of a missing original by the same artist.…

Schumann’s Piano Quintet in “The Favourite”

Impressed by Eileen Jones’ review – even after making adjustments for her bias/angle – I probably expected too much of Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest work. What grated in particular was his use of Schumann’s Piano Quintet as musical background for more…

The totem of the English

One more look at Philip Hensher’s letter to the LRB comparing the personal attacks on Corbyn and Thatcher: Alice Thomas Ellis called her [Thatcher] ‘a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutritionless, platitudinous parings…

Dehmel

Jonathan Gaisman writes of Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg’s early work (1899) based on a poem by Richard Dehmel: Looking at the poem on its purely literary merits, it is indeed difficult not to wince, or, at the mention of the man…

Which Ireland?

Mark O’Connell writes this in a piece on James Joyce’s proposed reinterment in Dublin: Joyce could neither live nor work in the Ireland of his time – a suffocating theocracy that foreclosed every possibility of freedom: intellectual, sexual and existential.…