Enjoyable piece by Christopher Hitchins in the Guardian of January 31.

The King’s Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human-interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history. One of the very few miscast actors – Timothy Spall as a woefully thin pastiche of Winston Churchill – is the exemplar of this bizarre rewriting. He is shown as a consistent friend of the stuttering prince and his loyal princess and as a man generally in favour of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis presented by the abdication of the prince's elder brother, King Edward VIII.

It’s good to see that Hitch is catching up with Memex, which, on January 8 observed:

Given that it’s supposed to be a true story, the film’s portrayal of Winston Churchill’s role in the Abdication crisis seems misleading. The impression is given that Churchill — played by a smouldering cigar ably brandished by Timothy Spall — was firmly behind Bertie and — by implication — implacably hostile to Eddie. But that wasn’t the case. For example, he and Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper proprietor, were in favour of allowing the King to put his case (for being allowed to marry Wallis) to “the people” via a radio broadcast. This idea was blocked by the Cabinet, on the grounds that it would undermine the principle of a constitutional monarchy (which is that the only body entitled to decide these matters is Parliament).

“If two speeches and a social-media site was all we needed to spread democracy, why did we invade Iraq? Why didn’t we just, I don’t know, poke them?”

Jon Stewart

From Al Jazeera.

From today’s Financial Times…

The rain beats down on a small Irish town. The streets are deserted. Times are tough. Everyone is in debt and living on credit. A rich German arrives at the local hotel, asks to view its rooms, and puts on the desk a €100 note. The owner gives him a bunch of keys and he goes off for an inspection.

As soon as he has gone upstairs, the hotelier grabs the note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher hurries down the street to pay what he owes to his feed merchant. The merchant heads for the pub and uses the note to pay his bar bill. The publican slips the note to the local hooker who’s been offering her services on credit. She rushes to the hotel to pay what she owes for room hire. As she puts the €100 note on the counter, the German appears, says the rooms are unsuitable, picks up his €100 note and leaves town.

No one did any work. No one earned anything. Everyone is out of debt. Everyone is feeling better. And that is how a bail-out works.

The stallholder, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Covent Garden, London, yesterday. I found myself thinking: does he really have to pack away all that stuff every night?

Spotted in Covent Garden today.

Looks as thought the only thing Paul Smith had left to sell was a purple trilby.

Denis Dutton, the philosopher-cum-scourge-of-mediocrity is dead at the ridiculously young age of 66. He was one of the joys of academic life, and a luminary of the early Web. I first got to know him when I was asked one Christmas for a list of my favourite web sites, and I put his Arts and Letters Daily at the very top because it was the opening page of every browser that I used. Shortly after that, I received a nice, sardonic email message from him, and thus began a sporadic but always enjoyable correspondence. Robert Cottrell has a nice tribute to him on The New York Review of Books blog.

Dutton’s genius lay not in his philosophy, but in his capacity to provoke intelligently. Look at him speaking at a TED conference last year, and you see not only a thinker, but also a charmer, a gentle bruiser, an ironist. Even more than an intellectual, he was an intellectual entrepreneur. In The Art Instinct he found a captivating idea that built on winning themes—evolution, beauty, sex—and he advanced it as if it were truth. At Philosophy and Literature, his great legacy was not so much the promotion of good writing, which all journals have as their object, but the destruction of bad writing, which few in the academy were brave enough to attempt. At ALD, he found his relative advantage not in the production of fine writing, but in the boutique retailing of it, to the benefit of everyone: writers, readers, Dutton himself.

At the end of his piece, Cottrell says “If only there were a ‘more»’ link at the end of Denis Dutton’s life, I would be clicking on it now.”

Me too.

Brian Whitaker has tuned into Colonel Gaddafi’s views about the Net.

Even you, my Tunisian brothers. You may be reading this Kleenex* and empty talk on the Internet.

This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Internet, and you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of “Facebook” and “Kleenex” and “YouTube”! Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods?

*Footnote: “Kleenex” is apparently Gaddafi-speak for WikiLeaks.

One wonders if any of this has anything to do with the fact that WikiLeaks leaked the name of the Colonel’s voluptuous ‘nurse’?