Wonderful, sometimes exasperating, writer. I loved his newspaper columns and will always be grateful to him for How To Travel With A Salmon: and Other Essays. And for his wonderful 1994 essay on why the Mac is a Catholic machine, and the IBM PC a Protestant one. The NYT obit here

1984 photograph by Rob Bogaerts

If people ask me to recommend a good book about journalism (well, British journalism anyway), I always point them at Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Of the two, I prefer Scoop, and I was reminded of it by Roy Greenslade’s Guardian piece occasioned by the provisional death certificate recently issued for Lord Lucan. Greenslade reminds us of Garth Gibbs, the archetypal Fleet Street hack who diligently pursued the ‘missing’ Earl for many years:

Gibbs, who died in 2011, was renowned for his tenacious belief that he was only ever one step behind the missing peer. Not that he minded, however, because he spent a great deal of his employer’s money travelling the world while failing to get his man.

Reflecting on the matter after 30 years of fruitless journalistic endeavour, he explained that he had adopted as his motto an observation made by the canny Sunday Express editor John Junor: “Laddie, you don’t ever want to shoot the fox. Once the fox is dead there is nothing left to chase.”

Gibbs wrote: “With that in mind I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”

Indeed, he had. He failed to locate him after three weeks in Cape Town, which was handy because Gibbs, a South African, was able to visit friends and relatives. Nor did he find him in Macau or Hong Kong or the Bahamas.

Colleagues who liked to toast Gibbs’s heroic failures were particularly surprised when he announced that he was off to check on a Lucan sighting in Wales. They couldn’t see the point: no sunshine and no expenses.

And thus was born one of Fleet Street’s enduring myths: the plotting by reporters and photographers of sightings of Lucan in remote hotspots across the globe that ensured first class travel to spend sun-kissed days in five-star hotels.

Sigh. Those were the days.

While I’m on the subject, the latest theory about Lucan’s fate is that he shot himself at John Aspinall’s zoo, after which his body was fed to a tiger. The really shocking thing about that is that nobody saw fit to call the RSPCA.

The ones you won’t find in the Chilcot Report. Courtesy of Michael Spicer’s blog.

Lovely Observer piece by Will Hutton:

Sometimes dealing with the past is easy. A few months ago, the college where I am principal (Hertford, Oxford) handed back a precious 16th-century atlas to its rightful owners – the Humboldt University library in Berlin. A British soldier had been offered it in exchange for a packet of cigarettes in the devastated streets of Berlin in May 1945. His father was an Oxford professor and for most of the last 70 years the Ortelius atlas had been first buried in his room and then locked in the college safe.

The 70th anniversary of the end of the war seemed as good a moment as any to return it. But what struck everyone at the small ceremony was how affected the German delegation, including representatives from the embassy and Humboldt University, were by what we were doing. It was a symbol of Germany’s relationship with Britain within a peaceful EU, an act of friendship all the more valuable because it had been freely offered and a recognition that history had moved on.

But more often than not history’s legacies are more unforgiving – a minefield in which yesterday’s and today’s realities seem irreconcilable…

Isaiah Berlin was a past-master of the genre. Here he is writing¹ to Marion and Felix Frankfurter in December 1934 about Richard Crossman, who was then a Fellow of New College, Oxford (where Berlin had been briefly a Fellow), and whom I think Berlin detested.

“Crossman is trying to sell his soul again & finding no buyers even among those who think he had one.”

I worked for Crossman briefly, when he was Editor of the New Statesman. He was an interesting man, but not a nice one.

HT to Jon Crowcroft, who has forgotten more about music than I will ever know.

Lovely advice from Hannah Jane Parkinson

Here’s what I suggest. Taking a cue from my boss, I’m going to be turning on my out-of-office reply when I actually leave the office in the evening. On time. For homeworkers, or flexiworkers, that means when your shift is over. Because an automated out-of-office email that reads:

“Hi. Thanks for your email. I’ve finished work for the day and I have left the office. I’m now bathing my son and about to watch that new drama – the one with Ben Whishaw – and have a couple of glasses of pinot, but if anyone asks I’ll say it’s one. Might even order a takeaway. I’ll be able to answer your email in the morning, when I’m being paid to, at around 9am. Have a lovely evening too.”

JFK and Jackie leaving the hotel in Fort Worth to get the flight to Dallas.

We went to see The Martian on Saturday. Interesting and enjoyable, but not as good as Apollo 13. We saw it in 2D, but a friend who saw it in 3D described it as “unmissable”. In structure, it’s a bit formulaic — if you’ve ever read one of those ‘how to write a screenplay that sells’ books you’ll be able to predict how it evolves. But the big difference with Apollo 13 is that The Martian is pure fiction, whereas the earlier film told a version of something that actually happened, and so was significantly more gripping.

Still, the takeaways from The Martian are useful. They include:

• Never underestimate the significance of potatoes
• The importance of ‘maker’ and DIY skills — the very skills that are atrophying because of our addiction to black-box technologies with “no user-modifiable parts”.
• The usefulness of engineers and geeks, especially those who are good with mathematics.