… in 1944, the Allied landing at Normandy got under way. Wonderful, sobering account of it here.

… in 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded just after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary. It was one of the most depressing days of my life. The New York Times has asked three of his children to write short pieces about their father.

If, like me, you were puzzled by the ludicrous spectacle of the French President drooling over the British constitution on his first State Visit, then here is the explanation: he was crazed by sex, having taken up with his new wife, the delectable Carla Bruni. Confirmation of this is provided by a new book, Carla and Nicholas: The True Story, due out in France this week.

Excerpts in Le Point make the, er, point. “It was instant”, Carla told the book’s authors. “I didn’t expect anyone so funny, so lively. His physique, his charm and his intelligence seduced me. He has five or six brains.”

This startling neurological discovery was made at the fateful dinner where the couple first met. “The president had eyes only for [Bruni]”, one of the other guests told the authors. “Several times, Carla Bruni’s hair grazed the president… Not only is Nicholas Sarcozy subjugated by her, he’s absolutely crazy… He doesn’t stop flattering her all evening…They act as if they’re alone in the room. Nothing else and no one else matters to them. The dinner ends around 2am. Carla’s obviously tipsy; she’s really drunk and smoked a lot! At the end of the meal, she asks the president if he has a car”.

Thanks to today’s Irish Times for this important information.

Gorillapod wars. Seen in Ndiyo the other day.

The 2008 Reith Lectures have just started on BBC Radio 4. The lecturer this year is Jonathan Spence of Yale, a noted expert on China. His subject is “Vistas of China”. Listening to the first one, a short and pedestrian discourse on Confucius delivered in a monotone, I was struck by the extent to which one of the beacons of British public service broadcasting has been bowdlerised and mangled.

The Reith Lectures were founded in 1948 as a way of bringing important and difficult ideas to the widest possible audience. The series was kicked off by Bertrand Russell on “Authority and the Individual”. The 1952 lecturer was Arnold Toynbee (on “The World and The West”). In 1955, Niklaus Pevsner lectured on “The Englishness of English Art”. In 1957 George Kennan talked about “Russia, The Atom and The West”. In 1966, it was J.K. Galbraith’s turn (on “The New Industrial State”). In 1967, the anthropologist Edmund Leach lectured on “A Runaway World”; in 1970 it was Donald Schon on “Change and Industrial Society”. In 1984, the lecturer was John Searle, who took as his subject “Minds, Brains and Science”. For a complete listing of Reith Lecturers, see here.

As a kid growing up in the intellectual backwoods of rural Ireland, the Reith Lectures were some of the formative experiences of my adolescent life. I was exhilarated by what they represented — great intellects giving of their best; 50 minutes of uninterrupted talk delivered in crystal clear but unpatronising terms, with transcripts available later in the week in The Listener, then the BBC’s house magazine (for which I later wrote).

But then, somewhere along the line, someone in the BBC seems to have decided that the uncompromising full-length lecture was too demanding a form for the contemporary audience, and so the series was deliberately lobotomised. The length of each lecture was reduced to about 20 minutes. Each talk is now delivered to an invited audience with a different venue (sometimes in a different continent) each week. A TV ‘personality’ (currently Sue ‘Legs’ Lawley, formerly hostess of Desert Island Discs) was imported to introduce the speaker and moderate the ‘discussion’. The only thing missing is a set of PowerPoint slides.

The result is an unmitigated shambles. And a disgrace for a public service broadcaster.

Meanwhile, that whirring noise you hear is that of John Reith rotating in his grave at 720rpm.

I’ve just learned that Judy Bailey, who was Superintendent of Computing Services at Cambridge when I was a graduate student, died on May 6. She was a formidable but nice woman with whom I had many, er, discussions about my disk quota on the university’s time-shared mainframe. (Note for younger readers: disk space was once a precious resource.)

Her obituary on the Cambridge web site reveals that she was also an accomplished and dedicated musician — something I hadn’t known. May she rest in peace.

Times obit here.