No considered review this time, but some quick reflections and links to some other reviews, set out at The Event Library

Also posted at https://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2018/11/17/demons-of-the-punjab.html.

On Tuesday night I was discussing broadcasting history with someone and mention was made of Asa Briggs. Within an hour his death was announced. A few hours later, I learned of Sylvia Anderson's death; and now, Cliff Michelmore, a broadcaster who was moving into a retirement phase in my childhood but who still loomed large. The sense of twentieth- ( Read more... )

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( Spoilers! )

I'm about to fly south (on wheels) for the rest of the winter, but first, some links:

Where will we live?
James Meek surveys the background to the current British housing crisis and looks at the competing interests making a bad situation worse today, in the London Review of Books

2015: An Ugly StramashThe post-independence vote scenarios which ( Read more... )

Improving London's transport
The National Archives have a Flickr set of photographs from a 1946 edition of The Railway Gazette, illustrating improvements made to the London Underground between the late 1930s and mid 1940s. Areas covered include the construction of the present Kings Cross St Pancras Metropolitan and Circle tunnels and platforms, ( Read more... )

...and which some of you will doubtless have seen elsewhere, so apologies for the repetition.

The stuck society
Bagehot in The Economist writes "A supply of people able to work for less than their cost of living gives parsimonious firms a convenient pool of temporary workers. This is how two-tier labour markets, with a group of insiders enjoying job ( Read more... )

• The Naked and the TED
  
  • A somewhat vicious swipe from Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic at some recent publications under the TED imprint, with a side order of Niall Ferguson-bashing. I know very little about the subjects under discussion. Nevertheless, I share the reviewer's lack of enthusiasm for the sort of technocracy which he thinks is being ( Read more... )

I'm not usually one for linkspam, but here are a few items which have distracted me today:

• For sale: Bush House. A landmark of BBC World Service history.
  
  • Christopher Middleton at The Telegraph mourns the end of an era; but how often is 'Lillibulero' played on the BBC World Service these days? Its associations are questionable to say the least.
• Auction ( Read more... )

More of my own thoughts on The Doctor's Wife under the cut; but first a link to Matt Hills's latest Doctor Who post on the Antenna blog, concentrating on how Gaiman's authorial signature is accommodated within a television series which already has an anointed auteur:

Neil Gaiman's Doctor Who: Fan Service Meets the Junkyard Look

( Happy Families )