Eastward Ho
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22/08/2009
I am off to Berlin tomorrow to interview Nigel Kennedy after his jazz gig at the Brandenburg Gate, which is part of the closing celebrations of the World Athletics Championships. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it… Back soon.
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Friday Historical: The Comedian Harmonists
For today’s Friday Historical afternoon, here’s one of my favourite songs from The Comedian Harmonists – the smash-hit singing sextet of Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, subsequently banned by Hitler and thus forced to disband.
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Hey, Monster!
My piece about Nigel Kennedy is in The Independent today. I removed most of the four-letter words – it freed up some space!
And now, here is what happened when I met him in Berlin a couple of weeks ago…
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A Bluffers Guide to the BNP
The Community Security Trust, which works to protect Britain’s Jews from fascism in all its forms, has a very good guide to how the BNP uses media friendly language to cover up its racism. I was very critical of how the broadcasters give neo-Nazis powder puff interviews in the Observer at the weekend. (You can see Andrew Marr’s dismal effort here.) So I should say in fairness that the tape showing Griffin explaining to American neo-Nazis how he would play the media was dug out by the BBC’s better journalists.
Tolerating the intolerant
“For those who thought that a global pandemic would sound the death knell for identity politics, think again”
How to prevent the next pandemic
‘I have been reporting as a science journalist for years that the world is at increasing risk of pandemics like this; that this was predicted; that we know what we need to do to prepare and we simply haven’t done it; and that more and worse pandemics are coming so we need to do that, now’
D’où parles-tu? The post-truth world
Power, illusion and the open society: how postmodernism undermines our foundational concepts


