Gove Versus Hove: Round One
‘Events, dear boy, events.” House Of Cards and other such series show that Harold Macmillan was never more astute than in that deft analysis of the political scene. Manifestoes and volumes of theory can be undermined in a bolt from the sky, bed – or another department. Hove has this week been dealt a double [...]
Phil Ramone
Phil Ramone: obituary It sometimes seems that the only musicians not to work with Phil Ramone were – The Ramones. A producer and engineer continually at the forefront of changing technology, he never paraded himself with the flamboyance of Phil Spector or even the widely avuncular presence of George Martin; content with the back of [...]
An Epic Stroll
The freezing Monday morning had begun grey – and by noon had become black, all around me a tumult which I had never experienced before. This might sound – as if from a war-zone – an extravagant claim to make of an hour’s walk along some roads which straddle the border of Hove and Brighton. [...]
A Monkey At The Funeral
Last Thursday lunchtime I arrived at Hove Town Hall for another of those civic events where one discreetly ensures that that one is not at a table in the company of those people who have been so very unpleasant in their denigration of one’s efforts – as such, it is a setting which amounts to [...]
Jennie Rooney’s Red Joan
Red Joan Jennie Rooney (Chatto and Windus £12.99) A week is a long time in espionage. In Jennie Rooney’s third novel the contemporary week in question straddles several decades. As with her Inside The Whale and The Opposite Of Falling, past and present – sometimes continents apart – work in tandem, alternating and overlapping, the [...]
Truck
“Keep On Truckin’.” First used in a Thirties blues song and made popular several decades later in a cartoon by R. Crumb, this phrase could also hang from a lamp-post on Wall Street. First used as a verb in the thirteenth century, truck derived from various European forms, themselves rooted in medieval Latin, and meant [...]
Tush
In his recent, Fifties-set thriller False Negative, Joseph Koenig takes one of many opportunities to refer to a girl’s tush. The word – for bottom – has been one of those American terms not to cross the Atlantic (I first noticed it when Ronnie Spector used it in her memoirs to speak, admiringly, of her [...]
Hamartia
In the New York Times, Parul Sehgal discusses essay writers and notes that “Susan Sontag suffers from the sama hamartia” as befell choreographer Julie Taymor when thinking that she could make something of Spiderman: The Musical. That is, “the lack of self-knowledge [which] makes self-betrayal inevitable”. The term is from the Greek for fault or [...]
Triskaidekaphobia
The thriller writer Lee Child not only has a Manhattan apartment with a tremendous view but the productivity which netted him that has brought a separate one, in the same block, to keep up so unstinting a pace. As he notes recently in the New York Times, such diligence entails keeping the second place free [...]
And So This Is Christmas…
A small thing, perhaps, but it has been on the mind. Yesterday I brought three children’s coats and took them along to Brighton Town Hall, one of several collection points for Brighton and Hove Coats For Kids. There are those who cannot afford even a secondhand coat. And a coat – hat, scarf and gloves [...]
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Christopher Hawtree is the Green Party Councillor for Central Hove but items are posted here in a personal capacity as an individual.
