Zelensky says ready to quit if it brings peace, pushes back on US demand for Ukrainian minerals | CNN Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he was “ready” to resign as leader if it meant it would bring to his country, suggesting he could swap it for NATO membership - while also pushing bac...

February 23rd, 2025.

To be fair to Orbán, he conceded very quickly when only about 60% of the votes had been counted, because it was already such a landslide that he knew there was no chance of pretending otherwise without looking ridiculous.

The government’s proposing to make it a compulsory 80 for peers, legislation that’s not expected to be especially contentious. As for MPs, it’s a basic democratic principle that any adult can stand for Parliament with very few restrictions.

In Britain, the mandatory retirement age for
high-level legal professionals such as judges is 75, which was felt to strike the right balance between the obvious value of decades of experience and the ability to reliably draw upon that experience without other justified concerns coming into play.

The emptiest threat imaginable is “well, I’m never writing for you again!”, as if there was any chance of them being asked. And not one of these writers amounted to anything later, whereas I’ve been only too happy to give an early professional leg-up to genuinely talented writers.

They also tended to ignore the house style and word count, sometimes seriously overshooting the latter, and would then refuse to make the necessary cuts. So I’d have to do it myself, invariably without losing anything important (or what I regarded as important). Which RUINED their work, of course.

Two decades ago, I had to edit the work of a fair number of people who’d never written professionally before. Many were great, but some screamed blue murder if I tweaked so much as a comma—and they invariably needed a lot more than that to make their work publishable.

There was one piece that I couldn’t bring myself to read in print because I realised far too late that I’d made a really appalling factual error. Years later, I finally read it… and a sub-editor had discreetly corrected it.

(It was so obviously a mistake that they didn’t bother running it by me!)

I usually despise what I’ve written at the time of submission, but once I’ve completely forgotten about the writing process I can re-read my stuff a few years later with genuine pleasure. But it usually takes that long to convert me.

They did once attach my name to something I didn’t write, mind. It was of a Polish film that I’d seen, but I was pretty sure I’d never written it up, and in any case it didn’t read like me. I forget who actually wrote it, but I think they apologised to her in the next issue.

There are reviews published under my name in Sight & Sound whereby I remember absolutely nothing about the entire process: neither watching the film nor writing the review. But they read like me, and are backed up with viewing notes and email correspondence, so…

My first draft got 1,250 words into a 1,500-word commission and he hadn't even left Czechoslovakia. I was *almost* tempted to end with "And then he went to the US and made some more films", in inverted homage to obituarists who similarly elided Forman's Czech period, but reluctantly cut it instead.

Taxidermia (LE) A taxidermist is determined to leave behind a great work of art when he dies in this disarming black comedy horror from writer-director György Pálfi.

And, with immaculate timing, the world premiere Blu-ray edition has just been announced.

You won't be at all surprised to hear that Norstein is not at all keen on the use of computers in animation on any level.

(“I don’t like computer images; they are too pure, too distilled, they lack the salt impurities and micro-organisms necessary for a person to develop resistance to diseases.”)

It's impossible to exaggerate how great this film is. I practically wore out my off-air VHS recording in the 1990s, a time when I'd never have dreamed of getting my hands on anything better quality.

In this particular case you genuinely don't need to have seen it: the mere description of it depicting the Obamas as monkeys is 100% accurate. So nobody should be allowed to get away with the "haven't seen it" excuse.

For 99% of politicians world-wide, this would be career-ending. And should be.

Ah yes, the time when Vance referred to Trump as the new Hitler.

And then decided a few years later that he was perfectly cool with that.

I started reading it thinking "Bet they're too snobbish to include Sharknado", and was very pleasantly surprised when I got to number eight.

It's a great post-Christmas British tradition; we don boxing gloves and fight our way into the sales. Followed, as I said, by copious spending, thus achieving full satisfaction.

Last time I bought a clock was after some copious spending in the Boxing Day sales.

Yes, it wasn't at all hard to see why it had been programmed! And since Bacon was still alive at the time, it may well have been his own personal selection.

I saw Le Sang des Bêtes without any advance warning as to its content as part of a series of free screenings at what was then the Tate Gallery in parallel with a Francis Bacon exhibition—it was the supporting short to either Battleship Potemkin or L'Âge d'Or.

It was, um... quite an experience.

"Withering sarcasm" and "playful banter" are one and the same thing as far as the British are concerned. As demonstrated by pretty much any random conversation between me and my wife (and indeed me and my daughter).

Surely it was withering sarcasm? I'd be amazed if pretty much any British person wrote something like that with a straight face. And the "withering sarcasm" theory ties in with the tone of the other emails as well.

To be fair, there are three proper crossings (the third being round the corner) within easy walking distance, and I can appreciate that they've been more conveniently sited in terms of balancing traffic and pedestrian needs. It's just that there's a quicker method for more daredevil types.

My regular walk to Tesco involves crossing a busy road. Do I (a) walk several hundred yards down the road and cross at the lights? (b) walk several hundred yards up the road and cross at the lights? (c) gleefully indulge in a thrilling traffic-dodging run straight across?

Take a wild guess.

How would they have known? And if they did know, given the story's obvious importance in the immediate wake of the 2008 crash, why did the news not emerge till now?

Starmer *was* warned that Mandelson was risky, but that particular subject didn't come up.

Starmer wasn't even an MP when the Mandelson-Epstein shenanigans were going on. And if Gordon Brown didn't know about them until just now, as he's just claimed, there's precious little chance that Starmer did.

The cover of the Vinegar Syndrope release of 'Piotr Szulkin's Apocalypse Tetralogy', featuring a helmeted individual whose face has been replaced by a spiral, and the entire artwork has been covered with 21 yellow silhouettes of rats.

See also the way that the perfectly adequate, long-extant "tetralogy" has been supplanted by the grotesque "quadrilogy". I had nothing to do with this box set being correctly titled, but I was thrilled when my contributor copy arrived.

This was one of the harder ones to record a commentary for because all the info I had going in was (a) that it was Norstein's first solo film as director, and (b) that he thought it was "complete rubbish", a comment made when he was trying to persuade his biographer Clare Kitson not to watch it.