Warpaint: The Story Of Camouflage - BBC Sounds How the military were helped by bohemians to create effective camouflage.

Couldn’t do it nowadays… an unexpected reprise for this programme I made with John Goudie in 2002.
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Thank you. I’ll look out for it next time I visit…

Where was the original building? From the point of view of the State the war high formally finish until 1919 and there were requisition or leased places to return, or not, all over the place…

And you’re spot on re Rawlinson’s End. I always meant to write about Stanshall but this seems to be as close as I have got….

Thank you for that. Dorset remains fertile ground even though I am not often there these days. After a pause of several decades, I am at work on the third sequel to that book: another investigation prompted by the same wanderings, which circumstances have sometimes obliged me to call ‘research’…

In a fit of petulant rage, the latter had ripped his mother out of the picture, having fallen out with her. I remember respecting Anthony Pitt-Rivers for talking openly about this dark moment in his ancestral history.

ii). A scene in which Anthony Pitt-Rivers led me from his mansion in Hinton St Mary to the tithe barn theatre in which Oswald Mosley once spoke. He was carrying the remains of a portrait which had once shown the parents of his predecessor, the Nazi squire George Pitt-Rivers.

i). The Turkish Arabesque music we had playing on the car radio as a distancing device as we drove up to Bryanston School. I have forgotten the name of the singer but she was much admired by the taxi driver who drove me into Istanbul from the airport, and later delivered a cassette to my hotel.

I hadn't seen this for decades either. We had a great summer making the programme, which drew quite heavily on my researches for The Village That Died For England, and then a luxuriously long edit in which we tightened the thing but lost quite a lot too. For what it is worth, I most regret:

A few words for Rebecca Gransden’s recent novella from Tangerine Press, which claims to have been ‘publishing misfits, mavericks and misanthropes since 2006’

Yes indeed. Missed that piece!

Well said. Though wasn’t ’the Yookay’ coined by Raymond Williams? In Towards 2000 if I remember correctly (which I may not)…

Just heard these great Fado musicians at a restaurant in Mouraria, Lisbon. Riccardo Parreira was particularly brilliant on the Portuguese guitar: a descendant, as I was informed outside the gents, of John Dowland’s melancholy English lute.

Congratulations John. Just great to have kept going…. Much looking forward to reading it in due course.

Glad to say that programme was also remembered by Gwyneth Williams who became controller of Radio 4 and asked me for two series of The English Fix in the wake of Brexit. Each prog was about a moment/perspective in which ‘England’ was intensified by perceived encroaching threats. Silence ever since!

Late to see this but I was indeed there for one Gulbenkian performance. Ben Kingsley was brilliant as Gramsci - never better in my recollections of his later roles - and the point of political theatre was very well made - ie that it is never just about line-pushing. Poor University of Kent…

Indeed. I still remember Ben K’ fabulous performance as Gramsci in ‘Occupations’, during its appearance at the Gulbenkian Theatre, University of Kent, 1960