Laughing is good for you, even in excess.

Then again, it's nice to hear when one of your own early bits of high-class cobblers is still remembered.

Siri: define literary fiction.

Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet.
This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.

I'm 64, so the clock's ticking for both of us ...

Now you're talking ...

Stuart, if you can secure Kerry Minnear his long-overdue hearing at the Proms, your own national treasure status will be secure.

I hope so too! Planning to write a final volume in the saga - but not for a while. Stay tuned.

The full programme hasn't been announced so we can live in hope. If there's no Gentle Giant I shall be writing @stuartmaconie.bsky.social a stiff letter.

BBC Proms The world's greatest classical music festival - stunning concerts and collaborations.

There's only one way to browse the Proms programme - alphabetically by composer, but they don't make it easy. Took me about fifteen minutes to find it, but here it is ... www.bbc.co.uk/events/rpgwr...

Prog Rock: A Fanfare for the Common Man The Proms celebrates prog rock with BBC Radio 6 Music host Stuart Maconie, presenting brand-new orchestral arrangements of songs by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield, Renaiss...

I suspect Benjamin Trotter has already booked his tickets for this ...

This morning I’ve seen Olly Robbins’s appearance before the select committee described as ‘box office’, while a commentator flagged up another key political moment with the words ‘bring the popcorn’.

That’s one of our main problems right there.

I didn’t, sorry!

No, I hadn't! That's brilliant.

I was told Hersheys tastes the way it does (ie horrible) because they have to make it in such a way that it will neither freeze in Alaska nor melt in New Mexico.

You're very kind, thank you!

Perhaps she should start with The Dwarves of Death - after that, things can only get better.

Enjoy! (Your holiday, that is.)

Great, will look out for that, thanks.

One of the first writers I ever interviewed for the Guardian, during which he came out with a line that I still like to quote: 'The great thing about fiction is that it's like some covert CIA operation - it's all ultimately deniable.'

Conferences organised by well-funded rightwing think tanks are a theme of my last novel, but of course the figurehead eulogised by one drunken character as 'Scrodger Luton' and 'Lodger Scrotum' is - like the fictional British prime minister 'Liz Truss' - merely a product of my fevered imagination.

Seems incredible in retrospect that Bill's musical collaborator on The Goodies was Michael Gibbs, one of the most cerebral and challenging modern jazz composers. Almost as if Benny Hill got Schoenberg to do an arrangement of Yakety Sax for him.

Amazing, I can imagine him rocking the Roger Moore-era James Bond look.

Very good.

Exterior of a branch of Scruton, the Budapest cafe chain named after the British right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton.

Re: my last RT, I think we should all take a moment to reflect on how very bizarre it is that this chain of cafés came into being in Orban's Budapest.

What happens to Britain's radical right if Orbán loses? Inside the money, power and patronage connecting Hungary and the British right

It's a good night to read this excellent piece, on the Orban regime's network of financial support for the nationalist right in Britain.

For many on the radical right, the tills are about to stop ringing.
democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits

Ha! Let’s start a crowdfunder to get him to come here and campaign for Farage in 2029.

Thank you Jenny, that's really lovely to hear. One of the reasons the film version is struggling to get financed is execs saying that young people have never heard of Billy Wilder and wouldn't be interested in him. (Ironic given the subject of the book!)

Why is everyone suddenly watching Dodsworth?

(I watched it a couple of nights ago, and thought it was great.)

"Art of The Deal" 🙄

Full text: