Farewell to the landmark Geordie TV series When The Boat Comes In 40 years ago
Set on Tyneside in the inter-war years, the first episode of the fourth and final series of When The Boat Comes In was broadcast 40 years ago in February, 1981
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What was it about Bessie Smith that made such an impression on you? I think she’s simply the best. I think all the blues singers at the time – Clara Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters – would have acknowledged that she was the queen of the blues; her tempo, her timing, her understanding of the blues. She wrote a lot of her own blues. Ma Rainey taught her a lot of the ropes, but Bessie was technically, and in every which way, better than any of her contemporaries. And I think Bessie’s life captures us. Alas, we all do love a tragic death. We all like to think, ‘What would have happened if someone had lived longer?’ From the Janis Joplins to the Bessie Smiths to the Amy Winehouses to the Robert Burns, we are constantly left with the question, ‘what if?’
The late Coco Chanel photographed by Man Ray
Credit: Granger/Shutterstock
There was only one occasion when I dressed up last year, and that was during the second lockdown in November, for a visit to Windsor Castle. Needless to say, I wasn t there to meet the Queen - she and Prince Philip were in their own regal bubble; I was being filmed with the art historian and curator Caroline de Guitaut, talking about royal wedding dresses.
After months of wearing jeans, it felt cheering to slip into a Dior Bar jacket embroidered with flowers, teamed with tailored trousers and Chanel black slingbacks. These were instinctive choices, but they also happen to be emblematic: the enduring sartorial symbols of how fashion emerged from previous crises with a powerful sense of renewal.
Crazy Days for Money
This article anticipates the end of the fiat currency regime and argues why its replacement can only be gold and silver, most likely in the form of fiat money turned into gold substitutes.
It explains why the current fashion for cryptocurrencies, led by bitcoin, are unsuited as future mediums of exchange, and why unsuppressed bitcoin has responded more immediately to the current situation than gold. Furthermore, the US authorities are likely to suppress the bitcoin movement because it is a threat to the dollar and monetary policy.
This article explains why growth in GDP represents growth in the quantity of money and is not representative of activity in the underlying economy. The authorities’ monetary response to the current economic situation is ill-informed, based on a misunderstanding of what GDP represents.
How Astronomer Anton Pannekoek Planned To Storm the Heavens 07/02/2021
Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek combined the roles of an important socialist thinker and a prominent scientist. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
There has always been a healthy crossover between Marxism and the natural sciences. Frederick Engels kept abreast of the latest scientific knowledge in his own time. In his work
Dialectics of Nature, Engels warned that no matter how far humans were able to perfect their forms of social organisation, a time would inevitably come when the Earth could no longer sustain organic life:
And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the Earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.