Re: Alex Johnson - worst prime minister ever?
Posted: Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:43 am
"Aaaaah but if you question his integrity or impartiality you're casting aspersions on him and that's not fair!"
Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 10:22 am So, we are to consider anyone chosen by the Prime Gammonster to be above and beyond criticism? Because the Handmaidens of the Hedge Funds are infallible?I think that's basically the government's position. How dare we question them?
Bones McCoy wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 10:52 am What do you call somebody who throws their flag on the ground and tramples on it?“Doctor, I dream I’m a tiny man trapped in a cross of blood.”
A traitor??
Or maybe just a virtue signaller.
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One of the UK’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars has revealed that they were approached by a representative of Boris Johnson to help him write his very delayed biography of the Bard...
...The Shakespeare academic, who did not wish to be named, told the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald they were contacted by an agent acting for Johnson in late 2015 and asked to attend briefing meetings with him, where the academic would “supply Mr Johnson (and a dictaphone) with answers to questions about Shakespeare”...
...The originality and brilliance, his agent assured me, would lie in Mr Johnson’s choice of questions to ask and in the inimitable way in which he would write up the expert answers he received,” said the Shakespearean, who went on to decline the opportunity.
According to a recent report in The Fence’s newsletter, historian Warren Dockter “acted as a sort of guide through the literature and evidence” for The Churchill Factor, but Johnson, a former journalist, was credited with having done “all the heavy lifting”. Johnson reportedly recorded himself “extemporising on scenes from Churchill’s life” early in the morning, sending draft chapters to Dockter by 5am for “fact-checking and review”. Dockter, who has been described as Johnson’s “research assistant” and assembled the book’s bibliography, is not credited in the book, but is thanked in the acknowledgments.
.The leading Shakespearean said they had not been tempted to take on a similar role for Johnson’s tome on the Bard. “For one thing, the agent suggested that I would need to be perpetually available at short notice to come to meet Mr Johnson at points when he found space in his diary. The fact that I already have a full-time job and that I do it a long way from Westminster didn’t seem to have occurred to them,” they said.
Johnson’s politics did not help matters. “At the time Mr Johnson hadn’t yet betrayed his continent by choosing to advocate the UK’s departure from the EU for his own personal advantage, so he wasn’t quite as politically toxic as he is now; but I assumed he would be trying to enlist Shakespeare as a Tory nationalist, so the idea didn’t much appeal,” said the academic. ..
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/ ... ys-scholar
Youngian wrote: ↑Mon Jul 05, 2021 10:38 am Couldn’t Bozo hide behind a pen name? The Earl of Oxford. The description the agent gives of what his client does is reporting without quote marks.A pen name would defeat the objective of this vanity project.
Samanfur wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 12:02 pmFound this video: The second main speaker is Fantasyland author Kurt Andersen providing a neat summary of his book.Bones McCoy wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 9:22 amI finished that book last week. A couple of points caught my attention where the author wasn't calling out something that'd already been debunked as just that.davidjay wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 7:16 am "A nation cursed by self-importance." Post-war Britain in five words.You only have to watch the social media gammonopalypse on the days following Eurovision for a perfect example.
Furious, raging, livid people, angry at further proof that the conniving foreigners were against them.
No, they didn't vote.
No, they didn't watch it.
They just know.
I'm a few chapters into Fantasyland (A book recommended here a few weeks back).
Eurovision Vs British exceptionalism wouldn't be out of place in there among the preppers, the puritan enclaves, the truthers and the latter day saints.
One was Whitley Streiber's alien abductee narrative, which Streiber later admitted himself was made up - allegedly after a night in a bar with L. Ron Hubbard, where they made a bet with each other about who could fleece the most people by starting a movement.
The other was in the epilogue, when the author said that his own mystic side had been stoked by Black Elk Speaks as a youngster, when the Lakota have basically disowned the book as mistranslated and potentially embellished, since the translator was a non-native speaker.
Did you spot any others?