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Nottingham World, Published 18th Sep 2024 https://www.nottinghamworld.com/recommended/lifestyle/the-extraordinary-life-of-the-eccentric-millionaire-magician-who-gave-newstead-abbey-to-nottingham-4788169 “He never wanted Newstead Abbey for himself. It was always for the people of Nottingham.” Newstead Abbey is one of Nottinghamshire’s most renowned ancient buildings, and a magnetic draw for tourists from far beyond our county. But the story of the abbey’s eccentric former owner, the man who gifted us all the unique site and may well have saved it from ruin, is far less well known. When Sir Julien Cahn bought Newstead in 1931, he was at the peak of a magnificent and magnanimous career. At the age of 49 the son of Jewish German emigres fleeingRead More →

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The Trent Barton threes bus crosses some hard country. Hard and troubled pit towns long into decline. Hard political battles of recent times. Hard days ahead. It takes you through the conjoined towns of Sutton and Kirkby, in Ashfield. Lee Anderson turf. It takes you to Mansfield, snatched by the Tories seven years ago with the proud Ben Bradley taking the seat. Conservative coups in the hard-Brexit seats of Mansfield in 2017, and then Ashfield in 2019, were major moments in post-referendum politics, and bitter losses for Labour. This is mining country. Or it was. These are the ‘red wall’ seats we used to talkRead More →

Civil Service World

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Civil Service World, Summer 2024 Naming and blaming has undeniably harmed the relationship between officials and ministers in recent years. What will it take to restore trust, after so much tension? In the post-Brexit referendum atmosphere of 2019, a revealing comment by Dominic Cummings made its way into the papers. Any civil servant who, in his view, “snubbed” Brexit should be purged. Cue a bloody period of resignations and sackings. Cue a “hit list” of officials marked for moving on. Cue the emergence of, in the words of a senior civil servant quoted in the Guardian, a “poisonous, horrible atmosphere” in Whitehall, “a feeling thatRead More →

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Junior doctors walked out of work today for the first of seven days of planned industrial action Junior doctors from around the East Midlands came out on strike today as part of coordinated national action in a long-running dispute with the government over pay. Doctors formed a picket outside the main entrance of the Queen’s Medical Centre, the largest hospital in the East Midlands, to highlight what they say are ‘real terms salary cuts amounting to a 26% reduction in pay since 2008’. It is the eleventh time junior doctors have come out on strike nationally since the current dispute arose 20 months ago. TheRead More →

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Nottingham World, June 13th 20124 Political and civic leaders met at a small dignified ceremony today, to mark the first anniversary of the Nottingham attacks. Nottingham MPs Lilian Greenwood and Nadia Whitthome were joined by new City Council leader Neghat Khan, newly-elected Mayor for the East Midlands Combined County Authority Claire Ward, and senior officers from Nottinghamshire Police, to pay their respects at a vigil at St Peter’s Church. It is the site where, just hours after the brutal attacks which left three people dead, on June 13th last year, an impromptu vigil was held for victims Grace O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber, and Ian Coates. WithinRead More →

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I woke with a jolt at 5:30am, unrested and irritable, the sun blazing through the open skylight of my already stifling loft bedroom. After trying and failing for two more agitated hours, I gave up on the idea of getting any more sleep. Sitting up I reached for my phone and – though it is a hated early morning habit – opened Twitter. The first post, from a local reporter, caught my tired eyes: ‘Chaos in the city centre’, accompanied by a series of photos of one of the busiest rush hour jam spots in Nottingham cordoned off by police tapes, deserted. The tweet wasRead More →

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This list is guest-edited by Benedict Cooper, freelance journalist and trustee of the Orwell Society, who wrote an article for the i newspaper about the remarkable number of misquotations attributed online to the original railer against fake news. 1. “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Appears to have been first used, without the “universal”, and mistakenly attributed to Orwell, in Partners in Ecocide: Australia’s Complicity in the Uranium Cartel, by Venturino Giorgio Venturini in 1982. 2. “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.” This precise phrase does not appear inRead More →

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This feature appeared in the i newspaper in March 2022. “The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.” As one of the most revered and prescient authors of the past century, George Orwell is the source of many famous quotes. Like this one, they are often bold statements that seem to cut to the heart of modern society’s problems. People often feel a sense of satisfaction in sharing them to support their own viewpoints – especially when they have a conspiratorial air. There’s just one problem: the sentence above isn’t an Orwell quote. A graphic bearing these words, with the author’s nameRead More →

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“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” This famous Orwell quote is ubiquitous: in the media, on placards at demos and rallies, and of course in meme form, repeated and shared on social media, millions of times over. There’s just one problem: this isn’t an Orwell quote. The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four never wrote, said, or even noted this down. It was written in 2009. Orwell is one of those writers who are well worth quoting. Every day, in the press, on social media, and in TV talk shows, Orwell’s thoughts, words, and sharp observationsRead More →