British Right-Wing Pundits

Iain Martin is also one of the highly esteemed Orwell Prize judges: "Britain’s most prestigious Prize for political writing".

you say yr a fan of the orwell prize, name five of its winners

answers will surprise you

they're ALL fascists

It may be a step too far to attempt a rehabilitation of David Irving's *astonishing* body of work, but a regular Times column and a slot on GBTV wouldn't seem so beyond the pale these days!

Your reminder that Evelyn Waugh and others were very open in their support for Franco. pic.twitter.com/E4awMKUt4m

— Ken Pasok (@paulewart23) July 29, 2021

https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/15314

interesting thread here and you can download a dossier on the author's replies from that link

Aleister Crowley calls Franco a pirate and a common murderer and then suggests Hitler may prove to be a prophet!

boo at that book cover not splitting the authors into two rows so I can instantly know, do they think I got all day

some of them are quite amusing, one of them (Nevison whoever the fuck he is)) denounces fascism and also complains that it's a great threat to British Empire interests in the Mediterranean.

the "definitely against" row is p short (just five names) -- saddest inclusion for me there is arthur machen tbh, not that i'd quickly turn to him for political recommendations

the "neutral?" row is 15 ppl both-sidesing it like it was going out of fashion, including an extremely melty wells and (lol) a typically demented ezra pound posting thru it like the michael tracey of his day except he can supposedly read mandarin

(pound isn't neutral at all of course, he just thinks that the important thing to be mad about is that everyone involved is a liberal sap)

Ruby M. Ayres

UNINFORMED INTERFERENCE in international politics is more to be dreaded than any anticipated danger resulting from conflict in Spain.

As a professional writer I dread amateurs.

hah hah! it's not armies and bullets that kill people, it's posting!

Pound's take on the politics was funny and expected, the extremity of the antisemitic frothing was horribly new to me - like Eliot he toned it down for the poetry ffs

Lol, the "watch your tone" in this:

Norman Douglas "I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY about your questionnaire. I cannot excite myself over nations and causes and creeds—my contempt for humanity in general is too great. Individuals are the only things that interest me. If Spaniards like to cut each other’s
239 throats and get Germans and Russians to help them—why not let them? It’s not my affair. If they eat each other up to the last man, like Kilkenny cats, let them! This will sound unsatisfactory to you. But if you want the truth, there it is..."

Douglas is best remembered for his novel
South Wind (1917) and his feud with D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), exemplified in the
polemic D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: a Plea for Better Manners (1925)

239 throats?

rude? d h lawrence
not rude at all? saying spaniards can eat each other

RE Pound: "the stank of England" just doesn't sound worthy of someone who was supposed to be a top class poet and wordsmith, but also what a wanker!

What did Eric Linklater have to say? A really weird choice for them to go to a guy who mostly wrote comic novels in the Wodehouse vein...

Linklater: "MY SYMPATHY is with the people and government of Republican Spain. I am against Fascism and Franco and all who set the mythical value of an imaginary totality above the intellect and freedom of the individual. To European civilisation Fascism is as dreary and dreadful a peril as another Flood—and the Ark of the Covenant has unhappily been scuttled"

he was a professional journalist and a prolific essayist and commentator, even if that side of his work is now long forgotten .

by "professional journalist" i mean "prominent journalist" lol

my god Flora Gill is just astonishingly thick, it is a sight to behold

Eric Linklater very prescient about the soon to be rediscovered Ark

Flora advocating pornography for children and then deleting the tweet and saying that people taking screenshots is bad was very funny tbf!

the other ghouls with nepotism jobs know that there are no consequences any more and you can just double down on any awful shit, Flora is somehow too thick to grasp this

seriously suggest following Flora's Twitter, it's the most surreally inane thing out there, she has absolutely nothing to say and cannot stop saying it

i feel that "if only pornography for children!" is less NOTHING than SOMETHING, albeit quite a bad something

these days if you say there should be porn for children you get arrested and thrown in jail

Quality damning with faint praise

When dad died I was amazed at how many people that could've hated him, instead, said really lovely, thoughtful things. That's the only right way to be.

— Flora Gill (@FloraEGill) July 20, 2021

I'm still on the Spanish war thing (thanks for that link calzino btw, it is fascinating). Leonard Barnes seems like a dude.

xxxp would suggest that it is "nothing" in the sense that it has not been thought about in enough depth to be even considered an idea, it's not badly phrased, it's just utter stupidity presented very poorly.

just look at this, should be a really simple joke, she simply cannot put the words together properly

I’m really worried that it was coming home but it was being delivered by Hermes, so they prematurely said it was home but it’s not actually here and it might be lost in transit forever...

— Flora Gill (@FloraEGill) July 11, 2021

should say thanks to calzino for the Revolutions suggestion, Francisco Madero truly is the Kier Starmer of early 20th century Mexico.

Baron Boris Vladimirovich Stürmer - the Kieth of early 20th century Russia, but he was actually a PM for some time so perhaps not!

This is such a brutal putdown

It reminds me of an incident a few years ago in which a group of lefty men denigrated me as “Chuka Umunna’s intern” because they couldn’t get their head round the fact a woman with brown skin might be on a think tank advisory board. (They didn’t target anyone else on that board.)

— Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha) July 30, 2021

Sonia is such a load of garbage. Good to see her getting rinsed.

"Student-like nature of their politics"

Incidentally, that’s why I momentarily liked a tweet that was a dig at the student-like nature of their politics. I unliked it pretty quickly though because I felt it was a bit beneath me - when they go low, we go high after all 😉.

— Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha) July 30, 2021

It would be pitiful except, y'know, paid loads of money to be this thick

Whatever Novara's faults that was a pretty good piece on Corbyn and Starmer. The liking and unliking of Kamm's tweet is the thing I'd call infantile.

rare footage of the "rob (dog)" cited in the review:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Rob_para_dog.jpg

TIL that the victoria cross for animals is called the "dickin' medal"

I knew this and have always had big questions about what constitutes bravery in an animal

I bet Rob would have traded that silly award in for a nice big ham bone .. oo-er

my dog is very brave he runs into barbed wire like it's string and sometimes attempts to digest whole socks, he'd be make a great military labbie.

It is extremely funny to me that journalists have been heavily On Twitter for so long but they *still* simply cannot believe that normal people are allowed to respond to - even critique! - them. They've been in the denial stage of grief over this for over a decade now lol

— ACAB Rees-Mogg (@jelly_pack) July 30, 2021

I guess before social media the idea writers were smarter than their readers was pretty common. Most writers that struggle with what the tweet is describing started out before then.

not sure how consciously strategic it was, but one of the innovations of the gawker stable -- its layers of internal chat-groups, like kinja (which was i believe propietary and intended as a selling point) but also a semi-dedicated slack, which evolved alongside it, meant that a large-ish gang of writers came up very used to a kind of pre-emptive collective process of crypto-editing-by-competing-readers, a much less intimately secluding editing context than existed in the old days… which i think has made it less startling -- for that micro-generation of writers -- to have to adapt to the presence in social media of large gangs of highly critical readers joking abt yr work in friendly and in unfriendly ways. there's still an inside and an outside to the banter -- and the tale of that stable didn;t exactly go smoothly and always had other issues, but that's a development (including a potential for managed transparency) that the older publishing structures don't seem to have adapted well to. i think bcz it entails major challenges to established hierarchy (tho i likely establishes new hierarchies and also exarcerbates the problem of writers obsessing much too much in public abt the inner proecudures of publishing) (not that i mind, i love that shit)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8pd0YLWUAQUHG0?format=jpg&name=900x900

this spiffing chap who is married to the PM's press secretary and is best mates with Rishi has a solution to the stress the chaotic UK government has given rise to: find some solace in the season finale of The Crown that will never get made because of too much paedophile and death content.

Lionel Shriver going full Waitrose-Katie-Hopkins in The Spectator today.

‘More than a third of UK births now involve at least one foreign-born parent; in parts of London, 80 per cent of births are to foreign--born mothers.’

✍️ Lionel Shriverhttps://t.co/AveBeSWR5Z

— The Spectator (@spectator) August 30, 2021

if there was such a thing as a functioning "cancel-culture" you'd never hear another word from this one hit wonder

She has released SEVEN novels in the past decade and only one has a Wikipedia article, that's pretty telling.

yeah there is definitely a correlation between declining book sales and increasing desperate shouty loudness of her racism