Britblog Roundup #117

Greetings, and welcome to the 117th edition of the BritBlog roundup.

How many of you were up till 1am to watch John Higgins win the Snooker World Champion? Fewer of you than there would have been if Pandemian’s ideas for livening up the game were adopted…

Second up has to be the article at Lib Dem Voice questioning whether Ming should go. It’s refreshing to see such an honest approach to debate from a website that sees itself as at the heart of party debate.

There’s been an interesting spat going on in some corners of our mysterious world over the decision of a Peterborough ’superschool’ not to have a playground. Dsquared is a good place to start off, with a well-researched support of the policy; Crooked Timber responds.

Not Saussure launches into a delightful attack on Hazel Blears’ campaign for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

Jonathan Fryer opines on Lord Browne, and offers the useful advice… don’t lie!

This week’s big news is obviously Tony Blair confirming for the umpteenth time that he will resign, only this time giving a definite date to boot. Bloggers up and down the country have lived up to their reputations as wannabe columnists by wasting virtual rainforests pontificating on what Blair’s legacy will be.

The Magistrate castigates the Sun for its portrayal of Broadmoor, and throws in a sideswipe at Blair’s pandering while he’s at it.

Liberal England describes a process of coming to grudging respect for Blair, or the “reverse of Britain”, as it’s also known.

Chicken Yoghurt finds himself in the unfamiliar position of agreeing with Michael Howard. Alastair Campbell has a funny way of uniting people…

G Fawkes at Dodgeblogium thinks it is time to say good riddance to management graduates.

Central News gives his take on how the NHS should be governed.

Disgruntled Radical has a joke at the expense of Ian Paisley. The old ones are the best, after all!

The Overgrown Path brings our attention to Reginald Goodall, the holy fool.

The Big Blue Meanie, meanwhile, suggests that the reports of the death of bees may be somewhat exaggerated. As long as you are only talking about organic bees, of course.

Save the Ribble shows off his way of enjoying a politically-active and socially-conscious May Day at the glamorous Preston Flagmarket.

Susanne Lamido wonders whether Simon Jenkins is right in suggesting the Lib Dems call it a day (and do follow the link at the bottom of the post, too).

In a similar vein, The Daily Maybe wonders what the Green Party stands for. Is it anti-capitalist? My answer would be simple – yes. But it’s worth reading a lengthier and more clearly reasoned response!

Getting cultural for a second, My London Your London reviews the “Sacred” exhibition at the British Library.

Diamond Geezer has an entertaining look at the geography of 28 Weeks Later.

And finally, Inky Circus acts as an albatross dating agency.

That’s all for this week – next week, your host will be Clairwil.

Two Fine Men

There were two notable deaths in the world of cricket last week. One, Arthur Milton, was the last person to play both cricket and football for England. The other, Tom Cartwright, is a name with special resonance for me. My father regularly regaled me with stories of Cartwright, a hero of his in the 1950s and 60s Warwickshire teams. He still bristled with disappointment that he had never been given a longer chance at an international Test career – after all, this was a man who Richie Benaud described as one of the most accurate bowlers he had seen in all the time he watched cricket.

The obituaries of both contained stories that typify sportsmen of a different age, where, no matter what the competitive spirit, there was not such a ruthless professionalism in the will to win.

From Cartwright’s obituary:

From 1980 to the present, he ran the Welsh Under-16 team, showing as much concern for sportsmanship as for victory: “Sledging is infantile playground behaviour, isn’t it?”

The story I liked best, however, was this one, about an act of kindness on the part of Milton at the start of a young batsman’s career:

I first met Arthur Milton, who has died aged 79, in the Parks in 1959 when playing my first first-class match for Oxford University against Gloucestershire.

Milton was an established county batsman and had made his Test debut the previous year, thus becoming an international at both cricket and football – the last man to do so. I scratched about against John Mortimore before being dismissed without scoring. On a pair, and again confronted by Morty’s flighty off-spin, I got an inside edge and watched the ball go knee-high to Arthur, one of the game’s great close catchers, at backward short leg.

Arthur, to my astonished gratitude, parted his hands, letting the ball go through for three, his kindly gesture sparing a raw and nervous 19-year-old the ignominy of a pair on debut.

The great American sportswriter Grantland Rice once wrote “For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks – not that you won or lost -/But how you played the game.” Milton and Cartwright will have received top marks in the last week.

The Death of the Book Review?

Over at Open University, there was (a few months ago) much discussion about what constitutes a good book review. Many of the conclusions seem obvious, but they bear repeating: in an environment, both academic and recreational, where far more interesting books are published than any one person could ever read, a good book review section can do much in filling in the gaps of public knowledge.

David Greenberg reports today that the Atlanta Journal Constitution is doing away with book reviews. This is undoubtedly a shame. Not only do book reviews fill in gaps in public knowledge, they can also highlight things that we really ought to be reading. It is sad that valuable content is increasingly seen as expendable – but then again, the number of people who buy a newspaper for its books section is decidedly limited.

Nevertheless, surely there is a simple solution these days. The Internet has allowed many gaps in markets to be filled, particularly as it has opened the prospect of publishing ones work to a large audience. Assembling a high quality team of reviewers may take time, and it takes no small effort to publicise a blog to the point that it becomes worthwhile. But if the decline of the book review is to be lamented, why not arrest the decline? After all, a slightly longer than average blog post is more or less the ideal length for a book review – long enough to highlight the interesting points of the book to whet the reader’s appetite, but not so long that the writer succumbs to the temptation to suggest what he would have written himself in the same situation. Moreover, a good group blog would have the immeasurable benefit of considerable eclecticism. It’s easy to lament the decline of the book review, but with the opportunities of the modern world, it’s a deficiency that could easily be solved.