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Waddesdon Manor, UK/Historic England/Bridgeman Images

Recent links of note:

Country house picnics (with some ace opera attached)
Guy Dammann, The Specator
Only the English could turn the high art of opera into an excuse to have a drunk picnic. Guy Dammann presents a humorous take on the very-English phenomenon of the country house opera picnic. From Glyndebourne to Garsington, the English like nothing better than a muddy romp in black tie, with opera serving merely as an entertaining diversion.

Bloodless Headers in Lifeless Papers
Stefan Kafner, City Journal
A remembrance of legendary New York Post headline writer V.A. Musetto (of “Headless Body in Topless Bar" fame) leads Kafner to assess the lamentable state of newspaper headline writing in our modern age. While not every headline must be a zinger, we surely can do better than “Isis Vows Revenge.”

The Rothschild Taste
James Fenton, The New York Review of Books
Fenton explores the persistence of le goût Rothschild. He determines that, despite some incongruities, the value of their taste is evident, and that the family “score[s] highest when you can tell that they see the point of being Rothschilds…They like to do things well, but they prefer to do them really really well.”

Meet the Banking Regulator with an 8,000-Mile Commute
Max Colchester, The Wall Street Journal
How many central bankers do you know who take calls from their citizens on talk radio? And how many do you know who travel 8,000 miles to the office? Until now, the answer was assuredly none. The Journal helps us get to know Chris Duncan, the island of St. Helena’s Chairman of the Financial Regulatory Authority.

The Labour leadership election is an oasis of boredom
Frankie Boyle, The Guardian
Add another strike against Britain’s embattled Labour Party. Not only is the Party entirely lost, it is now to be led by bores, who, in the words of Frankie Boyle,“have few redeeming features, or features of any kind. They work most successfully not as politicians, but as a sort of broad-ranging challenge to satire.”

From our pages:

Doing as the Romans do
William Logan
On recent verse.

 

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