"Ooh, Your Eminence!": A short review of Conclave (2024)

If you enjoyed The Death of Stalin or the television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Solder Spy, you will enjoy Conclave - it's another film about power and hierarchy in a very male organisation. 

In this one, the cardinals meet to choose a new Pope, and politicking, corruption and violence ensue.

Conclave threatens to veer into Judge John Deed country when Ralph Fiennes, as Cardinal Lawrence, turns detective, but stops short of that line.

And Fiennes plays the scene where he is overcome with grief on finding the late Pope's glasses well, but Jean Alexander did it better when she found Stan's in Coronation Street.

I'm not proud of it, but I was often reminded of the finest double entendre in all the Carry On canon.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

Hooked on the livestream from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Imagine a cross between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the interview episode of The Apprentice. That's what you get from the hearings of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.

The inquiry's website carries a livestream during the day and also has a complete archive of recordings of all the hearings to date. It's well worth exploring. I won't pick out any names, but I doubt you'll come away impressed with the quality of Post Office personnel at any grade.

To whet your appetite, I've chosen part of this afternoon's evidence from Angela van den Bogerd, former People Services Director at Post Office Ltd and Programme Director for the Branch Support Programme.

Asking the questions is the impressive Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry,

Bill Brand and The Nearly Man: When ITV screened drama series about British politics

The death of the dramatist and screenwriter Trevor Griffiths has reminded me of the Seventies, when British television companies showed political dramas in primetime. 

Griffiths's contribution was Bill Brand, about which the BFI's Screenonline site is positively rhapsodic:

Bill Brand (ITV, 1976) was an epic attempt to lay bare the nature of political power in the UK, and more specifically to analyse if, and how, the socialist struggle could be furthered by the parliamentary Labour movement. Its origins can be seen in Trevor Griffiths' early Play for Today, 'All Good Men' (BBC, tx. 31/01/1974), where the tension between the social democratic and revolutionary positions were embodied in an argument between father and son.

In Bill Brand, the scope is much broader, and focuses on newly elected left-wing MP Brand (Jack Shepherd), a former Trotskyist, and his attempts to negotiate a path between the demands of his family, the local party, the whips and his conscience, while still trying to make a difference politically. During the course of the series he is vilified by the press for his controversial views, and through his acquaintance with the eventual leadership candidate David Last (Alan Badel), he is witness to the power struggles that occur at the highest level of government. ...

The PM (Arthur Lowe) has to retire because of ill-health, and after the series was written (although before transmission) the same thing happened to Harold Wilson. More importantly, Griffiths examines the political rifts within the Labour party, and, with uncanny foresight, dramatises the ideological conflicts that would eventually lead to the formation of the SDP.

Bill Brand is a breathtaking series. Transmitted during the boiling summer of 1976, at peak-time between World in Action and News at Ten, it engaged with contemporary politics in a dramatic way, but remained consistently intelligent, and far from talking down to its viewers, assumed that they were a vital part of the political processes described, and as committed to understanding how things might therefore improve. There has been nothing like it since, and that's more the pity.

I must have watched it, because I remember being impressed by Jack Shepherd, but I can't have seen that much of it, because I have no memory of Arthur Lowe as the PM.

Play the video above to see both of them in action. The good news is that the whole series appears to be on YouTube.

Bill Brand was made by Thames Television. The year before it was shown, ITV had screened another drama about the Labour Party.

The Nearly Man was made by Granada and written by Arthur Hopcraft, who was to go on to adapt John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's hero, played by Tony Britton, was a moderate Labour MP who had written an important book on the future of socialism some 20 years before. 

Despite this, he had never been made a minister, but there were still those who see him as cabinet material or even a possible leader.

The Spinning Image site says of the series:

Here there was no less attention to detail about what drives a politician - or more specifically, what drives a politician to aim for the top, and whether it is essential to be so ambitious to be good at your job; indeed, are you a failure as a politician if you do not do so, however successful you may or may not be? 

But the public's perception of what makes you leadership material was important as well: in the first episode Collinson's younger son dies in a road accident which generates a lot of sympathy for him across the country, and makes up his mind and that of his backers that he has it in him to stake a claim for the Cabinet, and possibly further. However, Alice turns out to be rather more sceptical, and the title of the series may provide an inkling as to his overall triumph.

Alice's lack of faith is a prime reason for the couple splitting up in episode two, whereupon Collinson meets a lecturer, Millie (Kate Fahy) at a university talk and they get along famously, to the extent that they become a couple themselves. 

Meanwhile, they try to keep this arrangement away from the ever-prying media as he makes an enemy of teacher and party activist Michael Elphick, who resents Collinson's middle class background when his constituency is working class, and he doesn't even live there, as a salt of the earth councillor, Wilfred Pickles, tries to bridge the gap between the left and right of the Labour party in a development that mirrored the increasingly fractured nature of socialist politics in Britain for years, even decades to come. All the while the big opportunity Collinson needs remains frustratingly just out of his grasp.

I imagine that Collinson held on to his seat at the 1979 election and was one of the last Labour MPs to jump ship to the SDP. After waiting some years, he was given a peerage by the Liberal Democrats, and I hope he made our front bench in the Lords before he died.

There's doesn't seem to anything of The Nearly Man on YouTube, but you can buy it on DVD. I don't remember enough of it to be able to recommend it, but again I do recall watching some of it.

The only scrap I can find online is a Facebook page that has the opening and closing titles. The Gerald Scarfe cartoons look forward to Yes Minister, but the jazz theme tune is execrable.

Books for Keeps interviews Malcolm Saville in 1980

Books for Keeps, the magazine about children's books, launched in 1980 and interviewed Malcolm Saville the same year.

Saville had only a couple more years to live, and the impression I have is that he was by then uncomfortably aware that his work had rather gone out of fashion.

Pat Triggs, who interviewed him for Books for Keeps, writes that he has been:

accused of being 'middle-class' and 'old-fashioned' (the stories have been cut and modernised - he thinks badly - for paperback).

Armada paperbacks had a standard format and many books were cut to fit it. I don't think any rewriting of Saville's books had taken place, but a lot of character development and period details were lost in the shorter editions, which inevitably concentrated on plot.

Saville's describes how he began as a children's writer - he already had lots of experience in publishing and journalism:

"I suppose I owe a great debt to Arthur Ransome; he used genuine backgrounds and my daughters liked reading him." He sent Mystery at Witchend to his daughters who loved it. Was it written specially for them? "Oh, no. I was in the business. It was definitely for publication."

Newnes took it. ‘Then I had the luck that every author wants.’ It got on Children’s Hour (‘beautifully dramatised by Barbara Sleigh’) and was a great success.

There's insight into his writing methods:

"I'm first influenced by a place. I read it up and find out all I can about it. I study maps. Sometimes it's a newspaper item that arouses my interest. I went to Southwold because I’d read about the east coast floods and thought It might make a story,' (It did – Sea Witch Comes Home.) The windmill which appears in The Gay Dolphin Adventure is in Winchelsea. For the Marston Baines stories he visited every location. The settings are as real as he can make them and when he takes liberties with reality the readers are told in an introduction. 

"I don’t write any fiction unless it is very carefully plotted. I do a synopsis, chapter by chapter, with dialogue, character notes, what I want the reader to know. This goes to my editor." When the synopsis is clear, the writing starts.

I remember the Revd Jeremy Saville, Malcolm's son, giving a talk to the Malcolm Saville Society and telling us that if the family went on holiday to a new part of the country, the children knew there would be a book about it in a year or two. Sadly, the windmill at Winchelsea was to be blown down by the hurricane of 1987.

Triggs paints a portrait of Saville that suggests he was still full of live at 79:

Lively, energetic, friendly, a compulsive and enthusiastic talker. He holds firmly to 'traditional values'. 'I'm a very strong believer in family life' and, like the Lone Piners, thinks friendship and loyalty are important. 

Although officially retired, there’s still 'lots to do'. Apart from writing, lecturing and keeping in touch with readers, he shares many interests with his wife. They love 'travelling, walking, the theatre and being together'. They dislike 'people who drop litter'. There are 'two children and their families within reach', 'plenty of friends' and a 'fierce social life in Winchelsea'. 

Above all he is a professional. If every publisher promoted books as energetically as Malcolm Saville there would be a lot more children reading. Like every writer he wants to be read and to make sure that children can get hold of his books when they want them. (He’s a supporter of school bookshops.) 'I don’t think a professional writer can ever really stop.'

And a final point... When I asked Jeremy Saville which writers his father liked most, he thought for a moment and said he didn't think his father read much because he was too busy writing.

But here, describing Saville's cottage in Winchelsea, Triggs writes:

The sitting-room bookshelves hold several spy stories. "I'm an addict, especially for John Le Carré."

Ian Bannen in a Spaghetti Western with John Huston and the kid from Shane

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Ian Bannen will always be Jim Prideaux from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to me, but he enjoyed a long and varied acting career. Here is one of its more outré moments.

The Deserter was a 1970 Western designed as a vehicle for the Yugoslavian theatre and film matinee idol Bekim Fehmiu.

He's not in this clip, but it's remarkable who is. Bannen is the languid British officer, while the grizzled old General is the great American film director John Huston and the young officer who serves them both drinks if Brandon deWilde.

deWilde played the little boy Joey in Shane - I have blogged about him and his misfortunes before. This was to be his last Western and almost his last film: he died in a car crash in 1972 at the age of 30.

Paddy Ashdown didn't have a British passport when he died

Embed from Getty Images

"I was a passionate European, I still am and so was Paddy. In fact when he died he didn’t have a British passport. He had an Irish passport - like John Le Carré, who was a friend. I can’t tell you how much that saddens me."

In 2021 Jane Ashdown, the widow of the former Liberal Democrat leader, gave an interview to Seth Dellow for the Marshwood Vale Magazine. She talked candidly and emotionally about her life in and around the world of politics.

Listen to the interview.

The Joy of Six 1173

"On New Year’s Day 1953, he signed up to become part of the greatest churn of young football talent English football had yet seen, the Busby Babes. The young Charlton, fair-haired and bequiffed, threw himself into metropolitan, cosmopolitan Mancunian life, the cinemas, cafes and dances a world away from his colliery hometown of Ashington." John Brewin pays tribute to Bobby Charlton.

Matthew Pennell on what happened in Mid Bedfordshire and why it will probably never happen again.

"An unfounded accusation that I had 'been unkind' to a non-statutory government document should not have been a reason to attempt to cancel my presence at professional events. Beyond the impact on me personally, it removes my expertise and connections with expert practice around the world from England’s state education system. If this is happening daily across the UK’s ministries, it also paints a frightening picture of a narrowing of discussion and expertise in policy making." Ruth Swailes has been blacklisted by the Department for Education for being critical of its policies.

Errol Morris is interviewed about John le Carré and the film he has made about the author's life and work, The Pigeon Tunnel.

"These days it’s where giddy teens and grizzled pros purchase shiny guitars, but before that it played a founding role in the careers of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Elton John, the Sex Pistols and more. But this history goes back even further. Before the Second World War, Denmark Street was home to music publishers, their windows piled high with sheet music." Peter Watts tells the story of Denmark Street.

Rail Engineer descends into the cutting at Edge Hill in Liverpool to find the site of the stationary steam engine that hauled trains up the gradient from Lime Street until the 1870s.

The Joy of Six 1101

Neal Lawson believes there’s no point Labour winning the next election unless it acts to dismantle our toxic electoral system.

"Truss was the product, not the source, of her party’s problems. She embodied a Conservatism that embraced creative destruction, that was dismissive of caution and contemptuous of institutions, that prized ideology over experience and regarded opposing voices as heresies to be burned out; a Conservatism that had ceded power to irresponsible think-tanks, contrarian newspaper columnists and a dwindling party membership that nobody has elected." Robert Saunders shows that the forces that gave it Liz Truss still dominate the Conservative Party.

Sebastian Stroud says that botany degrees are disappearing from British universities just when the world needs botanists most.

John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which adapted for the BBC in 1979, is a perfect snapshot of a declining Britain managing its post-imperial malaise in a changing world, argues Eliot Wilson.

"Kay’s great-grandfather, Captain Harker, in whose house Kay lives, lost some treasure - 'church ornaments, images, lamps, candlesticks, reliquaries, chalices and crosses of gold, silver and precious stones' - entrusted to his care by the archbishop of a South American port during the revolutions and uprisings of 1811. The loss haunted the captain until his death, a haunting that also ruined the happiness of his wife and son. Now others more avaricious than Kay are on the treasure's trail. Can he find it before they do? It is only at the end that you realize the book is about the restoration of more than one kind of treasure." Mathew Lyons on The Midnight Folk, John Masefield's prequel to The Box of Delights

Eleanor Parker finds that genteel Buckinghamshire is really wild border country.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "Sir Percy Alleline is a fine upstanding fellow"

I was rather pleased with this entry, and then I realised what a narrow audience it would appeal to. It's people who loved John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or the television adaptation of it (but perhaps not the film) and who remember Ming Campbell's leadership of the Liberal Democrats and formed the same view of it I did.

As I explained recently, those letters from Paddy have their origin in The Goat Hotel, Llanfair Caereinion.

Wednesday

Yes, I miss Paddy Ashdown. I miss his correspondence – those envelopes marked ‘Top Secret: Burn Before Reading’ that arrived by every post – and I miss his company. Despite Ashdown’s best efforts, I never could quite get my head around ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.’ “What exactly was Toby Esterhase up to?” I would ask him, and “So did old Smiley do right by Ricki Tarr in the end?” 

Now Paddy is gone there is no one in the party to explain this to me. I tried asking Ming Campbell the other day, but he just told me Sir Percy Alleline was a fine upstanding fellow and that he wouldn’t listen to a word against him.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers Diary...

• He's looking down on us and not saying a word about it
• Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Og

Lord Bonkers' Diary: He's looking down on us and not saying a word about it

Lord Bonkers is still bereft at the death of the Queen. "I can't start a new week of diaries on the day of her funeral," he sobbed to me this evening, "It wouldn't be right."

The he brightened. "Tell you what, put it up before midnight and no one will be able to say a word against me."

Monday

"What we need is a mole," said Paddy Ashdown one day. "Awkward blighters, moles," I replied, "you should hear Meadowcroft on the subject." "No," he persisted, "we need to place a deep-cover Liberal Democrat agent at the very top of the Conservative Party." 

I naturally assumed that Ashdown wanted to make one of our chaps leader of the Tory enemy so he or, indeed, she could bring it down from within. I have myself installed alumni of the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans in all sorts of useful places and read their reports avidly. However, as Ashdown outlined his scheme it became clear it was much subtler than that. It was so secret, indeed, that not even the mole could know what was going on. 

"So what we need," I summed up for him, "is a young Liberal Democrat who would be perfectly at home in the Conservative Party, is insanely ambitious and bound to be a disaster if they ever become prime minister." 

We looked at each other for a moment and then exclaimed as one: “Elizabeth Truss!” Today Ashdown’s plan has come to fruition and I feel sure that, in a very real sense (as the Revd Hughes would put it), he's looking down on us and not saying a word about it

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Watch All Night and Barriers: Unscrambling my memories

Having more or less vindicated my memory of having once heard a purported real "stone tape" on the radio, let me confess to a less accurate recollection.

Take a look at these tweets.

The girl has had mental health problems and everyone tries to convince her she never met her father. Her only help is a boy of her own age who plays the flute.

I was living in Sutton Coldfield at the time, so this may be a late ATV production.

Any ideas? 🙏

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers)

October 7, 2021

Replies to them convinced me that I had run together two different serials screened by ITV on Sunday afternoons in that era.

The girl who met her father and was then told she hadn't (a plot that owes something to the early Dirk Bogarde film So Long at the Fair) came from Watch All Night.

But the boy with the flute had wandered in from another series altogether: Barriers.

You can see its opening titles above. I have watched the first episode and, with it scenes of the East/West border and public school life, it feels like John le Carré for teenagers. 

So it's appropriate that its star, Benedict Taylor, went on to play the young Magnus Pym in the BBC adaptation of A Perfect Spy.

There were two series of Barriers. Only the first is on YouTube and I think it was the second that I watched, which makes this last point hard to prove.

But could that haunting theme be the reason I am convinced that Fauré's Sicilienne was once used to introduce a period detective series?

A big of googling shows I am not alone in this belief, but if Taylor turns out to have played Sicilienne at some point in the second series of Barriers, I suspect that will clarify another of my unconfirmed memories.

The Joy of Six 1029

"Nearly three in four children’s homes and two in five fostering households are now provided by independent organisations, from both the private and charitable sector. For the largest private providers, income levels increased by 7.3% when comparing data between February and December 2020. Among the top 10 of children’s homes providers, seven are now owned by private equity firms." Katharine Quarmby and Sian Norris show how children in public care have become an opportunity for private investors.

Andrew Brown reviews Bleeding for Jesus, Andrew Graystone's exposé of John Smyth's beating of boys and young men and the cover up that followed. 

Fintan O’Toole on John Le Carré’s decision to become an Irish citizen shortly before he died.

"Public House has echoes of Geoffrey Fletcher’s 1962 book The London Nobody Knows, famously turned into a psychedelic documentary film in 1969. Partly it’s the ambling scope of it, the diverting asides, the delight at the curious and arcane. But it’s also the palette of the illustrations, a poppy array of orange and green that gives it a trippy feel of late Beatles and swirling pub carpets." John Grindrod reviews a new cultural and social history of the London pub.

K.B. Morris looks back at a John Bowen's television play: "Robin Redbreast was written at the tail end of the counter culture of the 1960s and Bowen is exploring the dichotomy of reason versus emotion or Apollo versus Dionysus. This conflict, which was so prevalent during that period, fascinated Bowen throughout his writing career."

"Olivia Laing walks the River Ouse in Sussex from its source to the sea, mediating on its flora, fauna, mythology, history and literary associations along the way. Chief among the latter is Virginia Woolf, who lived near the river, walked by the river, wrote about the river, and died in the river." With the help of Eric Ravilious illustrations, Terri Windling reviews Laing's To the River.

Six of the Best 984

"What was Brexit like? America’s declaration of independence? A man leaving a golf club but demanding to still be allowed into the bar? Over the years, I went through a few analogies, but the one that persisted was of a married man who has for years enjoyed casually flirting with a work colleague. One evening he makes his traditional half-hearted pass, and instead of rolling her eyes, she replies: 'Go on, then'. A month later, he’s living out of his car and negotiating through lawyers to see his children one weekend a month, and he can’t really tell you how it happened." Robert Hutton on the experience of reporting Brexit.

Sofie Jenkinson says parks, gardens and green space are vital for our mental health.

Donald Trump's tactic of refusing to admit defeat is spreading through the Republican Party, reports David Siders.

"To the very last, he raged against the dying of the light by remaining implacably vigilant; furious at the indignities to which his country was being subjected by bogus patriots, spiv nationalists and sloganeering charlatans." Matthew d'Ancona pays tribute to John le Carré.

"The Archers taps into a myth that the nation’s spirit is most authentically to be found in the countryside, that its irreducible social unit is the village – as if the Industrial Revolution and 19th-century urbanisation were only aberrations." Charlotte Higgins analyses the weird genius of the radio soap opera.

Emily Knight looks at the work of Joseph Wright of Derby, the 'painter of light'.

John le Carré has died

David Cornwell, better known by his pen name of John le Carré, died in Cornwall on Saturday.

After working in intelligence himself, he became the acknowledged master of spy fiction. The early fame he found with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was amplified in the 70s and 80s through the BBC adaptions of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People, which starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

As Sarah Lyall says in her New York Times obituary:

Before Mr. le Carré published his bestselling 1963 novel "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," which Graham Greene called "the best spy story I have ever read," the fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s James Bond - suave, urbane, devoted to queen and country. With his impeccable talent for getting out of trouble while getting women into bed, Bond fed the myth of spying as a glamorous, exciting romp.

Mr. Le Carré ... upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to call and in which it is rarely obvious whether the ends, even if the ends are clear, justify the means.

This interview from 2002 displays the wonderful clarity of Cornwell's thinking and speaking. He talks about Alec Guinness, the intelligence world and writing. It's a suitable way to remember him.

The Grantham Canal joins the Trent in 1934

The Grantham Canal was not officially closed to navigation in 1936, but all traffic had already ceased when this photograph was taken two years earlier.

On the far left is the railway bridge, now a road bridge, over which Karla defected to the West in Smiley's People.

A little upstream, on the far bank, you can see a lock and bridge where the canal joins the Trent. This is the lock I came across last summer.

Behind it are Nottingham Forest's City Ground and then Trent Bridge cricket ground.

On the near bank of the river you can also see a corner of Notts County's Meadow Lane ground.

George Smiley in West Bridgford

This is Lady Bay Bridge over the Trent. You can find it a little way downstream of Trent Bridge cricket ground.

It used to be a railway bridge, carrying trains on the Midland's fast route from St Pancras to Nottingham, which ran via Kettering, Corby, Oakham and Melton Mowbray. The last train crossed it in 1968.

In the early 1980s the bridge was converted to carry road traffic, but before that happened it starred in a celebrated television drama.

At the end of John le Carré's Smiley's People, the Soviet spymaster Karla, disguised as a labourer, defects to the West using a bridge that connect East and West Berlin.

The BBC's 1982 television was filmed on location across Europe, but this climactic scene was shot in Nottinghamshire on the Lady Bay Bridge.

You can see its finest hour in the clip below.

The Lib Dems checked Stasi files for Agent Cob

An intriguing paragraph from Keven Maguire's Commons Confidential in the New Statesman:

Maybe the Sun, Daily Express,​ Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph weren’t particularly interested in the truth when smearing Comrade Corbyn as a Cold War spy. 

But Mansfield’s expensively humiliated Tory vice chair Ben Bradley could have saved himself a small fortune and a grovel if he’d asked the Lib Dems. 

The sneaky yellow peril checked Stasi files three years ago and discovered that Corbyn wasn’t on the books. Eastern bloc agents were uninterested in the secrets of Jezza’s damson jam recipe.

Once gaining such intelligence would have involved Paddy Ashdown conducting a break in like Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

These days we probably send a student along to the library with a packet of sandwiches.

Six of the Best 749

"Going to a recent party to remember my predecessor as editor of Liberal Democrat News, my own party's weekly paper (Mike Harskin, who died 25 years ago aged only thirty) forced me to remember the maverick force that the old Liberal Party used to be. 'Obstruct the doors,' Mike used to say. 'Cause delay. Be dangerous.'" But where is the Lib Dem radical, trouble-making fringe now? asks David Boyle.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is emerging as the new face of Russian political interference in the UK, claims J.J. Patrick.

Jennifer Baker interviews Sharon Kaye about her work engaging children and teens with philosophy.

"Russian spies posing as London antiquarian booksellers is like something from the pages of Le Carré." But it really happened in the 1960s, as Calder Walton reveals.

Georgina Day on what's next for the broken brutalist dream of Thamesmead.

"Personal myth-making was important to Waugh: like many a 20th-century literary man, and one or two literary women, he spent a lifetime constructing a new and supposedly better version of himself out of what was essentially the same material." D.J. Taylor reviews a new edition of the collected works of Evelyn Waugh.

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" I was on the ... Social Liberal Forum stand. I was approached by a man who was attending his first conference. He had won a prize in the raffle. He explained that his son was on the Liberal Reform stall and they had told him we were a 'bunch of lefties'. He wanted to know about joining...." Iain Brodie Brown reports a conversation at the recent Liberal Democrat Conference.

Jennie Rigg offers her guide to filling out a speaker's card at Lib Dem Conference.

"Forced through war, poverty and uncertainty to make new lives in England, they were drawn to cricket as a way of connecting with home." Nick Greenslade tells the story of how Afghan refugees have saved a Kent village cricket team.

Andy Boddington asks if too many trees are being felled in Ludlow.

"Guillam’s interrogators - Laura and Bunny (the latter is a man) - are almost parodies of awfulness, and one cheers on Guillam as he gamely lies to them and seeks to protect ‘old Circus’ from the consequences of its actions." Dan Atkinson enjoys John Le Carré's A Legacy of Spies.

Clare Balding: all-round good egg or control freak? Listen to the experience of Ginny Dougary and learn how celebrity works..