Mad and bad

So said Samuel West at the Equity meeting yesterday, attacking Arts Council England’s proposals to cut funding to the arts; and Peter Hewitt, chief executive of ACE is reported this morning as feeling that he had been ambushed by the vote. His reaction, and the management blather he speaks, perhaps point up the real problem: indifferent leadership and a signal failure of imagination. Better is the more considered view of Sir John Tusa, on Radio 4’s Today Programme, “This is a painful transition, probably not a very well-managed transition, but I suspect it actually has to take place”.

A Dismal Science

See Paul Hodkinson in Legal Week this morning. The LSE has “included law in its annual list of non-preferred subjects for undergraduates”. He reckons that this risks having the legal community up in arms. I doubt it. Those of us who have the misfortune to practice law already know that his assertion that law is a ‘dismal science’ is all too true.

The novel life is not enough

An interesting snippet in a report in Legal Week that the newly appointed head of Appleby’s global structured finance department, Jeanne Bartlett, had left private practice with DLA Piper in 2006 “to write a novel”. Clearly she has either completed the novel; or the lure of institutional work (or perhaps just the money) proved too great.

North of Milton Keynes

From The Economist (January 5th 2008): “North of 52 degrees latitude (roughly, beyond Milton Keynes), the winter sun is too weak for vitamin D to be produced.”

Looks tell all

Look at the picture of Hillary Clinton on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph. The caption reads ‘Barack Obama glances at Hillary Clinton after she lost her temper during the Democratic debate in Manchester at the weekend’. But it is not how Obama looks; instead it’s Hillary: she is smirking. Whatever else she is doing, she is playing a calculated game. All the reports today are running Obama’s way but for a contrarian view, read “Why Neither Obama or Clinton will win’, David Herman’s post in First Drafts, the Prospect magazine blog. If either do, Herman thinks this “would be the greatest shock in US politics since the war.”