I was lucky enough to be in the same room as Hockney once, at Yuja Wang’s recital in the Lightbox. I love most of his work, but his daily iPad drawings from lockdown in Normandy still make me cry. He sure made old age look fulfilling and fun.

Polish/French composer Alexandre Tansman was born #OTD in 1897. After the German occupation of France in 1940 he fled south and managed in 1941 to escape via Lisbon to Los Angeles, thanks to the efforts of his friend Charlie Chaplin. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexan…

Wait, Hugh Grant was in Very Peculiar Practice?? 🤯

I thought I was a geek about The Third Man, my favourite film, but this episode of @PPFIdeas is full of new info to me, including politics and espionage, plus fascinating details. Might have to watch it for the 330th time. 🤓 podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas…

Just watched People Will Talk, with Cary Grant, and frankly, I’ve been conducted by worse… youtu.be/UpC3NUrSOhU

In Sep 1939, entertainer, activist and French Resistance agent Josephine Baker (born #OTD in 1906) was recruited by French military intelligence to collect data on German troops from Axis officials she met at parties which she then recorded on sheet music. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph…

best mclennon picture of all time and its not even close. Its literally not close at all

My latest interview: violinist Leila Josefowicz on new music, what she learnt from Miles Davis, how she sustains her energy, and how the classical music world has changed since the start of her career. elbowmusic.org/post/when-you…

There is a history lesson that the British Museum might usefully teach, were it still in the business of teaching history rather than surrendering it to the heckler’s veto. It goes like this: when a society can no longer protect its Jews in the public square, cannot guarantee that a talk about ancient archaeology will not be shut down by a mob, it has already lost something foundational. The Jews are not the only ones who should be alarmed. They are simply the first. Yesterday the British Museum, founded in 1753, repository of civilisation's deepest memory, cancelled a Jewish Culture Month event on the kingdoms of Ancient Israel and Judah. Not because the content was controversial. Not because the speaker, Dr Paul Collins, was provocative. But because a "significant number" of registered attendees had pre-planned to disrupt it. The bullies, in other words, didn't even need to show up. The threat alone was sufficient. The institution folded. A talk about archaeology, about pottery and inscriptions from a civilisation nearly three thousand years old, was considered too dangerous to host. Let that sink in. This is Britain in 2026. The museum's statement was a masterpiece of institutional euphemism. It spoke of its “responsibility to ensure that events hosted within the Museum can proceed safely.” It noted, with some delicacy, its commitment to "freedom of expression in a democratic society." What it did not say - what it could not quite bring itself to say - is that a group of activists committed to the erasure of any Jewish connection to the land of Israel decided that even academic archaeology was an affront, and that rather than face them down, Britain's foremost cultural institution chose to stand aside. This is not a security decision. It is a political one. And it carries a clear message: that organised intimidation works. Worse still, it is not even an isolated incident. Last year, the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth postponed an exhibition on Jewish life in the town, citing “security concerns” and what it called a “sensitive time.” The exhibition, funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, celebrating a century and a half of Jewish community life, was quietly shelved. It came after a Jewish man had been shot with an air rifle in Bournemouth's East Cliff neighbourhood and swastika graffiti had been painted on a local rabbi's home. Then there was Edinburgh. Last summer, two Jewish comedians had their shows cancelled from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe after staff members raised "safety concerns". One of them, Philip Simon, said afterwards: "I am still processing the concept that in 2025 I can be cancelled just for being Jewish." This is a story that Jews in this country have grown sickeningly familiar with. The language changes slightly each time - "security concerns," "sensitive period," "logistical challenges" - but the outcome is always the same: Jewish culture retreats and the mob advances. And now the British Museum. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the incremental, bureaucratically managed exclusion of Jews from British public life - achieved not through legislation, not through violence, but through the quiet, cowardly calculation that accommodating the mob is less trouble than standing with the minority it targets. "London is for everyone" - except, it appears, for Jewish Londoners who wish to attend a talk about ancient history without requiring a security cordon and police guard. "Antisemitism has no place here" - except, it seems, at public galleries, comedy and theatre venues, university campuses across London, and now the British Museum. When a city's most celebrated cultural institution cannot guarantee the safety of a lecture on ancient pottery, the mayor's solemn pledges ring not as reassurance but as insult. The British Museum's statement said the decision was taken "to protect the event, not to diminish it." This is precisely the kind of sentence that tells you everything while appearing to say nothing. What the museum was actually protecting was not the event - which it cancelled - but itself: its staff, its management, its desire not to be in the newspapers for the wrong reasons. The result, of course, is that it is in the newspapers for the worst possible reason. The protesters won without stepping through the door. And the institution that holds the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, that has survived the Blitz and two world wars and three centuries of global upheaval, has demonstrated that it cannot survive a vocal mob with bad intentions. Public money flows generously to these institutions. If they cannot maintain a basic standard of intellectual courage in exchange for it - if they will cancel Jewish history at the first whiff of organised hostility - then serious questions about that compact are not only legitimate but urgent. What is needed is not sympathy but spine. The British Museum should have taken the measures necessary - whatever they were - to allow the event to go ahead on the planned date. If it lacked the resources, it should have asked for them. If it lacked the legal tools, the Government should long since have provided them. The Director should have stood at the door, personally if necessary, and said: this institution does not negotiate with intimidation. Instead, it issued a statement of regret, rescheduled to a date yet to be confirmed and hoped the story would blow over. My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. She spent the remainder of her long life trying to understand how a continent of supposedly civilised nations - with their museums, their universities, their cultural institutions - had permitted the systematic exclusion, humiliation, and ultimately murder of its Jews: one bureaucratic decision at a time, each supposedly reasonable in isolation, each contributing to a logic that ended in catastrophe. She did not ask future generations to simply remember. She asked them to act. The British Museum will, no doubt, host the talk eventually. It will be rescheduled for a quieter moment, with more security, with fewer registered protestors, with a smaller Jewish audience too. It will be, in all the ways that matter, a diminished thing. And the people who believe that Jewish culture has no place in British public life will note that their tactics worked. And they will use them again.

I’m ALWAYS this Ringo…

The fabulous Edith Lorand. 🤩 At school, the headmistress suggested I join a Palm Court orchestra. Maybe she was right after all... youtu.be/zy_kDTvKu3Y?si=sHNb…

Starting young...

Hamas’s sexual terrorism is laid bare and still the world looks away thetimes.com/comment/columni…

Not sure about this. I always make a detour and doff my hat when I'm in the area, but I love the anonymity of it, so I hope it doesn't turn into another Abbey Road. Feels a little more *ker-ching* of the brand. I'll still queue hours and pay an extortionate fee to visit, obvs.

Happy Brahms's Birthday! 🎂🎶 youtu.be/9-JY3VcK5zY?si=2wfE…