Watching the new Dux DVD of Weinberg’s “The Passenger”. Am struck by the comment of Krzysztof Olendski, director of the Adam Mickiewicz Inst.: “‘The Passenger’ is a shocking work. It is a guardian of memory, which should be cultivated by all.” Now more than ever.

If the Michelle Mone yacht worth £10 million is confiscated and the £148 million owed to taxpayers is 'paid back' that's £158 million right there in the defence pot. Oh and let's not forget the £500 million owed in taxes by M'Lord Bamford. #BBCLauraK

Everyone needs a friend like Sir Kevin Sinfield.

Died OTD 2016 American-Armenian violinist Anahid Ajemian. Contemporary composers champion. Co-founded the Composers String Quartet. Her career reminds us that new music survives because performers choose to believe in it. #ClassicalMusic #AnahidAjemian

The Torre Bellesguard house in Barcelona, designed by Antoni Gaudí, Completed in 1909.

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Elon Musks needs to stay out of UK politics. RT if you agree!

10 years ago Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in Birstall by a far right thug. Do you remember the Farage \ Tommy Robinson riots that followed it, No me neither. R.I.P. Jo

84 years ago today, the Nazis erased an entire village for a crime it didn't commit. June 4, 1942: Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, dies after Czech paratroopers ambush him in Prague. Hitler demands blood. The Gestapo follows a false lead to a small mining village of 500 people: Lidice. It had no connection to the assassination. None. At dawn on June 10, every man and boy over 15 was marched to a farm garden and shot in groups of five against the wall. Too slow, the commanders decided. They increased it to ten. Each new group walked past the bodies of their neighbors before joining them. By afternoon, 173 men and boys were dead. Mattresses had been propped against the wall to stop the ricochets. The women and children were held in a school gymnasium for three days. Then the children were ripped from their mothers' arms. 195 women were shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp. The children were told they were being taken to their parents. 82 of them were loaded into sealed trucks at Chełmno and killed with engine exhaust. The youngest was about a year old. Only a handful, judged "racially suitable," were given to German families and stripped of their names. Then the Nazis erased the village itself. Burned the houses. Dynamited the church and the school. Dug up 400 graves and looted the corpses. Cut down the orchards. Diverted the stream. Rerouted the roads. They filmed it all. Proudly. But it backfired. The Nazis publicized Lidice as a warning, and the world answered. Towns in Mexico, Brazil, and the US renamed themselves Lidice. Parents named daughters Lidice. The village meant to be forgotten became impossible to forget. After the war, 143 women came home. Years of searching recovered just 17 of the children. Today the site is a memorial, its centerpiece 82 bronze statues of children standing together, facing the valley where their village used to be. The Nazis tried to murder a village and its memory. The people are gone. The memory won. Remember Lidice. June 10, 1942.

A family fleeing for their lives as far right thugs burn their house, egged on by GB News and Tommy Robinson. This is terrorism.

Kevin Maguire: "After the attack on the Liverpool football parade & it was a white guy, middle class, former royal marine, no-one went after other white, middle class former marines & set this person represents that entire group"

Mehdi Hasan on the Belfast attack, "As far as we know this person was here legally as someone who was approved by the then Conservative government" "He's from Sudan. Most people would agree people fleeing from Sudan are genuine refugees" "Whatever your politics we can agree there is a genocide going on in Sudan" "That doesn't excuse the horrific crime that he committed, obviously" "But the idea that we suddenly reduce this to illegal immigration" "And Elon Musk pushing this is absurd, because Musk was an immigrant to the Unites States" "His own brother claimed that they were both illegal immigrants at one point" "People exploiting this for political gain.. Making everything about immigration.. Like the murder of Henry Nowak" "The person who killed Henry Nowak was born in Britain. His father was born in Britain. But that's been made an immigration story as well"

A moment of appreciation for our building! 😍 If you wander around the Hintze Hall balconies, you’ll see beautiful arches and columns, as well as a great view of Hope, our beloved blue whale skeleton!

Fascinating composer. Check out his Music for Brass and Concerto a Tre

RT @archeohistories: On April 12, 1945, Dwight Eisenhower walked into Ohrdruf and threw up. It was the first Nazi camp liberated by Americ…

November 1971. Chiswick, West London. Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor. She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house. Then the door opened. A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking. She didn't want tea. She needed somewhere to hide. Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police. Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter. When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one." Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed. Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority. She didn't stop. By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere. In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief. Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords. She kept the doors open the entire time. That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York. The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world. MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical." She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million. Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86. She never stopped. It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no. Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go. She made room. Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world. Follow us Lost in Yesterday

I’m hoping the Greens win. No Reform and Burnham stopped dead in his tracks!

Lovely performance, too!

Thanks for calling attention to John's incredible music.

The literary novel is thriving, the symphony is dead. Why? slippedisc.com/2026/06/is-an…

This is the tweet that @ZiaYusufUK wants us all to forget. Don’t let him! RT!!