Lawslot

An interesting historical take on Radio 3 Breakfast this morning when Rob Cowan introduced Beethoven’s Egmont Overture: apparently Egmont was fighting the Spanish Inquisition. Strange that, I had always thought that it was the treacherous Duke of Alba. But then nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

If you want more on the context of arts funding, you will do no better than read William Skidelsky’s post, Britain’s New Renaissance in First Drafts and then read Mary Wakefield in Coffee House on what should go on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. To which I would only add that having seen the new designs (and what is there at the moment) it is less a new Renaissance and more straight back into the Dark Ages.

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”.

Poor old David Starkey. Attributing a quotation to Goebbels, he has attracted a rash of letters in The Sunday Telegraph, castigating him both for his apparent criticism of the Sovereign (did Starkey really say, “I don’t think she’s at all comfortable with anybody intellectual. I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude – you remember, he said: ‘Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver’.”) and, worse for a historian, getting it wrong. It was said, apparently, either by Goering (I have always been told this) or by the German playwright Hanns Johst (who merely reached for the safety catch of his Browning). I have always rather liked the apparent retort, by whom I know not, “Everytime I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture”.