David Hepworth rewinds with Churchill, swots up on botany, and muses on modern pop-classical performance
Theres nothing new about impetuous young British men disappearing from their homeland to find immortality by waging jihad in foreign parts. Winston Churchill did the same in 1897, begging his glamorous, well-connected mother to pull strings to get him a posting with the British forces who were fighting Islamic insurgents in the mountains between British India and Afghanistan. These days he would have his own channel on YouTube and a deal with Vice sponsored by Adidas. Back then he subsidised the trip by knocking out lurid dispatches for the popular press at home, all signed by a young officer. What happened is explained in *By A Young Officer Churchill On The North West Frontier *(Sunday, 3pm, Radio 4) a thundering dramatisation starring Douglas Booth as our hero, which manages to combine Flashheart appeal with sage observations of how little actually changes in the world. The political officer Churchill interviews reflects on the nature of the foe: From the first day he is old enough to hold a stone to the last day he has strength to pull a trigger, every one among them is a warrior and a politician and a theologian. Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbour. Weve provided them with an enemy all can unite against.
One of the many side effects of the era of empire was the increasing awareness in western nations of what grew in the ground of the east, and a consequent explosion in the varieties of plants available to scholars eager to classify them. But as Kathy Willis, the science director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, explains in the first part of *Plants: From Roots To Riches* (Weekdays, 1.45pm, Radio 4), that meant they had no means of knowing whether they were talking about the same thing or something slightly different. Thanks to the Swedish botanist Linnaeus and his system of binomial nomenclature, with its neat encoding of similarity and difference, they knew whether they were comparing apples with apples, so to speak. Readers who are worried about how their house plants may have got on while theyve been on holiday could take some comfort from the first programme. This starts with Encephalartos altensteinii, which was brought to Kew a good 10 years before the French revolution. I dont know how long it will last, says one of the staff, with probably a nervous glance, but itll see me out.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
Theres nothing new about impetuous young British men disappearing from their homeland to find immortality by waging jihad in foreign parts. Winston Churchill did the same in 1897, begging his glamorous, well-connected mother to pull strings to get him a posting with the British forces who were fighting Islamic insurgents in the mountains between British India and Afghanistan. These days he would have his own channel on YouTube and a deal with Vice sponsored by Adidas. Back then he subsidised the trip by knocking out lurid dispatches for the popular press at home, all signed by a young officer. What happened is explained in *By A Young Officer Churchill On The North West Frontier *(Sunday, 3pm, Radio 4) a thundering dramatisation starring Douglas Booth as our hero, which manages to combine Flashheart appeal with sage observations of how little actually changes in the world. The political officer Churchill interviews reflects on the nature of the foe: From the first day he is old enough to hold a stone to the last day he has strength to pull a trigger, every one among them is a warrior and a politician and a theologian. Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbour. Weve provided them with an enemy all can unite against.
One of the many side effects of the era of empire was the increasing awareness in western nations of what grew in the ground of the east, and a consequent explosion in the varieties of plants available to scholars eager to classify them. But as Kathy Willis, the science director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, explains in the first part of *Plants: From Roots To Riches* (Weekdays, 1.45pm, Radio 4), that meant they had no means of knowing whether they were talking about the same thing or something slightly different. Thanks to the Swedish botanist Linnaeus and his system of binomial nomenclature, with its neat encoding of similarity and difference, they knew whether they were comparing apples with apples, so to speak. Readers who are worried about how their house plants may have got on while theyve been on holiday could take some comfort from the first programme. This starts with Encephalartos altensteinii, which was brought to Kew a good 10 years before the French revolution. I dont know how long it will last, says one of the staff, with probably a nervous glance, but itll see me out.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
