5 h. ago Lampshades, Urns & Notebooks: Our London Design Shopping Guide

Lampshades, Urns & Notebooks: Our London Design Shopping Guide  ELLE Decor

Economics

33 h. ago Mark Nicholas: Pride in 2005 Ashes mixed with sadness at missed opportunity

Nicholas led Channel 4’s coverage of an unforgettable series as England lifted the urn for the first time in 18 years.

Politics

4 d. ago Brendon McCullum labels upcoming Ashes as ‘biggest series of all of our lives’

England head coach hails ‘box office’ Jofra ArcherStokes and Wood ‘progressing well’ after injuriesBrendon McCullum has ramped up the Ashes hype ahead of this winter’s trip to Australia, describing England’s pursuit of the urn they last won a decade ago – and have brought back from the Antipodes just once since 1986-87 – as “the biggest series of all of our lives”.England returned to international action last week for the first time since a thrilling five-Test series against India concluded in early August, and though they lost to South Africa over three one-day internationals that run ended with a historic, one-sided victory in Southampton on Sunday. A spellbinding performance in that game from Jofra Archer, who took four wickets for 18 runs – “There was an ‘ooh’ or an ‘aah’ every single over,” he said afterwards – set imaginations racing with thoughts of what the injury-prone seamer might achieve in more high-profile assignments to come. The first Ashes Test starts in Perth on 21 ...

Politics

2 w. ago Everything We Do Is Music by Elizabeth Alker review – how the classics shaped pop

From Stravinsky to Donna Summer, the story of connections that enriched music – in both directionsOne of many things I did not expect to learn in this book is that the BBC benefited from Nazi technology. Its standard tape recorder, in use till the 1970s, was called the BTR-2: EMI’s original model, the BTR-1, had been copied from a captured example of the German “magnetophon”, as used by Hitler to record a radio broadcast.Musicians who liked fiddling with machines, too, benefited from this legacy. Delia Derbyshire, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer who produced the original Doctor Who theme tune and otherwise particularly enjoyed playing an enamel green lampshade, influenced Paul McCartney’s experiments with tape loops, while Steve Reich hit upon his compositional technique of “phasing” phrases in and out of sync with one another on tape recorders, before training live musicians to do the same. Continue reading...

Politics