Ash Sarker when she stops waxing.

A view from the Martello tower where Ulysses begins. To the mortification of my children, and with the encouragement of a guide, my wife and I did a reading from the first chapter. I, the entrance of Buck Mulligan, my wife the snot stained handkerchief & scrotum tightening sea.

Stumbled upon a fine statue of Roger Casement in Dublin. 118 inches, green. striking.

Improve thyself!.Ulysses (1967) Milo O'Shea, Barbara Jefford, Maurice Poeves.

This is one of the key things about Cable Street. It was mostly Jews and Communists fighting with police to try to stop a legal match. As much as the areas are described as Jewish, they were historically British working class areas into which Jews had moved and there was ethnic

This seems surprising. If true, interned British fascists were aware of and openly talking about the gas chambers in mid 1940.🧵

One of the gloriously simplifying aspects of explaining history in terms of hand-wavingly pathological causes, or explanations where everybody is misleading, is that it avoids the burdensome need for detailed historical analysis.🧵

I suppose in a David Starkey sense, this comes down to the idea of Democracy as populism being bad. Democracy as some sort of process managed by suitably qualified & selected people being good. Democracy as rule of the majority at the expense of the minority is undemocratic.🧵.

Here, the ethnic tensions around late 19th century East End immigration are effectively pathologised and dismissed. Documents like report of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration 1903 records all sorts of practical reasons for the hostility. It could well be that in the

I hadn't heard about this before. It seems strange that there were enough Jews for this to be a well worn path. Maybe it is a Sabbath thing?🧵

A book by one of Vidal Sassoon mates in the 43 Group about growing up in the Jewish community in interwar Hackney.🧵

The sixth episode is from the 4th series and there really isn't much to it. Alf's wife fails to pack his lunch and he has to watch a fat socialist eat ham sandwiches with lots of jokes implying he's Jewish. There's then a Royal Variety performance, which is just mugging to the.

The fifth episode in the book is hilarious. They are going on holiday to Bournemouth, but it is made clear that this is a less desirable holiday than Spain, where the young want to go. On the train to Bournemouth, a Pakistani comes on who is offended by the uncleanliness of Alf

Episode the forth, this one is about paying respect to the dead. Some woman over the road has died, and Alf the younger generation, are watching the telly. Alf feels that with the body of their neighbour over the road, some sort of attempt to mark it communally is in order. It

Another episode from the second series of the show, Sex before Marriage, is particularly revealing of the format. Alf is concerned that his daughter and son-in-law might have had sex before marriage. He articulates this as a desire to protect the innocence of his daughter. This.

Man who was granted a right to be in the UK, so long as he didn't leave the country for more than 2 years at a time, left the UK for more than 2 years. Complains he lost his right to be in the UK through no fault of his own. This is typical of "Windrush scandal" cases.

This is typical of the way that Alf is disproved, catching him out in a generalisation that has an exception that is embarrassing to him, and flusters him, even while it doesn't really undermine the real-world point he was making. 🧵

Here Alf Garnett, working class philosopher that he was, shows his awareness of the contradictions at the heart of democracy and points out that often "democratic progress" happens against the wishes of the public.🧵

In an episode from the second series, Alf expresses scepticism about public health pronouncements reminiscent of Covid scepticism, and recommends observing the actual behaviour of politicians, who presumably know "the truth".🧵

Seems like the last time I went out for a drink, I somehow ended up ordering a Vanity Fair caricature of Major Sir William Evans-Gordon from 1905 with the words "The Alien immigrant" written across the bottom. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this.