The nineteenth-century Greens
First broadcast on Radio 4 extra, 16 July 2008
What would 19th-century Romantic poets like Wordsworth make of modern Greens? A half-hour broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
At Wordsworth’s and John Ruskin’s beloved Thirlmere, in The Lake District, Britain’s first national campaign to preserve a piece of local landscape emerged. Beginning there and featuring interviews with experts on Wordsworth, Ruskin, William Blake and William Morris, this programme questions some of the conventional wisdom about English literature and modern environmentalism.
The image is a portrait of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), by Benjamin Robert Haydon (National Portrait Gallery)
KOWTOWING TO BEIJING DEPT: Whaddya know? Keir Starmer finally discovers his ‘growth agenda’! As my piece also suggests, the portents don't look good for Labour to protect the UK from CCP operations https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-pares-back-secretive-china-strategy-review-seeking-closer-ties-2024-12-16/
"By all means, keep up the salty, anti-Starmer tweets, Elon. But kindly keep your mega-bucks to yourself."
At the #ECB, convicted lawyer #ChristineLagarde has just beaten inflation, oh yes. But #AndrewBailey's many forecasts of lower interest rates have excelled again, with UK inflation now at 2.6 per cent
Painting: Thomas Couture, A SLEEPING JUDGE, 1859
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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