By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded – choose your favourite cliché – as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable… In [1978] the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun never set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labour unrest shut down public services, paralysing the nation for months on end… Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses. The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don’t want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you’re always on strike, you never deliver.” This was what had become of the world’s greatest trading power.

From Claire Berlinski’s “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, which I’m halfway through reading and enjoying quite a lot. It’s a brisk and witty reminder of what was at stake and how socialism can lead to extraordinary selfishness. It also has plenty of revealing incidental nuggets, as when Berlinski notes the feelings of some of Thatcher’s loftier enemies:

When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theatre producer Jonathan Miller replied that it was “self-evident” – they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat, well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”

Claire Berlinksi is interviewed by National Review’s Peter Robinson, again in 5 parts:

1. Socialist winter.

2. How she did it.

3. Thatcher and Obama.

4. Turkey and Islam.

5. What’s a radical?

Glenn Reynolds also interviews Berlinksi here. (Registration required.)

Related: Tory! Tory! Tory! An excellent 2006 miniseries tracing the history and context of Thatcherism, the miseries it involved and the much greater miseries it avoided. Well worth viewing in full. The three episodes are embedded below in six parts: 

Two galleries of snakes photographed by Guido Mocafico. Click to embiggen.

Mocafico’s book, Serpens, is available here and here.

Readers may recall Phil Wolstenholme’s ongoing digital photography project Wide Area Network, in which Sheffield’s surrounding countryside is writ large in a series of enormous, eerily detailed prints. Aesthetes among you may be interested in Wolstenholme’s first book of photographic work, Networks, published by Heavy Everywhere. 92 colour plates in a deluxe hardcover volume.   

To promote their literary works at the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishing company Eichborn deployed 200 flies, each attached temporarily to an ultra-light banner.

The banners, measuring just a few centimetres across, seem to be causing the beleaguered flies a bit of piloting trouble. The weight keeps the flies at a lower altitude and forces them to rest more often, which is a stroke of genius on the part of the marketing creatives: the flies end up at about eye level, and whenever a fly is forced to land and recover, the banner is clearly visible.

The results can be seen below.

Hm. A partial success, I think you’ll agree, but promising. Maybe if the project was scaled up dramatically. Say, with 100 million flies. Or maybe just one enormous mutant mega-fly, rumbling through the skies and casting its shadow across entire city blocks.

Between 1988 and 1991, Daniel Laine visited the African continent, photographing its various tribal monarchs and assorted royalty.

Left to right: Oba Joseph Adekola Ogunoye, Olowo of Owo, Nigeria. Isienwenro James Iyoha Inneh, Ekegbian of Benin, Nigeria. El Hadji Mamadou Kabir Usman, Emir of Katsina, Nigeria. Salomon Igbinoghodua, Oba Erediauwa of Benin, Nigeria.

From the book African Kings: Portraits of a Disappearing Era. Via Coudal.