Russian icon

I'm in a bit of a Russian phase at the moment.  I'm just over half way through Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic novel centred on the Battle of Stalingrad, which has prompted me to dig out my Russian Made Simple book which I last had a go at about twenty years ago.

Now the Russian hat trick is complete with the news that Wells and Young have brewed a new batch of Courage's Russian Imperial Stout, the strong bottle conditioned beer that was last brewed in 1993. Originally brewed at the Anchor Brewery in Southwark by Thrales and then Barclay Perkins for export by sea to the court of the Russian tsars in St Petersburg, it's a beer I've never drunk and I'm looking forward to its release next year.

Here's a description of Russian Imperial Stout by the journalist Cyril Ray who visited the cellars of the Anchor Brewery in the mid-1960's.

"The firm's visitors' bar stood me a bottle of the 1962 Russian Stout...A smooth, rich, velvety depth-charge of a drink - sweet, but with the sweetness only of the malt, for there is no added sugar, and yet with the bitter tang of hops...[and then] down to the Russian cellars to taste one or two that had been specially bottled and long matured. First the 1957, poured from a pint champagne bottle that had been corked and wired, exactly like champagne, and matured lying on its side...The cork came out with a pop, and the beer frothed creamily into the glass, dark and rich. Smoother than the 1962, I thought, but it was surpassed by the 1948 which came from a full-sized champagne bottle, smelled like burgundy and drank like liquid silk."

Let's hope Wells and Young can reach these standards.

h/t to Ron at Shut up about Barclay Perkins for reproducing the Cyril Ray piece which you can read in full here.

The Sound of Young America

Last week's death of Marv Tarplin, the guitarist in Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, got me thinking about the criticism that the music coming out of Motown's Hitsville USA studio in Detroit in the late 50's and early 60's was as mass produced as the cars rolling off the Ford assembly line which gave the city and the label their names.

There is no denying that the Motown sound is more polished than the Southern soul exemplified by Stax in Memphis.  The label's founder Berry Gordy, a former assembly line worker at Ford who had previously run an unsuccessful jazz record store, consciously created a template for music that would appeal to young white as well as black people, labelled the Sound of Young America.

But the Motown sound was also rooted in African-American gospel and specifically its immaculate close harmony singing. Combined with sharp suits, some nifty dance steps and lyricists of the calibre of Smokey Robinson (who wasn't called "America's greatest living poet" by Bob Dylan but could have been), it produced a sound and a look that is as distinctive as it is timeless.

Another blow for Murdoch?

I was pleased that Karen Murphy, the landlady of a pub in Portsmouth who chose to show a Greek broadcaster's coverage of Premier League football rather than Sky's, won her case in the European Court of Justice yesterday.

I've watched live football in pubs broadcast from Greece, Scandinavia and North Africa.  With Sky charging pubs £700 a month and overseas broadcasters around £60 you can see why. And like me, a lot of the people watching live foreign broadcasts of a match at 3 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon - games which Sky itself can't show - are people who have been priced out of actually going to the ground by the Premier League clubs.

The idea that you should be able to buy stuff cheaper from elsewhere in the EU seems pretty fundamental to a free trade organisation and the judge hearing the case was quick to side with Ms Murphy on that point. Whether the Premier League manages to reassert its control by witholding copyright permissions and whether many domestic Sky customers switch to other channels remains to be seen but the mere possibilty of the Murdoch empire losing some more money as a result of her bringing the case should make any decent person raise a glass to her.

With liberty and justice for all?

The news that Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia, Italy in 2007, has been freed on appeal has been met with popular acclaim across the Atlantic.  This is unsurprising as the US media assumed from the start that the Italian justice system was so flawed and the Italian police so incompetent that a fair trial was impossible.

Even if it's true that Italy's justice system is flawed, it does not follow that the US one is superior. Those who think so might want to consider the case of Troy Davis, the 42 year old African-American man executed last month in Georgia for the 1989 shooting of an off-duty police officer, who was convicted on similarly shaky evidence and protested his innocence up to the door of the execution chamber.

That the US media assumes an eduicated, middle-class white woman is innocent and a poor Southern black man is guilty says a lot about the racism that still runs through much of American society.

Thirty years ago today

The Tory party is meeting in Manchester this week, at the convention centre that was Manchester Central railway station until the late 60's.  The photograph shows it standing derelict in 1981, a couple of years after a Tory government had come to power proclaiming that there was "no alternative" to economic slash and burn policies that devastated large swathes of British industry and put millions on the dole.

With the Tories back in power, how long before it looks like this again?

Peterloo and public school politicians

Along with about thirty thousand other people, I was in Manchester city centre this afternoon for the TUC demo outside the Tory party conference.

The conference is taking place at the Manchester Central Convention Centre (Manchester Central railway station until 1969), close to the site of Peter's Fields where in 1819 fifteen people demanding parliamentary reform were cut down by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry in what is now known as the Peterloo Massacre.

A lot has changed since 1819.  Working-class men and women got the vote in 1918. In 1819, the Tory Prime Minister was the Charterhouse and Oxford educated Lord Liverpool; now it's an old Etonian...

There have been only been three Prime Ministers not educated at a public school or Oxbridge, two Labour (Brown and Callaghan) and one Tory (Major). When will we see the next one?

The photo shows the RMT rail union's Manchester branch banner depicting the Peterloo Massacre, ending with a quote from Shelley's 1819 poem The Mask of Anarchy:

"Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many — they are few"

Trial on TV

I've watched bits of the trial of Conrad Murray, the doctor accused of the involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson, live from Los Angeles on the BBC and Sky News.  As Tony Hancock said in Twelve Angry Men, it's just like they do it on TV, although the way American lawyers question witnesses seems a bit laborious to English eyes. Sky News have got a English barrister who's also a member of the California Bar to give expert analysis which is useful but they do keep going to a commercial break every five minutes.

Inevitably, watching the trial you come to your own conclusions about the case. Even at this early stage of the trial, I think it's pretty clear Dr. Murray is guilty as charged.  Having said that, given Jackson himself got away with sexual offences against a child, I hope Murray gets away with his crime too, or failing that receives the shortest sentence possible.