Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth

This book is a celebration in plotting. Dickens would have been proud. It takes the reader through half forgotten streets of the political stresses of the seventies. The three day week, Northern Ireland and Heath v Wilson. It takes us close to the literary world almost mixing history with fiction. His characters condemn nihilist writing and then he gives us a nihilist ending.
He just gets better

Magna Carta - The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015

Third Millennium are publishing a quite excellent book on Magna Carta edited by Professor Nicholas Vincent. It has a special Lincoln edition which highlights the particular role of this city in the Magna Carta story.

There is currently the opportunity to subscribe to this edition. Here is the link http://tmiltd.com/products/magna-carta-lincoln

I have had a sneak preview and find something totally absorbing. This ranges from the nature of law to the detail of just what the pressures were that brought it all together. But there is much more, it is the legacy of Magna Carta that truly matters. This is seen clearly in the constitution of the United States, but it is much wider. It is almost the legal air we breath, in much the same way as the christian heritage of 1000 years is the air we in the western world breath. It may not have detailed application but its influence in unmistakeable.

12 Years a Slave

This is a film you watch with an sense of reverence. The fully deserved plaudits for its makers are one reason, the gravity of the subject matter the other. Throughout the film the sound in my ear was 'Gott' the first word uttered by Florestan at the start of his aria in Beethoven's masterpiece, Fidelio. Florestan was imprisoned as a result of an abuse of power and it was only the love of his wife that saved him. But it is the parallel of abuse that struck me most strongly. Let no one say that Magna Carta is irrelevant. Power is abused each and every day and this only happens because ordinary people like you and me do nothing.