Daily Grind Of Still Water

If you’ve set your heart on cooking ortolan in its own fat, the French songbird is there on page 527, complete with photograph More practically, barded thrush breasts is on page 817. Geoff Dyer arranges more personal snapshots of the great figures of (mostly) US photography in The Ongoing Moment (Little, Brown, £20). Extravagant in size, exorbitant in price, too many photography books contradict the century-long drift of the art toward lightness and spontaneity. Sometimes, however, quality justifies bulk, as with the landmark Oxford Companion to the Photograph (edited by Robin Lenman, OUP, £40).

Written with all the authority and illustrated with the breadth you would hope for from its patron, this grand slab ranks alongside its definitive Oxford stablemates. Alternatively, you could use this book to press your brisket.. The 18 kitchen-hardened contributors include Paul Gayler on sauces, Shaun Hill on poultry, Charlie Trotter on vegetables and, more esoterically, Ferran Adria on foam. The legendary maestro of El Bulli reveals the secrets behind his signature dish of cappuccino almond foam. This has been a year of monster cookbooks.

Running to 648 pages, The Cook’s Book (Dorling Kindersley, £30), edited by Jill Norman, is a culinary leviathan of technique-led recipes. Rapture, by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador, £12.99), is a dramatically new departure for a poet so rightly celebrated in the past for her tough and edgy brilliance. This book-length sequence documents, consistently rhapsodically, sometimes repetitiously, often oozily, a love affair.. She is the latest in a long line of nature poets – Hopkins, Thomas, Hardy – and her work has an engaging mystical bent, whether interrogating the stoniness of stones or the owlishness of the owl. This collection confirms Oswald as our finest young English poet. But to every rule, there is almost bound to be an exception, so we begin with this selection’s only truly slim volume, Alice Oswald’s third book Woods, Etc (Faber, £12.99).

Both are on show as his story progresses from the hard times, with weight problems and a bad back, to this all-conquering summer. Michael Vaughan’s Calling The Shots (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) has a reasonable stab at conveying something of the England captain’s lot. The mystery of captaincy, according to Vaughan, is that there isn’t one. Instinctive rather than cerebral, he even admits to allowing Marcus Trescothick and Graham Thorpe to take the helm for a while during games.. Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25. Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25.

Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25. Is the best poetry to be found in slim volumes of verse? Not this year. The best books are editions of collected poems, anthologies or, in the case of Thomas McCarthy, a delightfully engaging almost-novel-length interweaving of poetry and prose. The players were all perceived as national heroes, naturally, but Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff was the only one to attain the status of national treasure. Though his autobiography Being Freddie (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) doesn’t really rise to the immensity of the occasion – how could it, given the immensity? – it does provide an agreeable stroll through his life and career. Like so many athletes, Flintoff is something of a split personality: there’s the extravagantly talented all-rounder, and the fun-loving Lancashire lad with the party-animal potential. This year we have been privileged to enjoy one of the great sporting contests.

A 14-year-old schoolboy playing pinball in a local bar, a 17-year-old cycling home, and people sitting outside their homes, were among the victims.The Baixada Fluminense massacre, which was immediately condemned by authorities, was the worst in the city’s history, but far from unique. Security based on repression will not bring the peace that the population demands.”A number of high-profile police “invasions” of the favelas have shocked the world in recent years.On 31 March 2005, 29 people were killed in the Baixada Fluminense district of Rio by a group believed to be police officers, who drove through the area shooting randomly. Witnesses and relatives are intimidated by police, with many too scared to speak out, even in the rare cases where investigations are conducted, according to community human rights groups. Groups also claim that there has been a rise in reports of police sexually abusing and beating young people in the favelas.Amnesty, which accuses Brazil’s government of “betrayal” of its poorest citizens, is calling for an immediate national action plan to be implemented to overhaul the system.Launching the report, They Come in Shooting, in Sao Paulo, Tim Cahill, Amnesty International’s lead researcher on Brazil, claimed that police were putting lives at risk.”Despite the fact that people living in Brazil’s poorest communities are more likely to be victims of violent crime, authorities invest little to nothing in their protection,” he said.”The poor of Brazil’s main urban centres are crying out for state protection and what they often receive, if anything, is violent and corrupt police officers. Amnesty believes the true figures are far higher.Working with grassroots organisations in Brazil’s largest cities, Amnesty has compiled a dossier of claims that police repeatedly cover up shootings before a forensic investigation can take place.

Brazil’s police force needs urgent reform to tackle endemic human rights abuses that potentially constitute thousands of executions in the country’s poorest communities every year, Amnesty International says. A report released yesterday claims that “death squads” – groups of rogue military police who have been accused of the mass murder of people living in favelas (slums) – are on the rise across the country.
It includes accounts from victims and relatives of routine extortion, theft and police brutality that sometimes results in death. According to official figures, more than 2,000 people were killed in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 2003 in cases labelled “resistance followed by death”. Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25. Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25. Besides which, it’s so much classier than a toaster or a set of fish knives.”. Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25.

She is said to like simple Brazilian barbecues, eating Japanese food, watching DVDs and shopping amongst the hoi polloi – all ordinary pleasures but worth their weight in gold to a poor little rich girl. Since she met Miranda, she has also found some kind of accommodation with her Greek ancestry. Not only has she renewed her Greek passport, but she has joined an Athenian riding school and stated her wish to ride for the country of her grandfather’s birth at the Olympics, although whether that will be enough to satisfy the “greybeards” is another matter.Perhaps in January, when Athina reaches her maturity and takes complete control of her own financial destiny, things will become clearer But somehow you doubt it In the meantime, in this most imponderable of weddings at least one thing is simple. The couple don’t want presents, suggesting instead donations to charity. “We did this,” says Miranda, “to show people there is a better place for their money. Miranda’s motives – love, money or a mixture of the two? – have been questioned just as Thierry’s were But the disturbing parallels do not stop there.

Since beginning her relationship with the rider, there have been reports that Athina has had breast and buttock implants at her fianc? request and that she has become blonder.Some observers have wondered whether it is not just a morality tale about money that is being played out across the generations, but a self-destructive psychological drama.”Athina is the third generation of Onassis woman to marry young, and to an older man,” Alexis Mantheakis, a former spokesman for the family told one interviewer.Others have pointed out that Athina seems genuinely happy in her relationship and the relative normality it offers. Horse-mad since childhood, Athina was trying to reach the standard required to ride in the 2006 Olympics Mirandawas her instructor when their affair began. Shortly afterwards, she left school.There is no one more moral than a rake who becomes a father to a daughter: Thierry Roussel was said to have been apoplectic, dismayed by his daughter’s refusal to go to university and disapproving of the fact that Miranda was 12 years older than her and a divorc?ith a six-year-old daughter by his ex-wife, the former model Sibele Dorsa.You do not have to be Dr Anthony Clare to wonder whether there isn’t a pattern. Athina met Miranda at the Nelson Pessoa riding academy in 2002.

As a teenager, she even considered giving all the money away when she inherited: “If I burn the money, there will be no problem. No money, no problem.” The relationship between father and daughter seems to have been permanently damaged, too. Last year, he finally renounced all claim to managing the Onassis fortune: but only after he received a settlement of £53m.This, then, is the kindling that has helped make today’s wedding such a potentially combustible event The spark that may light it, however, is the groom. Roussel could claim a victory of sort when the courts eventually appointed the accounting firm KPMG to administer the inheritance.But at what emotional cost? The moniker “poor little rich girl” stuck to Athina like a barnacle on one of her grandfather’s tankers. More plausibly (as much as anything in this twisted tale is truly plausible), they claimed they were simply monitoring her to confirm that she was satisfying the terms of a life-insurance policy.Later, the 13-year-old Athina appeared in court to claim that she had “great abhorrence for everything that is Greek” and that she wished to break with the trustees. Claim followed counter-claim: there have been at least 95 legal actions between Roussel and the trustees.At one point, he went to court to claim control over the money, insisting that the Greek “greybeards” were attempting to kidnap his daughter. She even tried to offer him a further £10m if he would give his sperm to provide her with another child.It never happened.

However, she still had to earn a living, so at the same time she took on a job in the orchestra at the Cambridge Theatre in London. As my mother was Polish, they reckoned I was an honorary Pole.She always felt that the experience of working with this ensemble greatly helped her musical development, but above all: “We were paid £6 10s a week! It was a fortune!”When the war ended, the quartet disbanded and Rozsa decided she needed more tuition, so she went to study with the Flesch pupil Max Rostal at the Guildhall School of Music; here she later became a distinguished professor herself and was later elected a Fellow. It was here that she first met Martin Lovett, a fellow student.Two years later, Rozsa was asked to lead the London Polish Quartet, a group sponsored by the British Council and the Polish government in exile. She said:They were all supposed to be Polish musicians, but the violinist, Frederic Herrmann, was taken ill and I was asked instead. Eventually Rozsa auditioned for Flesch and he was sufficiently impressed to reduce his fee to £4, still a vast sum to be found.

Unfortunately, her period of study with Flesch was brief, since at the outbreak of the Second World War he left for Holland.At 18, Suzanne Rozsa was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where she became a pupil of Isolde Menges, a pupil of the legendary Leopold Auer. He strongly advised her to leave the country and recommended her to go to London where Carl Flesch was then teaching.A successful application to the cultural attach?t the British Embassy brought visas for Rozsa and her mother for three months. They arrived in London with only hand baggage and her violin and their sole subsistence was one pound a week, provided by the British Committee for Jewish Refugees.In order to augment their tiny allowance, Rozsa’s mother worked as a dressmaker, but insisted that her daughter only practised the violin. Almost immediately Rozsa received a letter telling her she was not required at the forthcoming concert and Morawec – who had a Jewish wife – was sacked from the academy.

So Rozsa prepared the Bach E major Concerto for what would be the most influential performance of her young life.But the date in March 1938 was dramatically significant as it coincided with Hitler marching into Austria. It may make a terrific difference to the way they work for the whole of the next week.Suzanne Rozsa was born in Budapest in 1923, into a Jewish family who loved music. When she was six, she was given a small violin and soon taught herself to pick out folk tunes on her new toy. She was then given lessons with a local teacher and made such good progress that at 10 she was awarded a scholarship to the State Academy in Vienna, to study with Ernst Morawec, a pupil of Otakar Sevcik.At 14 she won the coveted Kreisler Prize and one of the rewards was to appear as a soloist at one of the Academy concerts. “We often go on for an hour and a half or longer,” she once told me:But what does that matter if a child needs that extra attention? If they have developed a fault that must be corrected, you can’t stop. Her students loved her because she always seemed to understand their problems and could find a solution to almost any difficulty; furthermore, her lessons never went by the clock Her enjoyment of teaching was obvious. The trio was only disbanded on the death of Fuchsova in 1980.Rozsa became one of Britain’s most respected teachers.

Their next step will be to apply for a grant from the Enterprise Fellowship Scheme for up to £7,000.In terms of practical help, they are receiving support from Coventry University’s business start-up programme, Vision Works. Should they start by asking for a large investment, aiming at high production levels, or begin with low-volume production, where the tools will be cheaper, and pitch their idea to investors for a lower amount?
“The latter would be the safer option,” says Adam Treen, one of the graduates. “But the risk is that if volumes increase dramatically, we may need to change the manufacturing process to cope with demand. That would entail a large capital expenditure – perhaps even doubling the cost of tools.”Meanwhile, asking for a large investment carries the risk that the graduates would be left exposed if the idea did not take off. Four Coventry University graduates have designed an intelligent cot with the potential to connect to modern home network systems so that parents can monitor the air temperature and remotely rock their baby.

What’s more, they will be able to see and hear their child from any room in the home, while a platform will be provided that raises the mattress to make it easy to lift their baby out

There’s only one problem. “People know when I’m travelling because they receive more emails than ever”.Charl?is also a Formula One fan and a shiny red part of the front nose of the Toyota F1 racing car is propped up against a wall in his office. He also proudly brandishes a small piece of the grey “skin” of the new Boeing 787 jet, which is being designed and made “end to end” with Dassault 3D software.Unashamed capitalism is in Dassault’s DNA, and Charl?has little time for the protectionist pronouncements of some French politicians. The graduates want to get their “Intellicot” on to the market this year, and to do so they need funding. “People [in France] are thinking about how to protect the past as opposed to how to build the future Politicians may talk but they cannot stop globalisation.”. If you thought a cot was just another piece of furniture, think again.

When not travelling, he sets off at 6am each day for a run of up to 45 minutes from his designer apartment in Les Invalides. His cap says “Top Gun”.He claims to get “great ideas” when he’s sitting in airports waiting to take flights to visit customers, collaborators and colleagues. His singular lack of self-doubt and strong leadership make him a hard task master; his technical assistants, it is said, invariably burn out after two years – to be duly replaced with fresh young bloodBut as he approaches his 50th birthday, Charl?s own flame still burns strongly He is unstinting in the daily demands he makes of himself. You have to read complex books and so on.”The world of engineering, mathematics and technology will be one where you learn through 3D demos, through 3D virtual experimentation – which will be so fun that you will want to learn.”Charl?has drawn criticism in France for the largesse he enjoyed in his take-home pay in 2004, when he received just over €1m, including a bonus, and also collected a capital gain of $3.6m after exercising an option on 300,000 shares in Solidworks, a Dassault subsidiary.But his fans argue that, by American standards, Charl? rewards are modest, while his contribution to the company’s growth is considerable. He is also in no doubt that Dassault’s evolving software can be a powerful tool in the teaching of science and technology.”Here is my vision of the future The new generation loves games They want to see the world through games Engineering is boring for this generation. Charl?sees Virtools as a catalyst for rolling out new tools to communicate complex industrial design via the playful devices used in games. The spin-off went public in 1996.The Dassault family retains 44 per cent of its capital but plays no part in the management.

“In 1938, my father borrowed $55 – to my mother’s dismay – from their landlord in order to start the Gold Bond Stamp Company This was one of the first loyalty programmes. After the war there was a lot of pent-up demand, and saving Gold Bond stamps from your grocery, or drug store or service station, was a popular way to get irons or toasters,” she recalls.”With the economic miracle after the Second World War, people grew more sophisticated. In Europe, the US and Japan, travel became a powerful reward. So she orches- trated the delivery of toy ducks to each National Football League team owner. “For a great game and wild life, play indoors in Minnesota” was the message.The little rubber ducks turned out to be irresistible: the 1992 Super Bowl generated more than $100m for Minnesota.The company now headed by Carlson Nelson was founded by her father, Curtis Carlson, just before the Second World War. You decide that you will persevere – that you will never give up.”The Thunderbird flight is entirely in keeping with Carlson Nelson’s unconventional approach to business and marketing.

In 1995, shortly after the company had merged its business travel operations with Accor of France to create the $19bn (£11bn) Carlson Wagonlit Travel, which operates in more than 145 countries, she caused a stir at an executive gathering in Las Vegas “This company meeting was about risk taking. So I decided to rollerblade from the back of the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas to the stage, waving our Carlson Companies flag.”A few years earlier, she had been asked by the Governor of Minnesota to mastermind a campaign to bring the Superbowl to the state. We did rolls and we pulled nine Gs – nine times the force of gravity, a huge amount of force, supposedly as much as the body can take.”
She compares that experience eight years ago to running her family’s multi-billion-dollar travel company, whose brands range from Radisson hotels through Seven Seas Cruises to TGI Friday’s “Some days it feels that way. Your heart is heavy and you feel helpless.”You get up the next morning and you feel light and excited. When things go wrong, when there is a bombing in a hotel or something happens in this crazy world, then you feel enormous weight. “The take-off was one of the most exciting things I have ever done.

“I had a little camera and a microphone, so I could talk to our people about teamwork during the flight,” recalls Carlson Nelson, a dainty 66-year-old who was a ballerina in her youth. When Marilyn Carlson Nelson became the chief executive of Carlson Companies, she marked the occasion not by going to the office, but by putting on a helmet at a US air force base and climbing into an F-16 fighter jet. He has confirmed that he is very much his own man.LIFE & TIMESNAME: Nicholas Gordon Richards.BORN: 25 February 1956, Alnwick, Northumberland.EARLY DOORS: won Flat championship as amateur rider, 1973; became assistant to father Gordon at Greystoke stables.CAREER: took over Greystoke as jumps trainer upon death of father in autumn 1998; won with first runner, Better Times Ahead, at Carlisle, October 1998; 15 winners in first season; best of 50 winners in a season, 2004-05; 48 winners so far in 2005-06.HIGHLIGHTS: treble on first day of Aintree meeting with Monet’s Garden, Turpin Green and Faasel.FAMILY CONNECTIONS: as well as legendary father, sister Jo and daughter Jo work at Greystoke.. It’s long, gradual, build-up to fitness, using proper National Hunt training methods, and everything we make out of this job, we plough back into it in facilities.”He pauses and runs the question through his head once more, before adding mischievously: “Mind you, if one of the Arabs or Coolmore rang you up.

well, that’s a different matter, isn’t it? You can never say never.”For the moment, Cheltenham dominates all thinking. “I want to prove myself as a real high-class trainer and I know I’m no way near being there yet. You’ve got to earn that respect to be regarded at that level, and what you achieve at Cheltenham plays an important part.”Already Richards has demonstrated that he is considerably more than the son of a genius who produced a champion in One Man. But we’re competing at the sales at quite a high level now and we’re determined to get as high up that ladder as we can.”Greystoke is very labour-intensive. And later we got a young fellow called Jonjo O’Neill from Ireland. I was never really going to figure, was I?”He is now in his eighth season training, and the Richards yard is flourishing.

This helps explain why the UK was able to weather the collapse of share prices from 2000 to 2003 without damage to demand, because houses went on increasing in value.But naturally, were house prices to soften, the impact on wealth would be correspondingly large in the other direction.. It takes more than a pink tie to make a prime minister. Gordon Brown’s pre-prime ministerial posturing this week stuck in the gullet. If the Chancellor is going to be “on approval” for the next 12 months, I suppose at least we can flesh out the main elements in his credo – such as health policy. Six years ago, almost to the day, a bizarre struggle broke out between the two most senior ministers of Her Majesty’s Government. As part of this conflict, the Prime Minister appeared on breakfast TV and sought to bolster his “real Labour” credentials by suddenly promising a 2 per cent shift in GDP in favour of health.
No 11’s initial response was hostile. But the Chancellor, realising that he was potentially being outmanoeuvred, then did a complete U-turn Suddenly, 2 per cent was barely enough.

In the ensuing bidding war for the heart of the Labour Party, the UK ended up with one of the most dramatic peacetime government initiatives in history.We spent £44.6bn on the NHS in 2000; we are set to spend closer to £90bn in 2008. In the past few years it has absorbed nearly 40 per cent of the Government’s discretionary budget, and if we carry on spending at this rate, by 2008 all increases in government spending will be absorbed by this one priority.Where has all this money – your money – gone? Yes, in some ways there are visible signs of improvement, such as shorter waiting lists (though some doubt the validity of the statistics).But overall, it is rather difficult to see the dramatic flourishing of the NHS that this doubling of expenditure would imply. The sad, indeed tragic, truth is that by the Government’s own admission 73 per cent of this shower of bounty has gone into so-called “cost pressures”.Chief among these has been the wage inflation among healthcare professionals. A couple of weeks ago at a march in Berlin, German doctors carried placards that read: “England, we are on our way”. Who can blame them? Our doctors are now the best paid in Europe, having had a 30 per cent pay rise in the past three years alone.

The average GP now earns 45 per cent more than his German counterpart (and nearly nine times his equivalent in Poland).At least having the best-paid doctors (and nurses) in Europe might give us hope for a high-quality service, but why hand out largesse to drugs companies? A recently leaked government study found that the UK pays nearly 20 per cent more for branded drugs than nearly every other country in Europe.This is why, despite the cash raining down from the Treasury (and this is where the bizarre becomes ridiculous), nearly a quarter of NHS trusts are on the verge of deficit, and overall the service is in the red by some £620m a year.Where on Earth do we go from here? In the first place, quite simply, we need to put the brakes on all this spending, and fast. “When it comes to the approach to business here, the French may have invented the word entrepreneur but they do not always recognise it.” After a pause he adds: “But we are getting better. I have to be positive about my country.”His promise to blue-chip clients such as Boeing, BMW, Toyota, Porsche and Nokia is compelling: “faster, better, cheaper” processes and products, as their far-flung teams of designers and engineers collaborate cohesively in real time courtesy of Dassault 3D simulated images on their screens.Charl?insists there is no need for expensive physical prototypes as the final, virtual prototypes can be verified digitally, so costs and lead times to market are slashed and factory production capacity can be optimised.Dassault software does not come cheap and businesses must also be willing to make radical changes to the way they operate, to embrace digital management of the life cycle of their products.But evidently Charl? messianic zeal and the power of IBM’s sales and consulting machine, to which Dassault has hooked its wagon, has convinced many. He led the company’s thrust into design software and became its chief executive in 2002.With his lithe figure, contagious optimism and explosive energy, he is a dead ringer for the American genius of dance, Gene Kelly.

When it is suggested he might resemble the star of An American in Paris, he laughs: “Some days, yes.”If only, he continues, his fellow countrymen could be so nimble on their feet. He had graduated with honours as a mechanical engineer from one of France’s most intellectually rigorous universities, the Ecole Normale Sup?eure in Cachan. “Why build a product that may not work, when in the virtual world you can verify if it will work or not?”Charl?was 26 years old when he joined Dassault in 1983 to lead teams developing new technologies. On the banks of the Seine, in the bourgeois Parisian suburb of Suresnes, on the seventh floor of an undistinguished building, Bernard Charl?is pacing about his functional little office. The irrepressible chief executive of France’s Dassault Syst?s is explaining how he sees the world in digital 3D, saying: “All physical products, no matter what, should be designed and made, end to end, with our simulated 3D software.”

Dassault is a €5.3bn (£3.6bn) group whose innovative computer-aided design (CAD) software has revolutionised the construction of planes, cars, boats, factories, watches, mobile phones – even a dam in Canada, and architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim art museum in Bilbao.
“Only when manufacturers have looked at every aspect of the design and construction of their products, and verified that they will perform via virtual 3D software, should they be authorised to use the energy, resources and material to build them,” Charl?argues.

Ordinary models are available for between £500 and £600, and may well have more features than the P8.But if portability is the main criterion, the P8 is the model to opt for.RATING: 4 out of 5PROS: ultra-lightweight and compactPROS: no digital input; portability comes at a priceCOST: around £1,200 plus VATCONTACT: www.toshiba.co.uk. A digital (DVI) connector would give a sharper image, although an analogue-only input might be an acceptable compromise in return for the P8’s portability.The P8 is also significantly more expensive, at around £1,200, than a standard projector. This is fine if the person giving the presentation is standing ahead of the screen, but less useful if someone is driving the projector from the back of the room, as they might be if they are playing audio-visual material, such as DVDs.The other issue is that the P8 only has an analogue video interface. The picture is XGA standard and compatible with high-definition DVD or TV standards, and the image is crisp and bright. In our test, the P8 handled basic video from a DVD without a glitch, and computer-generated images, such as PowerPoint, with ease.There are plenty of adjustment options for the image, which can be accessed via the remote control or from the buttons on top of the projector. One of the more useful is “automatic keystone”, which straightens the edges of the image if the projector is at an angle. This is a problem that is most acute with small projectors, as they tend to be used nearer to the screen.The P8 does have a couple of minor drawbacks.

After 3 minutes add the mustard and cr? fra?e and turn up the heat. Stir once or twice and allow the sauce to thicken and reduce by a third Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary. Don’t wash them in water as this washes away a lot of the flavour as well as the dirt Watch out for bugs Melt the butter in a pan large enough to hold the morels. When the butter is foaming, add the morels and squeeze over the lemon juice, a little salt and pepper and allow them to cook down.

Don’t play around with them too much, just let them do their own thing. Spoon over the chilli oil and squeeze over some lemon juice if you want to. Morels with cr? fra?e on toast Serves 4 1kg/2lb of morels 40g/11/2oz of unsalted butter Juice of one lemon 11/2tbsp Dijon mustard 150ml/5fl oz cr? fra?e Salt and pepper 11/2tbsp very finely chopped parsley 4 slices of sourdough bread (toasted, with a clove of garlic and drizzled with olive oil) Start by cleaning the morels I use a mushroom brush but you could use a pastry brush. Meanwhile once the butter has melted and is beginning to foam in the second pan add the garlic and cook, stirring quickly until the garlic shoots are wilted but still beautiful and mossy green – this takes just a few seconds Season with salt and pepper. 3 generous handfuls of wild garlic shoots, washed and lightly patted dry 50g/2oz of unsalted butter 4 eggs 50ml/2fl oz of extra-virgin olive oil 1 medium red chilli with the seeds removed and very finely diced 1 lemon to squeeze over the eggs Start by combining the chopped chilli with the olive oil and set aside until ready to use Place two saucepans on the heat. Add 10g/1/2oz of the butter to one and 40g/11/2oz to the other. Crack the eggs into the one with the smaller amount of butter and fry without turning until the eggs are cooked to your liking.

It is important to use the very best eggs that you can find – they must be organic and free-range. Skye Gyngell is head chef at Petersham Nurseries, Church Lane, Richmond, Surrey, tel: 020 8605 3627 Two fried eggs with wild garlic shoots and chilli Serves 2 This makes a delicious brunch, light lunch or, for that matter, supper. New season or wet garlic is another ingredient I wait for with great anticipation. Its soft bulbs can be eaten whole when roasted, as its aroma is far stronger than its sweet, young taste. Here I have served it with the young, lemony goats’ cheeses to be found at this time of year, but you can try them in a soup with young Jersey royals, lemon and thyme, and finished off with cr? fra?e and plenty of parsley – a really memorable late spring dish. He made a delicious omelette filled with wild hops pan-fried in butter.

He is a forager in the true sense of the word – his knowledge of wild food is second to none and it is always a joyful and life-enhancing experience when he comes to visit.
Two of the ingredients I am using this week can be found this way – wild garlic shoots often grow beside bluebells in woods. The soft, dark green leaves are garlicky and punchy when raw, but wonderfully mellow when quickly saut?. And morels – ruffly almost coral-like mushrooms – are the essence of spring. They stay with us only for a short while and my favourite way to serve them is how I have done here on garlic-infused sourdough toast.

The clocks have gone forward and I am desperate to move my food on to a lighter, more vibrant place. Last week I was encouraged by a visit from our friend Claudio Bincoletto who had walked along the tow path from Hammersmith to Richmond and had collected wild hops, borage, angelica, dandelion and sorrel on the way. Daniel Vencker’s Alsatian origins show in the signature tarte flamb?(onion and bacon tart) and Alsatian pork knuckle.La Fourchette105 Western Road, Brighton, tel: 01273 722 556 This Brighton bastion of all things Fran?se is very near the border with Hove. Service is diner-friendly and Gallic, as is the menu, running from soupe de poisson to steak tartare, cassoulet, grilled chicken with white beans and rabbit in a mustard sauce.Email Terry Durack about where you’ve eaten lately at t.durack independent.co.uk. Expect a good range of fresh fish dishes, as well as classics such as duck confit with onion confiture, and c?de boeuf with B?naise sauce.Racine239 Brompton Road, London SW3, tel: 020 7584 4477 It is now hard to imagine Brompton Road without Henry Harris’s chic but cosy bistro.

His music – a heady broth of hip-hop beats and vibrant, accessible reggae-pop – is infused with unabashed lyrical celebrations of his faith and the Jewish condition (“3,000 years with no place to be/And they want me to give up my milk and honey/Don’t you see, it’s not about the land or the sea/Not the country but the dwelling of his majesty” he sings on “Jerusalem”), and has been variously dismissed as a novelty curio by some, and hailed as the advent of a truly original voice by others. As the world’s only known platinum-selling Hasidic Jewish dancehall-reggae sensation, metaphysical MC and human beatbox, Matthew “Matisyahu’ Miller cuts a distinctly awkward figure amongst the gallery of image-obsessed, MTV-endorsed, chart phenomena he’s recently found himself rubbing shoulders and sharing airspace with. If we were to assess the old MX-5’s gender by use of a scale depicting, let’s say, the sexuality of old school Hollywood film stars, placing Charles Bronson at one end and Audrey Hepburn at the other, it would have come in around about the Doris Day mark (feminine, but with underlying notes of butch – think Calamity Jane). The new MX-5, however, edges the brand more towards Rock Hudson. Its bulbous wheel arches give it a more masculine stance and they’ve done away with the ickle 1.6-litre version (there’s even a 200bhp monster due for launch in a couple of years), but it is still going to have strong opinions on your soft furnishings.

It seems that, with old rivals like the MGF and the Fiat Barchetta dead, the MX-5 is, once again, the only proper sports car in the village.It’s a classic: Mazda MX-5Very few cars truly deserve to be called instant classics – and they are usually phenomenally expensive Ferraris and the like – but the Mazda MX-5 was one.This was partly because it so obviously harked back to a classic era of lightweight, open-top, front-engined, rear-wheel drive two-seaters, epitomised by the Lotus Elan (the main inspiration for the car’s Californian-based designers).The MX-5 evolved from a design sketch by Tom Matano in 1983 and was, famously, developed as a “garden shed” operation in the design team’s spare time. Their self-imposed remit was to design a car with responsive handling, lively performance, timeless design, a pleasant place for two and a simple roof at a price affordable to anyone who loves to drive.The price did creep up a bit by the time of its launch in 1989, but the MX-5 turned out to be wildly more successful than Mazda ever imagined, becoming the bestselling sports car of all time (overhauling the Ford Mustang and Datsun Z series), with almost half a million MkIs and almost 300,000 MkIIs being sold.. It has more safety equipment – more airbags, traction control, ESP – but, best of all, it weighs just 10kg more than the original. Trust me, at a time when VW Golfs have been known to cause eclipses, this is little short of miraculous.One thing that has changed, albeit slightly, is the new car’s sexuality. It grips, but not so much that you can’t “have a bit of fun in the wet”, as Spitfire drivers term it, although it does grip enough so that you won’t end up in a hedge, as most Spitfire drivers do from time to time.

This is a car that doesn’t so much worm its way into your affections as wrap itself around your heart like a boa constrictor and squeeze until you give in.The new car is better equipped, has a classier interior and seems heftier than before. No, the best thing about this car is how much fun you can have at legal speeds (which is why I’d go for the cheapest £15,600, 1.8-litre version, which also does without a limited slip differential). This is a car you drive with your fingertips and toes; like all the best sports cars its power and poise (it’s still rear-wheel drive, of course, with near 50/50 weight distribution) flatter you into thinking you are a better driver than you are without risk of a long-term hospital stay. It has the same precise and immediate steering; knobby little snick-snick, six-speed gearstick; unpretentious, manual cloth roof (none of your bourgeois, mumsy, folding hardtop flimflammery here); and, most important of all, from the moment you wiggle your bum into the hugging seats and grip the chubby leather wheel, you feel like an electrical plug slipping into its socket.What I’m trying to say is that the MX-5 is electrifying, albeit not in a hair-raising, whizz-bang Lamborghini kind of way (the MX-5 was never about spearing across the salt flats in a quest for land speed records). Let’s just say that for about a decade prior to that, most people’s idea of a budget sports car came with a hatchback and a GTi badge.
The new car is every bit as good as the old one: compact, light, agile and perky. The Godfather: Part III, Basic Instinct 2 and Roseanne’s thin period are a more salutary guide. So where does that leave the new Mazda MX-5?I know that, technically, the new MX-5 is the MkIII, but the last one was really just a re-jig of that first, epochal MX-5, launched in 1989 It’s easy to forget how revolutionary the original MX-5 was.

Would suit: Anyone who simply loves to drive Price: £18,900 (as tested 2.0-litre Sport) Maximum speed: 131mph, 0-60mph in 7.6 seconds Combined fuel: economy 34mpg Further information: 08457 484 848

Sequels rarely improve on the original. The Godfather: Part II, Blackadder II and Elvis’s fat period are the exceptions that prove the rule. Prices are the same as those in the clinic – Botox injections starting at £200 – plus an £80 “delivery charge”.Botox is now the most popular non-surgical medical cosmetic treatment in the UK.But Dr Patrick Bowler, chairman of the British Association of Cosmetic Doctors, said despite the apparent popularity of Botonics’s house-call service, potential customers should proceed with caution.”I can see the pros,” Dr Bowler said, “but you wouldn’t go and have your teeth checked in someone’s front room, would you? Most people know what good medical practice is and, clearly, on the back of a bike is not it.”. “The whole thing took about 10 minutes and it was great, really relaxing,” she said. “The idea of being able to recline on my sofa and have my husband here during the treatment is far more appealing than going into a clinic.”Dr Blum, who checks that each person is suitable for treatment and that their home meets sanitary requirements, said he had seen a broad range of clients during his first few weeks of housecalls.”A lot of businessmen like to have this done, because it’s very discreet, comfortable and very quick,” he said.According to Dr Blum, the most popular treatments are around the eyes, mouth and forehead.

He talked her through the procedures she had booked – Botox around the eyes, and dermal fillers to smooth out lines around her mouth.Moving his client to the brightest place in the house – the sofa in the lounge – Dr Blum administered the treatment, checked all was well and then rode off into the night.Mrs Thrift, 27, declared herself extremely happy with the results. For the past few weeks, he has been riding across London to different addresses, his panniers full of syringes and an icebox of refrigerated Botox on the back of his bike.The west London-based Botonics group of clinics says it has been inundated with inquiries since it launched the service last month: would-be clients include working mothers, professional models, businessmen and celebrities.Shortly after 6.30pm on Friday, Dr Blum arrived at Mrs Thrift’s address in north London, clad in black motorcycling leathers. Services include skin peels, Botox and injectable wrinkle fillers – administered Dr Cyrille Blum.
Dr Blum, 55, a Parisian with 15 years’ experience in the field, is Botonics’s main house doctor. This weekend she became one of the first people to make use of the UK’s first home-delivery medical cosmetic service. Dubbed “Botox-on-a-bike”, a range of therapies is being offered by a London-based chain of clinics to be administered in homes by a doctor who comes to call on his motorcycle. Greg had been told he was diabetic, and would need to inject himself with insulin four times a day For ever

“I was quite distraught,” he said. “There was no way I could stick a needle in myself four times a day I kept refusing to do it.”.

UKApress ) somewhat economical with the truth about how many “soldiers” would be appearing in the Square.Still unhappy with the footage, he realised that he needed a technical adviser to deliver the much-needed uniforms for the film. Having begged and borrowed uniforms, weapons and regalia, and dressed his “actors”, he invaded the 1956 May Day Rally. But the evidence is on film for all to see.He began with an easy scene: a Nazi rally in Trafalgar Square. There were no actors either, Brownlow believing that he could save money by simply asking people in the street and the pub to be in his movie.It is hard to reconcile the massive chutzpah this must have taken with the endearingly diffident, quietly spoken 67 year-old man sitting opposite me. Drafting a one-page synopsis, he borrowed a 16mm camera and started shooting. There was no script, no money and very little equipment – aside from the borrowed camera which was then stolen on the second day of filming.

The boy began to imagine what England might have been like in an alternative universe – one in which the Nazis had won the war. We were watching a silent version of Oliver Twist one Sunday and I had sat as close to the projector as I could get The projector jammed and the film fell out. I picked up a discarded piece of film and later in bed shone a torch through it in the hope of projecting the image onto the wall. That’s how technically adept I was.”But the feel of celluloid in his fingers was like a narcotic and Brownlow began collecting old films and showing them to his friends on the projector he eventually received for Christmas.

At this stage, he says, he had no ambitions to make movies himself.”My mother was afraid I’d end up as a projectionist,” he says. “She encouraged me to be creative and bought me a camera.”At the time, the teenage Brownlow was steeped in dystopian fiction; he cites Orwell’s 1984, the novels of John Wyndham, the Boulting Brothers’ film, Seven Days to Noon and Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio play as possible sources of inspiration behind his debut movie.Brownlow recalls seeing a black Citroen pull up one day, and a man getting out and running into a shop, turning at the entrance to shout back at his companion in German. His initiation into the world of celluloid, he recalls, goes back to 1947 and his unhappy days in a Sussex boarding school at the age of 11.”The only good thing about it was that the headmaster used to show films every third Sunday,” he says “There was no sound so it was always silent movies. It was a triumph of the amateur will to finish what he’d started.Quentin Tarantino may have established the idea that film geeks could make movies, but Brownlow got there first. And I am hopeless at raising money.”Nonetheless, in between collecting old movies and working on documentaries, Brownlow managed to finish his film after eight years. “I wanted to be the next Orson Welles,” he tells me over lunch “But I never even put on the weight.

Through the story of its leading protagonist, nurse Pauline Murray, it tells of partisan resistance to the Vichy-like state, and how survival and compromise can easily slide into collaboration. Shot in black and white, in 16mm and 35mm, in the manner of a documentary, it has the jackbooted kick of authenticity.
It is hard to believe that Brownlow, now a distinguished film historian and the planet’s most accomplished film restorer, was just 18 when he began making the film. In actual fact, it is a scene from the 1964 British feature film, It Happened Here. The intervening decades have done little to diminish its worrying, subversive power.

Made by debutante director Kevin Brownlow, together with his colleague Andrew Mollo, It Happened Here rewrites history to suggest what might have happened if Britain had been occupied by the Nazis. It is one of the most striking scenes in British cinema: Nazi stormtroopers marching through Parliament Square. Clearly designed to alarm and provoke, it is an image that could have been ripped from a WWII Nazi propaganda film. Unfit for children? Not at all – they are radiant with a beauty that was still in its infancy.Silent Comedy, NFT, to Sunday, 020 7928 3232; ‘Throw of the Dice’, www.barbican , 020 7638 8891; ‘Silent Britain’ will be shown on BBC4 at the end of next month. Which five? I’d say Buster Keaton’s The General, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, F W Murnau’s Sunrise and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Run five silent films for your children, and just see what happens.

The Labour comrades were puzzled (the leader was, then, Hugh Gaitskell). No, the Russians objected: the leader must clearly be the party chairman.In 1997 Mr Blair appointed the “party chairman” without so much as a by-your-leave The first one was Mr Clarke The latest is Ms Hazel Blears Make of that what you will. Perhaps the most symbolic action of the new government in 1997 was to replace – in theory, it was to add to – the post of party chairman. It was usually filled by a second-ranking trade unionist (the top leaders were members of the TUC council instead). In 1997 the Conservative Central Office warned us of old demon-eyes, one of the most ridiculous campaigns of modern times.Besides, Mr Brown was with Mr Blair for the long march through the institutions.

He then turns into John Smith Mark II to the approbation of Labour backbenchers and Guardian columnists likewise. But Mr David Cameron’s young ladies and gentlemen are aware of the deception; or, rather, they are wary of trying to pull the same trick twice. Earlier in the day, at PMQs, Mr Blair was more circumspect, so it was fairly clear that the decision had already been taken: the need was to present it more gently than the Chancellor was later to do.It may be that, for present purposes, the need is to appear more Blair-like than Blair. He makes numerous references to football: not just Scottish football but the England team on all possible occasions.Last week, in his Mansion House speech, he announced quite suddenly that he would be continuing the UK’s nuclear missile programme, at colossal expense. He has already delivered several lectures on the subject of national identity. It would be tedious to go in for enumeration.But it is as if the age of John Smith has come again Smith would probably have won in 1997 but we cannot be sure. His support for the European Monetary System and his Shadow Budget in 1992 were both held against him.

And Mr Blair’s rapport with the English suburbs and the Daily Mail did not exist for Smith as it did for his successor, even though that is now a vanished asset. Still, Mr Brown can hardly bring on the ghost of John Smith.Mr Brown is more likely to play the patriotic card in the few years that lie ahead. Of course they were happy enough to begin with, but all of them – some more quickly than others – saw the spots fall off their spectacles. Much better stick to the Chancellor you know.There is, however, a picture in the course of construction which shows the preoccupations of Guardian women columnists alike with well-intentioned Labour backbenchers It is as if Mr Blair had never happened.

For who else is there? Mr Jack Straw or Dr John Reid? The latest smart-money candidate, following Mr David Blunkett and Mr Charles Clarke, is Mr Alan Johnson; and where are the others now? They are sunk to the depths of the back benches. At the lowest estimation, the backbenchers would always keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse. He was assiduous in his attendance on Mr Rupert Murdoch, attending a conference of Mr Murdoch’s managers and forming a relationship not only with the great proprietor himself but also with his man-of-business, Mr Irwin Stelzer, who seems likely to go on supporting Mr Brown, though one never knows about these things.But his heart was still in the right place: that was the important thing about Mr Brown. Mr Brown could certainly see that.Moreover, Mr Brown was imbued with a proper scale of values, separate from Mr Blair’s.

Admittedly Mr Brown made various approving noises about globalisation and the supremacy of markets. But was practical socialism not what Mr Brown was about? The problems of the 1930s were different from those of the present day. Mr Brown was prickly, he was awkward, but he was honest.True, he possessed a certain tendresse for the Private Finance Initiative, which was likely to bankrupt the National Health Service over the course of time, if it had not done so already. He was equally likely to come up with a wheeze for some new means-tested benefit if this would redistribute money in a fresh form. The women columnists of The Guardian, an easily impressed bunch, concluded not only that this was the best Labour government in history but, more, that this was the best government of any period at all.Iraq came, and stayed, and it is still there Other disasters supervened But there was still Mr Brown He was always there.