As in Devon and Cornwall, Whitby’s rise in second homes is fuelling worsening inequality and a housing crisis, says Alex Niven, a Newcastle University lecturer
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out that Mark Knopfler once worked as a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle when Basil Bunting was working there as a sub-editor. Knopfler being Knopfler, he eventually wrote a sad sweet song about it,
The musician talks to James Greig about the death of guitar music, Northern independence, and his growing disdain for ‘smarmy middle-class leftism’