Alfred the Great: The Most Perfect Man in History?
Barbara Yorke considers the reputation of King Alfred the Great, and the enduring cult around his life and legend.
King Alfred of Wessex (r.871-99) is probably the best known of all Anglo-Saxon rulers, even if the first thing to come into many people’s minds in connection with him is something to do with burnt confectionery. This year saw the 1100th anniversary of his death on 26 October 899, at the age of about 50. The occasion is being marked with conferences and exhibitions in Winchester, Southampton and London, but the scale of celebrations will be modest compared with those which commemorated his millenary, and culminated in the unveiling by Lord Rosebery of his statue in Winchester.
Trump’s ‘march on Rome’
The current US republic is heading towards an eventual downfall, contends Daniel Lazare
Certain pseudo-left circles seem to think that the January 6 assault on the US Capitol was no big deal.
Radical journalist John Pilger, for instance, tweeted that “the made-for-media theatrics on Capitol Hill were not an attempted ‘coup’. Coups are what the CIA stages all over the world. Neither was ‘democracy’ in peril. What democracy?”
Over at Sidecar, a blog site recently unveiled by the
New Left Review, the editors airily dismissed the “hysteria over the Capitol Hill occupation”. “Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy - oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc - constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy,” wrote Mike Davis, a member of