"... where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale ..."
He may have been an upper-class leftie pacifist, from a long line of upper-class leftie pacifists (dad was Raymond, socialist journalist and Good Foodie, auntie was Fabian Margaret Cole, one granddad missed out on the Cambridge Latin Professorship to A.E. Housman, another was the Labour Party leader who 'carted his conscience from conference to conference' and lost the leadership for his pacifism), but Oliver Postgate could tell a story. With Peter Firmin's artwork the result was magical.
The children are mourning too, having had the stories of Nogbad and Graculus read to them in their infancy.
He would have been Old rather than New Labour. Kept up the politics to the end, as his website testifies. Hs views on the BBC are of interest.
Trimmed
11 hours ago
4 comments:
"apart from a few in-built instincts, they [children] are blank pages happily waiting to be written on": oh dear.
Yes, I noticed that. By a happy coincidence, I'm reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate at the moment.
I gues Jones has run out of steam.
Douglas Keen, founder of Ladybird books, also died recently. Sic transit.
The 'blank page' error has a long history, dating back to John Locke's 'tabula rasa' through to Marxism. For a detailed liberal/left refutation, see Mary Midgley, 'Beast and Man' (1978), which is still available, I believe.
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