News about Ezra Pound

Richard Haldane, a former Lord Chancellor, was famous for a dry sense of humour. On one occasion, Churchill prodded Haldane's portly tummy. 'What's in there?' Churchill asked. 'If it is a boy, I shall call him John. If it is a girl, I shall call her Mary. But if it is only wind, I shall call it Winston,' he replied. The U.S. poet Ezra Pound had some controversial words to say in a 1945 interview. He said of Churchill: 'Winston believes in the maximum of injustice enforced with the maximum of brutality.'

The Book of the Week, Claire Dederer's Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, asks if artists stand accused of doing or saying of doing or saying something awful, are we allowed to carry on enjoying their art?

MICK HUME: Can anybody be safe from today's cancel culture and the modern statue-smashing, history-erasing thought police? First, the awakened culture warriors were known for their historical hate figures. The statue of Bristol merchant and Tory MP Edward Colston was erected in protest for his ties to the slave trade. Cecil Rhodes' statue was removed from an Oxford college as a symbol of British colonialism, according to the students. Evidently, they've scrapped a proposed statue of gay 1960s playwright Joe Orton, long a hero to liberal luvvies, due to his well-known sexual preference for teenage boys in Morocco and elsewhere.