peripathetic

Miscellany
Simon Waldman has courted controversy by hosting scans of a 1930s Homes and Gardens article on Hitler's 'Berghof' (mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria). Although the scans aren't there any longer, due to a takedown request from H&G which caused all the trouble, David Irving (as Waldman says, ugh) has hosted them on his site. They're also here and here (at least, they were on the date this was posted).

Whether this catfight is really about neo-Nazism, copyright, shame, architecture, design or anything else, it has to be said right here and now that while some Nazi architecture was grotesque, some of it was just plain good in itself. For example, HBO's epic miniseries Band of Brothers featured Hitler's 'Eagle's Nest' with some wonderment. Today the building is, jarringly, used as a cafe. That's worse than putting an article up on the internet, IMO.

And now we turn to some wonderful naval fiction, and very quickly slip on the drool which reading it has brought on, to encounter a site with a list of challenged and banned books of the decade. I'm surprised to see Dahl's The Witches sharing the list with Madonna's Sex, and not at all surprised to see Little Black Sambo (children's book from when nigger was still an acceptable word) on the list - I read it a few times as a kid and it was boring shite. :oD