Those prudish Americans!

It's a common myth that Victorian English people were so appalled by the sight of a bare ankle that they placed skirts or trousers around piano legs. In fact, this was first reported as something done not by the prudish English but by Americans. It seems to come from Frederick Marryat's Diary in America Volume II, from 1839. Marryat was an English naval officer and novelist who visited North America in the late 1830s, helping to defeat a rebellion in Canada and touring the USA. Like Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, who both visited the USA around the same time, he wrote a detailed account of his travels.

Only the last paragraph of this excerpt is relevant, but the earlier provide an amusing build-up.

When at Niagara Falls, I was escorting a young lady with whom I was on friendly terms. She had been standing on a piece of rock, the better to view the scene, when she slipped down, and was evidently hurt by the fall; she had in fact grazed her shin. As she limped a little in walking home, I said, "Did you hurt your leg much." She turned from me evidently much shocked, or much offended; and not being aware that I had committed any very heinous offence, I begged to know what was the reason of her displeasure. After some hesitation, she said that as she knew me well, she would tell me that the word leg was never mentioned before ladies. I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to my having been accustomed only to English society, and added, that as such articles must occasionally be referred to, even in the most polite circles of America, perhaps she would inform me by what name I might mention them without shocking the company. Her reply was, that the word limb was used; "nay," continued she, "I am not so particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a table, or limb of a piano-forte."

There the conversation dropped; but a few months afterwards I was obliged to acknowledge that the young lady was correct when she asserted that some people were more particular than even she was.

I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four limbs. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters, might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!

(on archive.org, or reprinted Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT, 2004, p90, accessible via Google Books)

Everybody loves Apple?

Another story about the iPhone? Is the mainstream media - particularly The Guardian - biased towards Apple projects, such as Mac computers, iPods, and iPhones? Although many newspapers often jump on strange bandwagons, such as the Guardian's enthusiasm for Twitter, the Daily Express's continuing obsession with Princess Diana, or the Daily Mail's project to categorise everything into the world into those that cause cancer and those that cure cancer, suggestions of pro-Apple bias have been made for a number of years. Many journalists celebrate the charisma of Apple founder Steve Jobs, but there are other possible reasons for good treatment: the tactics of Apple's PRs, and that most journalists personally use Apple Macs.

Apple are notoriously touchy with journalists and publishers. They refused to talk to IT news website The Register for a long time, have sued several technology blogs, and banned all publisher John Wiley's books from their stores. Reasons to incur this wrath included: mocking Apple boss Steve Jobs, producing a book about him, and reporting on upcoming products.

Historically Macs have been prevalent in newsrooms even in the company's 1990s doldrums, running software such as Quark used for newspaper and magazine production. Macs have their pros and cons - they are easy to use and have good software for many creative and design tasks, but have less software in other areas (particularly games). They can't interface with as much hardware - mobile phones, cameras, MP3 players, etc - as Microsoft Windows, due largely to the decisions of hardware manufacturers about what to support (although they do support iPods and iPhones), and they cost more than systems for Windows or Linux. In image terms, Apple have strong product design, but they lack the moral superiority of free software such as Linux, which appeals to many serious programmers for its underlying philosophy as much as for its power, configurability, and cheapness. Microsoft's business practices drove many morally-based purchasers away (although Apple's transgressions are less widely known). For the needs of a journalist, an Apple Mac might be ideal.

Occasionally a few journalists start to worry about this. The first seeds of dissent sprouted in late 2005 when Apple's initial iPod success was followed by a series of products of less than brilliant innovation, particularly the first video iPod - which came long after products from rival companies and had a tiny screen and minimal battery life (see below). In early 2009, when it turned out Apple had lied about boss Steve Jobs's health and he was actually seriously ill, there was another round of criticism.

One of the first people to discuss this was columnist John C Dvorak in August 2005, who compared the treatment of Apple with that of Microsoft:

As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today's newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. [...]

The newsroom editors are generally so out of touch that they can't see this bias. Besides, they use Macs too. There are entire newsrooms, such as the one at Forbes, that consist entirely of Macintoshes. [...]

I often confront these guys with this assertion, and they [...] all say that they use a Mac "because it is better."

Daniel Lyons in January 2009 complained that the media failed to pursue stories about Steve Jobs's health problems:

The fact is, in the eyes of the media, Apple is the corporate equivalent of Barack Obama—a company that can do no wrong. [...]

But some of my colleagues in the media have made a Faustian bargain with Apple. In exchange for super-special access to Jobs, they tacitly agree not to criticize the company or even to say things it doesn't like. [...]

Apple's entire corporate culture is built on secrecy, and I mean crazy, CIA-style secrecy[...]. Imagine what it might be like if the Church of Scientology went into the consumer electronics business

He also criticised Apple's PR machine in strong terms:

This is a company whose idea of "corporate communications" mostly involves picking up the phone and saying "No comment." Or sometimes they'll pick up the phone and just repeat the same meaningless sentence, over and over again, no matter what question you ask them. I'm not kidding. They really do that. And of course a lot of the time they just don't return phone calls at all.

This may seem incredible, even by the standards of telephone customer service people, but similar claims have come from The Register:

Apple corporate has turned these talented PR professionals into little more than call center workers who repeat the same, frustrating phrases over and over again, refusing to activate anything resembling human emotion or intellect. This has to be dehumanizing, and I suspect many of the PR staff seek therapy just so they can drive to Cupertino each morning.

It is little wonder that journalists whose careers depend on good sources in the industry and access to new technology will try and be nice to these fearsome PR robots.

Many critics of bias focus on over-enthusiastic reports of new iPhones and iPods. As already mentioned, these are almost the only mobile phones and media players that are fully supported on journalists' Apple Macs; Samsung, Motorola, or Nokia phones generally come with Windows-only software. CNet complained in November 2008:

the vast majority of journalists use Macs to write their stories and have a deep-seated love for Apple products. [...] When was the last time you saw the entire technology field stop and wait for an announcement from any other company besides Apple?

(CNet is no stranger at annoying big companies; Google once refused to speak to them for a year: report and the story that started it.)

The 2005 video iPod announcement provoked some questions from journalists, such as Jack Shafer in Slate, October 2005

The pairing of the V-iPod announcement with news that the iTunes store will sell Desperate Housewives and other ABC fare drove the story to Page One of USA Today and onto the biz fronts of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. [...]

Apple manipulates several narratives to continue to make its products interesting fodder for journalists. One is the never-ending story of mad genius Steve Jobs, who would be great copy if he were only the night manager of a Domino's pizza joint. The next is Apple's perpetual role as scrappy underdog—reporters love cheerleading for the underdog without ever pausing to explore why it isn't the overdog.

(Slate was at one time owned by Microsoft, but they had sold it by then.)

2005 was probably the high-point of Apple hysteria and bias. Another example: on 22 September 2005, the Guardian published almost the only positive review of the long-forgotten Apple/Motorola ROKR phone on the exact same day as they published an exclusive interview with Apple boss Steve Jobs. Following this, the Guardian featured in TV ads for the iPhone, where users were shown surfing to the newspaper's website, without the long loading times that the javascript- and ad-heavy web pages caused especially on first-generation iPhones.

Stephen Fry occasionally writes on consumer electronics for the Gardian, and one of Apple's biggest fans, with a close relation to the firm's PR machine. The corporation flew him over to Apple's headquarters to try it out, giving him a pre-release model, and in return received Fry's typically rhapsodic prose. (Time, MacWorld) This is no different to the way corporations woo other journalists, but Fry is not a young staffer on a technology website who might be expected to fall for such tricks.

There is also one particular story of pro-Apple bias which indicates the editorial standards of newspapers' technology desks. In the summer of 2009 readers noticed that the New York Times was employing as a technology journalist David Pogue, who also wrote several books on Apple products, and who gave Apple's products good reviews. Although he was not paid by Apple, there were suggestions of self-interest.

The Times's Public Editor summarised the problem:

Two Thursdays ago [27 August 2009], two of Pogue's interests seemed to collide. In his Times column, he gave a glowing review to Snow Leopard, Apple's new operating system for Macs. At the same time, he was writing a "Missing Manual" [part of a season of books] on Snow Leopard — two, actually — already available for pre-order on Amazon. It is no intended knock on Pogue's integrity — he has panned Apple products and praised those of competitors — to point out that the review put him in the kind of conflict-of-interest situation that The Times regularly calls others to account for: doctors with a financial interest in the drugs they recommend, or a presidential adviser whose clients have a direct interest in certain legislation. In this case, the better Snow Leopard sells, presumably the better Pogue's "Missing Manual" on how to use it will sell.

Later Pogue admitted that Snow Leopard, the OS he had praised so highly, was full of bugs and often crashed. The New York Times - one of the world's most respected newspapers - saw a conflict of interest but refused to take any action to stop it.

The always self-questioning BBC have given the pro-Apple bias some consideration. In 2008 Jeremy Hillman discussed its coverage of the iPhone 3G (not the original iPhone) launch which he claimed was modest (getting radio and website coverage but not TV) and correctly proportioned.

On the other hand, many Apple fans have insisted that the media is anti-Apple; while this can hardly be justified with respect to iPhones and iPods, the media has sometimes paid less attention to Apple computers - but with Apple's tiny share of the PC market that is not too surprising.

What is needed is more substantial, perferably quantitative, analysis. In the absence of that, I did a quick search of the Guardian's archives today. "Apple" returned 16131 results, 2145 in 2009; "Microsoft" 13085 results, 1341 in 2009. Taking figures for 2009, that is 60% more coverage for Apple than Microsoft, despite turnover of $58bn for Microsoft (makers of Windows, the XBox, search engine Bing, and websites including Hotmail) against $34bn for Apple (makers of Mac computers, iPhones and iPods, and operators of the iTunes online store). iPhone got 1074 results against 305 for Nokia. Google (2640 results) and Twitter (3566) got more coverage, although those stories may have been bulked by journalists inviting people to Twitter comments or Google stuff.

(The Guardian's vast Twitter coverage is another topic; whether they are enthused by Twitter's usefulness for marketing, or someone there just really likes it, is unclear.)

Lost and Found

Some examples of lost, mislaid, stolen, or destroyed, music, books, and films, plus some subsequently recovered.

Keith Waterhouse left the first 10000 words of his novel Billy Liar in a taxi and had to start it again.

John Stuart Mill accidentally destroyed the only manuscript of Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, mistaking it for scrap paper and setting fire to it, but Carlyle rewrote it and it became a classic.

Andre Malraux's manuscript novel The Struggle against the Angel was destroyed by the Germans in World War Two; Malraux, who fought in the French Resistance, was also captured but survived. Only a fragment of the book escaped destruction, and was later published as The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Malraux did not write any more novels, but served in de Gaulle's governments and became an important art historian.

John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester burned many of his more immoral poems when he decided to reform.

Ralph Ellison lived 40 years after the publication of his masterpiece Invisible Man without ever producing a followup, but with many excuses for not writing it - he claimed to have lost 365 pages of it in a house fire, but the truth of this excuse is disputed. His work in progress was published posthumously as Juneteenth.

Fantasy writer David Eddings accidentally burnt down his office when he attempted to test whether a liquid leaking from his car was water or gasoline by setting fire to it. However, it was not reported that he lost any work.

William Faulkner died in 1962; The Dreadful Hollow, a vampire screenplay set in Victorian England and possibly written as a joke, was found among his papers in 2007. Faulkner was a successful screenwriter, working on The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and To Have and Have Not among other films, and there were rumours when it was discovered that The Dreadful Hollow would be filmed with a $60m budget, but this doesn't seem to have happened.

Graham Greene's detective novel The Empty Chair written in the mid 1920s was unearthed in his archives in 2008. Unfortunately he never finished it, so nobody knew whodunnit.

Many works narrowly escaped destruction on the author's death when friends and relatives disobeyed the author's will. Nabokov left instructions for his unfinished manuscript The Original of Laura to be burnt after his death in 1977. His wife saved it and it sat in a Swiss bank vault for 30 years. Despite being little more than notes on index cards, it was published in 2009; reviewers were embarrassed or critical (Washington Post, Guardian, Telegraph). Virgil did not finish writing the Aeneid before his death, and legend says he ordered its destruction. Max Brod failed to carry out Franz Kafka's wish that he destroy unfinished manuscripts. In contrast, Ted Hughes destroyed some of Sylvia Plath's diaries upon her death, apparently without her authorisation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins spent his lifetime agonising over whether he should write poetry and released only a few mild verses that did not show his true genius; he died in 1889 but it wasn't till 1918 that his friend Robert Bridges published his poems. Emily Dickinson was another poet almost unpublished during her life; she died in 1886 and her sister Lavinia discovered her poems shortly after; they were published by friends in 1890. However, this collection was heavily edited and it was not until 1955 that a scholarly edition was produced that made no attempt to correct her strange rhythms and half-rhymes.

The history of popular music is full of legendary missing recordings. The mastertapes of Green Day's Cigarettes and Valentines album were stolen and they recorded something else instead - the American Idiot album. The tapes of an album by Peter "Where do you go to my lovely?" Sarstedt recorded in 1970 were lost for 30 years; it was released as the Lost Album in 2008. There is a missing album by Johnny Marr and Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen), recorded in 1993, stolen from a courier van on their way to fellow Bunnyman Will Sergeant.

The BBC followed a deliberate policy of deleting old programs on videotape so that the tapes could be reused. This means there are no recordings of episodes of classic shows from Doctor Who to Dad's Army, as well as classics like Hancock's Half Hour, live broadcasts from Top of the Pops to the BBC's coverage of the first moon landing, adaptations of Madame Bovary and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and many televised plays including The Madhouse on Castle Street (1963) which featured Bob Dylan's first acting performance. Sometimes an old telecine recording turns up, or a tape leant to an African broadcaster returns home, but the supply is surely drying up.

The Afghan John Lennon

In his latest blog post, Adam Curtis tells the story of the king of Afghan pop music, singer Ahmad Zahir. With the style of Elvis Presley and the political commitment of John Lennon, he remains an idol to his countrypeople. He was the son of Abdul Zahir, Columbia alumnus, court doctor, health minister, and prime minister under Mohammed Zahir Shah.

As Afghanistan's elite grew more westernised in the 1960s, the children of the ruling class looked for new forms of entertainment and expression. Ahmad started making pop music that blended western influences with traditional music and poetry as well as songs from Indian cinema.

This is Aye Darya* from his first album, with the Habibia Amateurs. It starts very strangely but bear with it a minute:



Later he became more involved with prog rock, working with Afghan band The Stars, who loved Emerson Lake and Palmer but also covered western disco songs. Begzar Ta Begeryam Chon Abaro Dar Bah is from Beyayed Beyayed, the album they recorded together:



Here's Khuda Bowad Yaarit, another proggy song, with a striking video:



And one of his last songs, Tu Ba Mani (1978; released 1979), with another dodgy fan video:



Following the marxist takeover in 1978, he protested against the new government and his songs were banned from state radio. He died mysteriously in his car on June 14, 1979. Officially it was a car accident, but many people believe he was shot dead by one of his friends who were travelling with him, on the order of communist general Daud Taroon.

Following the Soviet invasion in December 1979, his sister Zahira fled to the west, settling in Washington DC, where she set up a hair salon in the Watergate building. Her customers included Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George HW Bush and his son George W.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they destroyed Zahir's grave, believing all music to be sinful. But Ahmad Zahir still retains incredible popularity in Afghanistan and elsewhere, not least at his official web site. Recently his music featured in the film The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan.

*Unfortunately the romanisations of his song titles vary a lot (probably from being translated between Persian, Pashtun, and other languages).

Where are the right-wing writers?

It's a common supposition on both left and right that everyone in the arts is a liberal, lefty, communist, or fellow traveller; at most there's one or two exceptions writing from a conservative position. Thus, Tony Kushner in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy has Laura Bush say:

The liberals may have nearly all the poets and painters and everybody else but WE have Dostoevsky and he obliterates the whole kitandkaboodle, we have Dostoevsky and so we win.

But is this the full story? For your consideration, I present the following. From libertarians to upper-class high-church snobs, with a smattering of one-nation tories, Nazi sympathisers, and the unprincipled rich, here's a list of notable novelists, poets, and a few other literary types of a rightist persuasion.

1. Kingsley Amis - despite early socialism, he moved rightwards through his life to become a curmudgeonly conservative
2. Martin Amis - in recent years has followed his father's path, with his views on Islam condemned by many left-wingers; also anti-communist, writing books about Stalin
3. Jeffrey Archer - popular novelist and former Conservative Party MP; also convicted perjurer
4. Honoré de Balzac - royalist and chronicler of a society in decline
5. Hilaire Belloc - the poet and writer, known for his verse for children, was an admirer of fascism and especially Mussolini; he was a devout Catholic and has been accused of anti-semitism
6. Saul Bellow - a youthful leftist he moved to the right, was culturally conservative, opposing political correctness and multiculturalism
7. John Betjeman - a small-c conservative: an admirer of the English upper classes, a campaigner to preserve disappearing aspects of England, scornful of mass culture, and a Catholic
8. William Peter Blatty - the Exorcist writer is a donor to the US Republican party
9. Robert Brasillach - French novelist and journalist who collaborated with the Nazis
10. Rupert Brooke - upper-middle-class poet known for his patriotic World War One verse, although he also moved in liberal circles
11. John Buchan - the author of the 39 Steps was an MP for the Unionist Party in Scotland (which later merged with the Conservative Party), a keen imperialist, and has been accused of racism
12. Jorge Luis Borges - the Argentinian postmodernist was an admirer of Latin American dictators, including Pinochet
13. William F. Buckley, Jr - writer, tv presenter, and occasional novelist, a leading intellectual of US Republicanism from the 1960s to the 2000s
14. Roy Campbell - South African poet and Catholic, he moved to Spain in the 1930s and supported Franco (unlike most writers who went to Spain); turned against the Bloomsbury group after his wife had an affair with Vita Sackville-West
15. Orson Scott Card - best known for science fiction novels such as Ender's Game, he is also a pro-Republican commentator and a Mormon
16. Thomas Carlyle - Scottish historian, satirist, and essayist who distrusted democracy and modernity, and believed nations needed great men to lead them, writing an admiring biography of Frederick the Great
17. Willa Cather - a novelist who was conservative both in aesthetics and politics
18. Louis-Ferdinand Céline - the modernist novelist was an anti-semite and supporter of Vichy France
19. François-René de Chateaubriand - French royalist and a devout Catholic
20. GK Chesterton - humorist and Christian apologist, converted to Catholicism; George Orwell accused him of writing "endless tirades against Jews"
21. Agatha Christie - reactionary conservative who portrayed a bygone England, her early books included various racial caricatures
22. Winston Churchill - winner of Nobel prize for literature for his non-fiction, and Conservative prime minister
23. EM Cioran - Romanian philosopher and essayist, a pupil and follower of far-right philosopher Nae Ionescu
24. Tom Clancy - popular spy novelist, has donated large amounts of money to the US Republican party
25. Robin Cook - the thriller writer, not the deceased British Labour politician, is a Republican donor
26. James Fenimore Cooper - wrote widely on political matters, influenced by Jefferson, notably supporting the landowners in the New York Anti-Rent Wars in the 1840s and 50s
27. Patricia Cornwell - crime writer and Jack the Ripper enthusiast who has made large donations to the US Republican party, despite being a lesbian who has spoken out for equal rights
28. Noel Coward - naturally conservative, author of comedies about the upper middle classes, although he was an agnostic
29. Michael Crichton - climate-change denialist who satirised political correctness and accused liberal magazine editor Michael Crowley of being a small-dicked paedophile
30. Ian Curteis - British writer whose play about the Falklands war was allegedly a victim of censorship by the left-wing BBC
31. Robertson Davies - Canadian novelist with old-fashioned literary style and reactionary politics
32. Benjamin Disraeli - Conservative prime minister and novelist, the father of moderate one-nation conservatism
33. Michael Dobbs - conservative politician and prolific novelist, best known for Francis Urquhart books
34. John Dos Passos - modernist novelist, initially a communist, he moved all the way across the political spectrum to become an admirer of Joe McCarthy
35. Feodor Dostoyevsky - a reformer in his youth, he later moved to the right, seeking to defend the traditional Russian spirit
36. Mircea Eliade - Romanian fiction writer and philosopher of religion, a fascist in the 1930s
37. TS Eliot - former banker, socially and politically conservative, also accused of anti-semitism, said: "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"
38. James Ellroy - critically acclaimed crime novelist has expressed right-wing authoritarian viewpoints, e.g. defending the LAPD over the Rodney King beating, but elsewhere claims this was just controversialist nonsense
39. William Faulkner - although a liberal in his attitudes to race, the Southern US novelist is generally judged to be overall conservative
40. Julian Fellowes - a writer whose subject is the English upper classes, his Conservative politics are no great surprise, and he's often on lists of celebrity Tory supporters
41. Fillià - Italian futurist writer and painter known for his religious art, had links with fascists
42. Frederick Forsyth - the British thriller writer has long been a supporter of the Conservative Party
43. George MacDonald Fraser - the author of the humorous Flashman novels was a military man and a traditionalist in many areas of life, prominently campaigning against the metric system
44. Robert Frost - American poet of conservative political views who became a national treasure and spoke at Kennedy's inauguration; he played at being a farmer but earned his money from teaching
45. JW von Goethe - romantic conservative, admired the upper classes, and opposed the numerous revolutions of the late 18th/early 19th centuries
46. Terry Goodkind - Ayn Rand-influenced sword and sorcery writer with enormous sales
47. Knut Hamsun - Norwegian Nobel laureate (Hunger) and later a Nazi sympathiser
48. Robert Heinlein - right-wing libertarian militaristic writer of (mostly) intelligent science fiction
49. Hergé - Belgian comic-book writer of conservative politics, accused of racism and collaborating with the Nazis
50. Michel Houellebecq - anti-political correctness, anti-Islam, anti-women, for his admirers he offers a critique of modern liberal humanism
51. Ted Hughes - misanthropic violence-loving nature poet who detested modern life and became poet laureate and friends with the Queen Mother
52. JK Huysmans - in his early life, a writer of Zola-influenced liberalism, he dallied briefly with fin de siecle decadence but converted to Catholicism and became a conservative
53. PD James - English crime novelist and a Conservative peer in the House of Lords
54. Antony Jay - Thatcherite writer of satirical sitcom Yes Minister
55. Ernst Jünger - German writer who glorified the military following World War I and opposed democracy
56. Jack Kerouac - the beat novelist moved right in the 1960s, supporting the Vietnam war, becoming friends with William F Buckley, and returning to the Catholic faith he was raised in
57. Rudyard Kipling - poet of British patriotism and imperialism, defender of the British soldier
58. Dean Koontz - thriller writer and supporter of US Republican party
59. Philip Larkin - his posthumously-published letters revealed a racist, misogynistic, right-wing private man, while his poetry showed a kindlier backward-looking conservatism
60. DH Lawrence - novelist and poet had liberal views early in his life but later moved towards fascism
61. CS Lewis - Christian apologist and a moderate conservative, though he avoided political association and refused a CBE from Churchill
62. Wyndham Lewis - influenced by the Futurists, he was briefly a supporter of Hitler, and often anti-semitic
63. Liu Xiaobo - the Chinese writer, poet, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner was an admirer of George W Bush and a defender of American imperialism who criticised John Kerry for being insufficiently right-wing; also anti-Islam
64. Mario Vargas Llosa - once a supporter of Castro, he became a free-market centre-right politician, while defending human rights, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru
65. André Malraux - the novelist, art historian and resistance fighter fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, but in the 1960s he served as Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs
66. Thomas Mann - a supporter of the Kaiser in his youth, he moved in a liberal direction during the Weimar republic
67. FT Marinetti - Italian proto-fascist poet, active as both an artistic and political leader; he split with Mussolini because he felt the Fascist party was too backward-looking
68. Allan Massie - Scottish conservative historical novelist and journalist
69. HL Mencken - satirist who opposed the New Deal and hated Franklin Roosevelt
70. Stephenie Meyer - Mormon vampire novelist of conservative views
71. Yukio Mishima - right-wing anti-democratic Japanese novelist and playwright who attempted a military coup
72. Marianne Moore - like many in Pound and Eliot's circles, she was right-wing, a defender of American capitalism
73. Iris Murdoch - a youthful communist and populariser of Sartre, she seemed to move rightwards, and like Ayn Rand was a fan of strong-willed almost demonic men; her philosophy focused on topics such as moral virtue; she opposed literary experimentalism, and demanded striking miners be shot
74. Vladimir Nabokov - a conservative aesthete who fled Stalin's Russia
75. VS Naipaul - Indo-Trinidadian Nobel laureate, conservative, accused of disliking the third world and Muslims
76. Flannery O'Connor - Catholic moralist who mocked the godlessness of modern life in grotesque fiction
77. Alexander Pope - conservative satirist
78. PJ O'Rourke - satirist of right-wing sympathies
79. John Osborne - angry young man who turned into a cantankerous old man
80. Luigi Pirandello - experimental playwright allied himself with Mussolini, although his supporters claim it was purely from self-interest
81. Ezra Pound - sophisticated and erudite aesthete, accused of being sympathetic to Mussolini in World War Two and imprisoned
82. Anthony Powell - his Dance to the Music of Time chronicled rich English bohemians and he was an upper-class conservative
83. Marcel Proust - upper-class aesthete, although homosexual, came from a conservative background; he avoided politics and his political position is contested
84. Ayn Rand - popular philosopher and author of very long novels, known for her defence of entrepreneurs and for championing reason over emotions
85. John Crowe Ransom - conservative US Southerner, involved with the Southern Agrarians (backward-looking pro-Confederate grouping) for a time
86. Tim Rice - the lyricist, writer, and TV personality has supported the Conservative party for ages; he also does a lot of good work for charity
87. Walter Scott - Scottish historical novelist of Tory sympathies, active in conservation but condemned by Mark Twain for romanticising war and chivalry; while pro-Jacobite and romantic about Scottish history he also defended the union with England
88. Moshe Shamir - Israeli novelist, playwright, and politician, moved from early socialism to right-wing Likud and Tehiya parties
89. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the Soviet dissident had an understandable hatred of communism; on his arrival in the USA he allied himself with the neo-conservatives who believed the Soviet Union was the gravest threat to the USA's existence, and called for its destruction
90. Nicholas Sparks - the author of drippy romantic fantasies donated to Republican senator Elizabeth Dole
91. Gertrude Stein - collaborated with Vichy France; claims that she called for Hitler to be given the Nobel Peace Prize were probably a joke
92. Wallace Stevens - insurance company executive who wrote abtruse modernist poetry
93. Tom Stoppard - playwright is generally reckoned to be slightly right of centre despite his human rights work; an anti-communist long-associated with east European dissidents
94. Jonathan Swift - conservative, devout Anglican satirist, converted from Whig to Tory
95. Allen Tate - American agrarian poet, who later became a Roman Catholic and a legendary womaniser
96. Alfred Lord Tennyson - the poet laureate was a traditional English gentleman who celebrated military virtue and the chivalrous middle ages, but was more liberal on some causes - he refused a baronetcy from Disraeli and was agnostic
97. Hunter S Thompson - a libertarian and great believer in gun rights, although he hated most Republicans (despite a grudging respect for Nixon)
98. JRR Tolkien - deeply conservative and strongly Catholic throughout his life, he supported Franco in the Spanish civil war, although he hated Hitler for perverting northern-European myths and traditions
99. John Updike - novelist who wrote about suburbia with a conservative viewpoint
100. Robert Penn Warren - poet, critic, and novelist (political satire All the King's Men), who had links with the Southern Agrarians but moved left and later became a father figure of American liberalism
101. Keith Waterhouse - the author of Billy Liar was a Daily Mail columnist for decades until his death
102. Evelyn Waugh - satirist of the British upper classes and author of Brideshead Revisited, a right-wing Catholic
103. AN Wilson - British novelist, biographer, and newspaper columnist for the right-wing press, of firmly Conservative views
104. PG Wodehouse - although he satirised British fascism in the 1930s, he did broadcasts from Nazi Germany in World War Two, and has been condemned as a collaborator; certainly a small-c conservative
105. Tom Wolfe - satirist, journalist, and winner of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, an admirer of George W Bush and long-time Republican
106. William Wordsworth - a radical in his youth, he became more conservative as he got older, repudiating his initial support for the French Revolution and eventually becoming a member of the establishment
107. WB Yeats - Irish nationalist and mystic, a Nobel laureate for his poetry, who became increasingly conservative and eccentric and even flirted with fascism

Some suggestions from: Sans Everything, Ranker, WP, Bookslut, Iain Dale, BBC, ChuckerCanuck, Daily Mail, LibraryThing.

Top Ten Internet Hoaxes

MSNBC has produced a list of the 10 most heinous hoaxes on the Net. The list doesn't appear to be in order.

Twitter/Facebook AMBER alert: people broadcasting fake alerts about missing children over Twitter and Facebook.

Bonsai Kitten: fake images of a kitten in a bottle, complete with instructions on how to make your own. The American Humane Society and the FBI investigated it.

Epilepsy Forum Raid: Hackers got into the websites of Epilepsy Foundation of America and the British National Society for Epilepsy, filling them with rapidly-flashing images. It has been blamed on Anonymous (best known for their anti-Scientology actions), 7chan, eBaum's world, and the Internet Hate Machine.

Bigfoot's body: Two men in Georgia, USA, claimed to have bigfoot in their freezer, and sold the corpse to a man from Indiana for $50,000.

Changing pi: Mark Boslough wrote an April Fools story in 1998 about how Alabama legislators were going to change the mathematical constant pi to 3.

Save Toby: In 2005, some people announced they had found an injured rabbit and restored it to health. The heartwarming story changed tack when they said they'd cook eat it unless people donated $50,000.

Myspace Suicide: 13 year old Megan Meier met a boy called Josh on MySpace. They exchanged emails and she fell in love with him. He broke it off a month later and she committed suicide, hanging herself in her bedroom on 16 October 2006. But Josh never existed: Lori Drew, the mother of a girl who knew Megan, created the fake profile and Drew and others used it to send Meier abusive messages.

419 Nigerian scams: The classic get-rich-quick scheme, where someone emails to say that they've got $100 million in an African bank account and with your help they can get it out. Just send some money to help. And your bank details... In 1995, an American who went to Lagos after one of these schemes was murdered.

Work-at-home scams: Another age-old trick: just send money and we'll tell you how to earn $$$ from your own home. Whether the method involves setting up your own work-from-home scam will vary.

Facebook hoax on TechCrunch: Facebook tricked technology news website TechCrunch into believing Facebook had added a "fax this photo" feature to every photo on Facebook.

(Via Museum of Hoaxes, who suggests they missed manbeef.com, Marry Our Daughter, and "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then he knocked up my sister!")

We Live In Ethiopia Now

The Guardian has a feature on Josh Harris, an early and eccentric internet millionaire who funnelled his profits into massive art projects. He founded a company called Jupiter Interactive and a website pseudo.com for streaming audio and video. He offered sex chat and streamed audio programs on subjects such as video games over dial-up connections, later moving up to video. The company went bankrupt in the first dot com crash in 2000.

What's more interesting is how Harris managed to spend $80m he earned from his businesses. He was obsessed with the ability of the internet to broadcast people's lives in real-time audio and video. One project of his, called We Live in Public, involved him and his girlfriend broadcasting every action from dozens of video cameras in their luxurious Manhattan apartment for 100 days. Their relationship broke down under the stress.

He was also known for wild and eccentric parties, including his event marking the end of the last millennium, Quiet: We Live in Public, which involved a group of people living for a month in a Broadway warehouse, with all their actions broadcast on pseudo.com. The premises included "a shooting range, ... a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras", as well as lots of drugs and sex. To explain this, Harris referenced his New York predecessor Warhol: "I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That's where we're heading, whether we like it or not."

Ondi Timoner has made a film, called We Live in Public, about Josh Harris. After spending the early 2000s running an apple farm in Columbia County, NY, Harris now lives in Sidamo, Ethiopia, where he is apparently CEO of an organisation called the African Entertainment Network. Pseudo.com now offers a range of music videos for online viewing.