Who wants the Goebbels house?

It can be a temptation to own a historic home. It can also be a mixed blessing.

Some years ago I succumbed to the temptation and acquired one of those beautiful old buildings East Anglia is so rich in.

An elegant, slightly tired house with a long frontage in warm red 18^th-century brick. A quiet eye-catcher in the middle of its village.

Frankly, we wouldn’t have been able to afford it if it hadn’t been right on the main road.

A road that had never been expected to cope with motorised traffic, let alone millennial volumes of it.

And a house that would surely have been a money-pit if we’d had the money to pour into it.

As it was, I had to find a significant sum PDQ when I finally tumbled to the reason why one of the upstairs doors sometimes swung free and sometimes stuck fast.

Or when the surveyor I called in explained it to me.

Most of the house, in fact, was in pretty good shape for its 250 years.

Give or take the odd rotten windowsill. And the place on the end wall where the exhaust fumes of cars revving up to get out of the lane and into the traffic flow had eroded a hole clean through the brickwork.

The real structural problems weren’t with the original building. They were with the cheap and flimsy extension added in the 1960s.

And especially with the decision taken at that time to demolish a length of the original back wall up to first floor height.

It had left an original oak beam spanning a gap of something like 15 feet – with the full weight of another storey of brickwork above it.

It’s remarkable, really, that that beam had taken more than 30 years to start showing severe signs of fatigue.

The surveyor reckoned that in another few months that whole end of the house might have collapsed.

A heavy steel U-shaped girder and another venerable oak trunk now support it. And another owner has the responsibility.

I occasionally go by that way and it’s clear even from a passing car that the house has benefited lately from more love and more money than I could afford.

If the village ever gets the by-pass that’s been on and off the agenda repeatedly for at least the last 30 years, the owners will no doubt get a handsome return on their investment. And good luck to them.

I hope in the meantime they haven’t had too much of the hassle from planners that I now know can afflict anyone who has to maintain a Grade II listed property. For myself, I’ve been there, done that.

None of these are quite the problems that will afflict whoever cares to buy the historic Haus am Bogensee – though it too is a listed building.

Assuming, that is, a buyer can be found. There are now, apparently, bidders for the property, which has been standing empty for 24 years.

Bidders, what’s more, who are considered acceptable by the current owners, the city government of Berlin.

They are right to be fussy, even though they will no doubt be delighted to get the haus and its 42-acre grounds off their hands at last.

Before 1990, the Haus am Bogensee, beautifully secluded in beech woods 45 minutes’ drive north of Berlin, was used as a heavily guarded kindergarten for East Germany’s Communist Party youth movement.

In those Cold War days, the previous history of the building was probably not much thought about.

That kind of sensitivity didn't count for much in the Soviet bloc. Post-war Germany and Eastern Europe had too many buildings with queasy stories in their recent past.

But it's not its use in the Communist era that makes the Haus am Bogensee a difficult subject today. It's what it was before.

The lakeside villa, completed in 1939 in then-fashionable “Germanic” style, was built – at the expense of Berlin's tax-payers – for Joseph Goebbels.

It's where the Nazi propaganda minister had sexual trysts with a whole parade of young actresses.

And where he wrote his toxic anti-Jewish tracts.

It still has its grandiose stone columns and steeply sloping roof, and a banqueting hall with a large open fireplace and oak-panelled ceiling.

It has a private cinema where Goebbels presumably didn't entertain his wife, Magda, or their children.

And a bunker which isn't the one where he and Magda poisoned all six of those children before killing themselves in 1945.

Remarkably, the Haus am Bogensee is the only home of any of the former prominent Nazis still standing.

Which makes it historically interesting. And potentially difficult for its owners.

The Berlin government hopes it will become a boarding school or a hotel.

What it really, really doesn't want is for it to fall into the hands of neo-Nazis. For its old propaganda role to be revived.

An intriguing and important building. But not an easy one to own.

Straight in at No.1, it's Devo-max

Two more days and we’ll know if the UK is about to self-destruct. Or whether a bout of collective madness is merely set to fizzle out. So here, before it all passes into history, are a few final reflections on one of the oddest episodes in our national story.

1: Whatever happens, Alex Salmond’s SNP will get the result they want on Thursday. Up to a point.
The only way they can lose is if they get the result they say they want – a Yes vote to Scottish independence.
In that case their very purpose in existing will cease to be. The natural party of power in an independent Scotland will not be the nationalists. It will be Labour.
What Salmond really wants is more local power, still under the protective, over-arching UK brand. In other words, the so-called “Devo-max”, which isn’t a dodgy 1980s pop group but the third option David Cameron refused to allow on the referendum ballot paper.
And that – thanks to panic in Westminster – has already been granted.
So while the vote looks excitingly close, the leaders on both sides now actually want the same result – the No vote they all assumed until recently was a foregone conclusion.

2: If they don’t get it, Cameron’s head will be on the block. Or so they say.
He will be seen to have shot himself in the foot, carelessly losing a whole country. He could pay by losing the Tory leadership too.
I don’t think, though, that that outcome is quite as certain as some have suggested.
After all, the prospects for Tory rule in England would be greatly enhanced by the loss of all those Scottish Labour votes and MPs.
It could actually help Cameron to stay in power.
Or, heaven help us, to put Boris Johnson into No.10 in his place.

3: My biggest laugh lately came from a remark made on the radio by Scots novelist Val McDermid.
“The only reason Cameron’s ever set foot in Scotland before was to shoot stags on his father-in-law’s estate on Jura.” Touché.

4: Too much of the whole discussion has been about bankers and stock-market economics.
“The markets,” I keep hearing, “hate uncertainty.”
So what? Who elected “the markets” to power?
It may be – or seem to be – a fact of life in the world’s so-called democracies that bankers call all the big shots, but it’s the exact opposite of democratic.
A well-run independent Scotland – one in which the financiers work for the country, not the other way round – could emerge from the uncertainty as one of the richest little nations in the world.

5: One of the biggest losers in the whole farce is Ed Miliband.
The Labour leader’s show of unity last week with Cameron and Nick Clegg was a massive error of judgement.
It merely confirmed, at least to a casual glance, what disaffected voters have been saying for a long time. That “They” are all the same.
United or split, what the kingdom desperately needs is a radical change of direction. A Labour party – a Labour government – worthy of the name. Not Tory-lite.
Unfortunately, nothing of the kind is on offer. Except, potentially, in Scotland.


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My piece last week about the wonderful crops of blackberries and fungi this splendid autumn has brought us didn’t quite tell the whole story.
I neglected to mention how full the hedgerows are of wild plums.
Or what a bumper season this is proving to be on our raspberry canes.
Anyone intent on making sloe gin or elderberry wine will have no difficulty in harvesting all the natural ingredients they could possibly desire.
And if you know what to do with hips and haws, there’s no shortage of those colourful traditional companions out there either.
Season of mellow fruitfulness, indeed.

A Kingdom facing disunion

Suddenly it’s almost upon us. In just eight days’ time a vote will take place that could have a profound effect on everyone in what is still, for now, this country.

Yet neither you nor I will be able to take part. Unless you live north of what we already call “the border”.

Ever since the referendum was called, the outcome has looked pretty much a foregone conclusion. Until now, just when it’s on the point of happening.

Now it seems the United Kingdom could be facing disunion after all.

The pollsters who have all along been predicting a resounding ‘No’ vote now say it’s too close to call.

Partly, no doubt, because the “Better Together” campaign has been so dreary, so negative, so threat-based that it’s worked for the other side.

Partly, perhaps, because Scots feel like doing whatever David Cameron, Hillary Clinton, the King of Spain and the premier of China tell them not to do. And who could blame them for that?

If it turns out to be ‘Yes’ after all, it will mean an awful lot of change. Not all of it in Scotland. And not all of it predictable.

It’s a fair certainty that David Cameron and his Government have made no serious plan for that possibility.

More strangely, it rather appears as if Alex Salmond and the SNP haven’t thought it all through properly either.

If I lived there, I might well answer ‘Yes’ to the question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

If it’s about keeping a non-privatised NHS, the answer’s Yes.

If it’s about keeping university education free, that’s a Yes too.

If it’s about getting rid of the expensive, dangerous and unnecessary Trident nuclear programme, it’s a definite Yes.

But I might want answers to a few other questions first.

For a start, I might want a look at the proposed constitution. Oh, wait, there isn’t one. Or if there is one, we haven’t seen it.

Will the currency union with England continue?

If so, does that mean key decisions affecting Scotland will continue to be taken in London?

And if not, then what?

And – this one could concern me even though I’m not (yet) Scots – will the free movement of people between the two countries remain?

At present, the plan is that it should.

But what if Scotland is denied its wish to remain in the European Union? Which looks likely, with Spain – worried by the ambitions of Catalan separatists – sure to cast its veto.

How would the EU look upon an open border with a non-member state?

And how about if it then flips round? Which it surely could – the Little Englanders getting UKIP’s crazy wish to leave the club just as Scotland is allowed to join.

The future, in so many ways, is uncertain – as the ‘No’ campaign has been so keen to stress.

But if the alternative is the “certainty” of continued rule by the globalised fat-cat interests of the City of London, I can see the appeal.

There doesn’t seem much hope of escaping that fate for the rest of us. For whatever the rump UK would have to start calling itself.

Before Wales, Northern Ireland, Cornwall, Northumbria etc embark on their bids to go their own way.

*****

When did the English lose their taste for wild food?

Have they not read the inspirational writings of adoptive Norfolk bor Richard Mabey, whose book Food For Free has been a steady seller since its first appearance in 1972?

And have they not noticed that this year’s mild winter and wet summer have filled the hedgerows with the earliest and best crop of luscious blackberries I can ever remember?

Not to mention producing another good year for wild mushrooms.

OK, you have to be careful with fungi.

We’ve eaten some good field mushrooms and perfect parasols from the hillside outside our back gate. But there are also some destroying angels in the same field, and I’ve seen death caps in the vicinity – both, as the names suggest, are killers.

Unless you know your mushrooms well, and/or have a very good book, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

But you can’t go wrong with blackberries. As long as you’re prepared to pay the price of a few minor scratches and nettle-stings, anyway.

Yet I’ve seen very few people taking advantage of the present glorious bounty.

I was collecting a punnetful from the lane the other day when a woman out walking her dogs stopped to wish me a good harvest.

She too, it seems, likes blackberrying. And so does her whippet.

Put me in mind of a Staffie I had years ago which would accompany me on blackberry-picking trips and carefully pluck and eat any that were growing low enough for him.

'Most of us hate the boss'

Surveys that tell you what you already know – there are a lot of them around.

Newspapers, magazines, radio and TV all seem to like them. They're good for filling in those awkward little corners. And if nothing else they always get a knowing little shake of the head.

Like this recent (small) headline-maker: “Most of us hate our bosses.”

OK, maybe that was a nod, not a shake. Though “most” may be only just over half, and “hate” may be stretching it a bit.

But hang on. Look at it for a moment from your boss's point of view. Think how much he must hate his boss too. And so on and so on.

Maybe the findings of that other survey aren't so surprising. The one that claimed most really, really top bosses – the ones who actually own or run the big companies and scoop up the big bucks – are clinically psychopathic.

I assumed when I first read that one that a psychopathic personality was a requirement in getting to the top. (I was going to say “in a capitalist society”, but then I remembered Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao.)

But there's another way of looking at it. Maybe the sensation of all those accumulated layers of hatred rising up from below would bring out the psycho traits in anyone.

Now there are various reasons why you might not like the boss.

A lot of people probably just don't like being told what to do.

But it turns out the main reason is lack of respect and appreciation.

People like to feel the boss trusts them and values what they do. And most, it seems, don’t feel that – not often enough, anyway.

Now I'm not a manager (thank goodness), but I have been. In a fairly junior, middle-management sort of way.

When I got the job – a horribly long time ago – the best piece of advice I got came from my father.

He told me that if you're ever going to criticise someone, you have to be prepared to praise them too.

In fact, every telling-off should be balanced by at least eight compliments.

And – in some cases this can be the tricky part – the praise has to be deserved. It's not hard to say “well done”, but it must be said honestly.

Praise where it's due. And plenty of it.

It's a lesson many bosses could do with learning. It might save them from being so hated.

I was reminded of it the other day by another of those little reports on psychological research.

It said the human brain was hard-wired to remember bad things better than good ones. That eight-to-one ratio came up again.

The researchers drew two conclusions.

The first was that children remember the horrid feeling of being told off much more strongly than the nice feeling of a pat on the back. Parents beware.

And the second was about news values.

Bad news sells.

Back in Cold War days there was a journalists' joke about an East German front page headline: “Half the harvest safely gathered in”.

But why was it funny?

It was certainly a contrast with the diet of endless doom and gloom that we got – and still get – from the media in the West.

Yet we are constantly being told that we are the lucky ones. As, in so many ways, we are.

Of course, those who lived under Communism were also told – and in most cases no doubt believed – that it was they who were lucky.

So which would you rather read about? A successful harvest, or wars in parts of the world you'd probably never heard of before things got bad there?

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Rotherham was grim. Ebola is very nasty. The situation in Iraq and Syria is almost too ghastly to contemplate. Ukraine’s worrying. The accidental killing of a gun instructor by a nine-year-old girl armed with a sub-machinegun was just one more example of the madness of America.

But last week’s most touching news item concerned the death of a hippo.

Investigators in Germany are said to be conducting a “murder inquiry” after the incident at Frankfurt Zoo.

Which is news nonsense really. Evidence only of our ridiculous obsession with “murder mystery” stories.

There's not really much mystery about the death of Maikel, a 39-year-old, 315-stone gentle giant.

Someone threw a tennis ball into his enclosure. He ate it. It got stuck in his gut and killed him.

Sadness, yes. Mystery, no. Not once they'd carried out a post-mortem to see why a healthy animal suddenly got ill and died.

I doubt very much whether deliberate murder, or even cruelty, was involved. Just ignorance and stupidity.

The touching thing was the behaviour of Maikel's “lifelong partner” Petra.

As he was dying she kept swimming round him, nudging him to get up. As puzzled as the zookeepers. And grieving.

Some people – including many who really should know better – still cling to the old idea that humans are the only animals that feel emotion.

Which is as ignorant and stupid as whoever chucked that tennis ball.

The law won't stop abuse - but it's good to try

The bullying is mostly verbal, backed by the occasional veiled threat of violence.

For years he has humiliated, intimidated and belittled her. He does it to the children too – and he is raising them to behave the same way towards her.
He’s very skilled at persuading people that she is the one who mistreats them. Sometimes he almost has her believing it herself.
Now here’s another family.
He goes out to work, does the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning and most of the childcare.
He stays purely for the sake of her child, whose real father abandoned them.
The child is seldom allowed into “Mummy’s room”, where she spends most of her time watching TV or playing computer games.
Another.
She earns as much as he does, but all her money goes on paying the bills and putting food on the table. His goes straight into his personal savings account.
And another.
He’s happily married, a loving dad to his stepchildren. He can’t have children of his own because of the vasectomy he was pressured into during a previous relationship.
Next.
She’d love to feed herself and the kids more healthily. But he insists on a diet of pizza, bacon and sausages (see separate story below). If she brings fresh fruit and veg into the house, he throws it away.
And finally.
He earns the money, she drinks it.
When, after putting up with years of abuse, he talks of leaving, she cuts herself and threatens to say he did it.
All these people are real. They are all people I know or have known. And I could go on.
Which is why I welcome the Government’s proposal for a specific law against domestic abuse.
And why I’m glad to hear it will apply to emotional and psychological as well as physical bullying.
Home Secretary Theresa May was for once spot on when she announced the planned legislation, now entering its eight-week consultation period.
“Abuse is not just physical,” she said.
“I want perpetrators to be in no doubt that their cruel and controlling behaviour is criminal.”
Amen to that.
She also said: “Victims who are subjected to a living hell by their partners must have the confidence to come forward.”
And therein lies the problem. Worthy though the goal is, I’m not sure any new law is going to give those victims that confidence.
Some of the abuse cases I’ve known of have involved alcohol. Several involved money. Some involved violence or the threat of it.
Most included an element of deceit – and not just by the perpetrators.
In every case the confidence and self-esteem of the victim was steadily, inexorably sapped.
Often they end up blaming themselves for their seemingly inescapable situation.
And more often than not they conceal what’s happening, deceiving themselves and others.
Every domestic abuse case, whatever its nature and circumstances, is really about power. One person exerting control over another.
And it is never easy for a controlled person to turn publicly against their controller. Whatever the law says.


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Michael Mosley is the most interesting person on television.
In 2012, after an investigation that involved some pretty extreme experimenting on his own body, he concluded that a 5:2 diet – two days a week of near-fasting – was a healthy way to live.
He was persuasive enough for me to try it. Two years later I’m still following it, happy with it as a lifestyle that works.
Almost incidentally (the point is health and longevity, not weight), I’m a steady two stone lighter than when I embarked on it.
Now Dr Mosley’s giving me serious thought of adapting my regimen again.
It follows his absorbing two-part BBC series last week, “Should I Eat Meat?”
As before, he interviewed various experts, who didn’t all agree. And as before he put his own body to the test, this time taking on a high-meat diet, with some shocking results.
One of his conclusions confirmed what I already believed.
That humans evolved to eat some meat – but nowhere near as much as most of us now do.
Which, incidentally, is bad for animals, bad for the world’s ecology and bad for the rest of humanity as well as being bad for us.
Some of the shots of intensive farming might be enough to put a sensitive person off meat for good.
I lived for eight years as a vegetarian, so I know I can do it.
I don’t intend to return to an entirely meat-free diet, but I could do with eating less of it. As could nearly all of us.
In particular, I’m now considering cutting out the bacon and sausages which have become our family staples.
Because it’s those processed meats that are now fingered as high risk factors for both heart disease and cancer. Neither of which I’m particularly keen on inviting in.
If it’s true that on average every bacon sarnie cuts an hour off your life expectancy, I can do without it, thanks.

The real legacy of Gove

One national headline last weekend claimed the A-level results as a triumph for departed Education Secretary Michael Gove.

Well, we can guess which end of the political spectrum that particular paper occupies, can’t we?

The exams were a triumph for all those hard-working students who passed them.

For all those who got into the universities of their choice despite falling slightly short of the target grades set.

And for all the teachers whose professional expertise and dedication got them there.

That all the years of grade inflation have at last been halted is perhaps good news. Especially, maybe, for all of us whose long-ago grades don’t look quite as good now as they were back then.

But the idea (that paper again) that Gove has a “legacy” to be protected will have caused the entire teaching profession to splutter into its cornflakes.

Apart from his obsessive, staggeringly ignorant and nostalgia-imbued tinkering with the curriculum, his most radical “reform” amounted to a rampant privatisation of education.

Or, in the euphemistic terms he employed, “freeing” almost 4,000 secondary schools from local authority control.

And allowing 174 so-called “free schools” to be set up, with no regard for where new schools were actually needed.

The truly devastating thing – and what does indeed make this a legacy of sorts – is that the next government is unlikely to be either able or willing to take back what Gove has given away.

So that – just like what once really was a National Health Service – much of the education system may be lost to the profit motive for a generation or more.

It remains to be seen whether all those teachers who celebrated Gove’s sacking will come to love his successor more. Frankly, I doubt it.

Nicky Morgan’s only apparent qualification for the job is her gender at a time when David Cameron was being pressed to bring more women into the Government.

A qualified solicitor and expert on corporate law, her previous Government roles (only since last October) were in the Treasury and as Minister for Women.

She still has that latter job (who is the Minister for Men?) as well as the education brief, which doesn’t suggest her full attention will be on either.

That may be a blessing in disguise. But don’t expect her to stray far from the lines laid down by Gove.

Like all five of the ministers under her, she went to a private, fee-paying school.

That team line-up hardly bodes well for the care of the state school system.

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It’s a distressing fact that each time Israel embarks on the kind of murderous campaign seen lately in Gaza, anti-Semitic attacks in Britain and Europe increase.

Too many people, it seems – particularly the thick and nasty kind – can’t tell the difference between Israel and Jews.

It really shouldn’t need pointing out, but here it is.

Israel is a small country in the Middle East with a right-wing racist government.

Jews are people, most of whom are not Israelis.  Some are right-wing and some are racist, but most aren’t. Pretty much like other people.

A great many of them find the policies of Israel’s government as repugnant as most of the rest of us.

And that – despite some of what you may have seen or heard – applies to many Israelis too.

A minority, possibly, but a substantial minority. And that despite decades of apartheid-style immigration policy.

I can illustrate that policy by my own case.

My Jewish grandmother means I would have been a candidate for Hitler’s death camps.

But I wouldn’t be eligible for Israeli citizenship even if I wanted it. Wrong grandmother.

For Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – and for all those who mistake Israel for the Jewish people – the current grisly conflict contains a huge irony.

So many Jews around the world – particularly in America – are so horrified by what they see in Gaza that their support for Israel is wearing thin.

One slogan from a massive recent Jewish demonstration in New York states it clearly: “Israel is a Zionist state, not a Jewish state”.

If Israel loses the support of America’s Jews enough to lose the support of America, it really is in trouble.

I wouldn’t bet anyone’s life against it.

East is east and west is west, and when it comes to travelogues Twain is best

Shopping as a leisure activity seems to me one of the most idiotic aspects of our deranged society. Unless it’s shopping in bookshops.

A good secondhand bookshop offers probably the greatest time-erasing pleasure to be had in any high street.

And all with the prospect of a jolly good read, and maybe something really eye-opening, to come later.

The lately under-fire Oxfam may not be perfect. Heck, of course it isn’t, it’s a large and necessarily bureaucratic organisation operating in a capitalist world.

But it does a lot of good in its crusade against poverty, whatever Tory twit Conor Burns may say. (He’s the numpty who complained that the message was “too political”, instantly casting his party as the ones who want other people to stay poor.)

And for those of us not in poverty, but with leisure to read, Oxfam provides some terrific bookshops.

Places where you can browse and pick up the very volume you didn’t know existed until you discover you need it.

E-readers that you can slip in a pocket are all very well and may signal the end of the “airport novel” sooner than you’d think.

But no electronic gizmo could replace the pleasure of holding in your hands (you need both) the Portfolio of Photographs of Famous Cities, Scenes & Paintings that I have in mine. (Or did have. I had to put it down to type this paragraph.)

Promising “a rare and elaborate collection of photographic views of the entire world of nature and art”, it contains 256 full-page images of the world as it then was.

Or nearly full-page, for each one leaves room for a generous paragraph of description in John L Stoddard’s purple prose. But they are still good-sized pictures.

And utterly absorbing – as are Stoddard’s words – in their depiction of a world now mostly vanished.

It admits to being published by The Werner Company of Chicago, but not when. Careful scrutiny of the text, and reference to known history, dates it to 1897 or ’98.

Which means, of course, that pictures of Germany, Russia, the Middle East  – everywhere, really – are presented in happy ignorance of what the 20^th century was to bring.

It was a world much of which was still dominated by the British Empire, not the undeclared American one we now subsist under (or the Chinese one we appear to be entering).

In fact, it’s a slightly strange “entire world”, containing 12 pictures of London, 26 of France (including 17 of Paris), 37 of Italy, and one of China. The only actual Chinese people to be seen are a man and boy in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The selection is just one of the ways in which Stoddard reveals the attitudes of his time, class and nation.

Take this well-meaning but toe-curling description of the native Australians (pictured below):

“These Aborigines are a wretched race. Like most savages, they are fond of liquor, and were it not for strict laws prohibiting the sale to them of intoxicating drinks, they would doubtless soon become exterminated through their own excesses.

“Like the North American Indians, they are disappearing rapidly before a new and sturdier race.”

He doesn’t mention the sturdier people’s sturdier weaponry, or the sturdiness of their acquisitive aggression.

Just at the time Stoddard’s dismal early epitaph for a people was being written, another American traveller was on the Australian leg of his round-the-world tour. A better writer, a keener observer, and a much sharper commentator on human nature.

Probably the finest newspaper columnist ever: Mark Twain.

In his riveting ragbag of a read, Following the Equator, Twain has much to say about the Aborigines, their inventive brilliance, their amazing physical abilities and powers of observation –  and their treatment by the white settlers.

Of the last, he concludes: “It is robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man’s whisky.”

He remarks acutely and poignantly, too, on one way in which he considers the Aborigines superior to the invading Europeans. “The tribes,” he says, “had no comprehension of the idea of transferable ownership of land.”

Which, of course – as with the native Americans – made it all that much easier for the settlers to take possession and evict the former dwellers.

It’s not exactly the most rib-tickling section of a book that is often laugh-out-loud funny. But Twain does end the chapter on a characteristic wry note.

“There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Some things have changed since Twain and Stoddard’s day. Sadly, that isn’t one of them.

Traffic on London Bridge, with a London skyline very different from today’s

Pics from John L Stoddard’s Portfolio of Photographs of Famous Cities, Scenes & Paintings