Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️

Writes books about Aztecs, but also Anglican. After the human sacrifice, tea & biscuits will be served.
Occasional rants about things I care about, & bad jokes.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

Anyway since you now can't buy so much as a cheese grater on Amazon without a note from your mum, why not buy one of my books instead? First two are now available on Kindle (free with an Unlimited sub!)
#ShamelessSelfpromoWednesday

https://t.co/bXGLpjqMhT

[Bill @CageFooName]

"Take a gay for a cuppa" is just so brutally on the nose Iannucci would have scrapped it for something more subtle in The Thick of It

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@MorganE07969703 @SO3_Clausewitz @Crime_Penguin @UnderSneege @BlueEarthMngmnt Yes.

Sadly all we got was the Aeneid and Paradise Lost. Second-rate stuff in comparison.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@atomicjoy @history99917180 The square root of minus one. Or Gareth's net worth once etc etc.

[Daniel Schwartz @danschwartz88]

Evil rarely announces itself.

Hannah Arendt didn’t warn us that the greatest danger would come from monsters.

She warned us it would come from ordinary people who stop asking questions. People who trade conscience for slogans, curiosity for certainty, and morality for obedience.

The lesson of the Holocaust was never just about one man. It was about what happens when a society decides that thinking is optional.

Every generation believes it would have stood against evil.

History keeps asking the same question:

Would you have?

Or would you have simply gone along because everyone else did?

That’s why Arendt still matters. And that’s why this conversation matters. Because the opposite of evil isn’t outrage.

It’s the courage to think for yourself.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

This is a true hero.

Staff Sergeant Yarin Peled, medic.

Just 20 years old

She was killed in the massacre perpetrated by Palestinians on October 7th.

Defending her land by trying to save as many Israelis as possible.

We take for granted the true heroism of Israelis. Many youngsters in the West don’t know what it’s like to defend their country.

May her memory be a blessing.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@arbuthnotting Some of those look as if they're trying to communicate.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

Only QTing this to name drop that I once sat next to the person who dreamed up "Go to work on an egg"at lunch.

(Couldn't get 2 words out of her, mind)

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

If you were a child between 1970 and 1990, you grew up standing right on the hinge, and you can remember both sides of it.

You remember the cream sitting at the top of the milk, the liver on a Thursday, the dripping set hard in the chip pan, the joint that quietly fed a week, the egg they put on a poster and told you to go to work on. And you remember the slow business of it all being taken away, food by food, each one with a minister or a doctor or a laughing tin Martian on hand to explain why the old way had been a mistake.

You were told it was progress. You were told the science was settled and the matter closed. You were told, in so many words, that your grandmother's kitchen was a health hazard and the future arrived in a packet.

Some of it truly was progress. A great deal of it was not. And the quiet, awkward thing that nobody in charge much wants to say out loud is that the people who grew up on the old food, before the swap, are not, on the whole, the ones turning up in the clinics youngest and in the worst repair.

You do not have to take all of it back. But you saw both menus with your own eyes, and you are among the last people alive who did. You remember what real food was, because you ate it before they renamed it a risk. Most people now have only ever known the packet.

Tell them what the other menu tasted like.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@xMaccabix I'm fairly sure something like that happens in a J G Ballard novel.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

82 years ago this morning, a man of 31 from Middlesbrough waded onto Gold Beach in Normandy and, before the light went, did the thing that would make him the only man awarded a Victoria Cross for the actions of D-Day itself.

His name was Stanley Hollis. Before the war he had driven lorries and worked as a sandblaster. On 6 June 1944, a company sergeant-major in the Green Howards, he spotted a German pillbox his company had walked straight past. He went at it himself, up the open slope into the machine-gun fire, cleared it with a Sten and grenades, and took a second position and its occupants prisoner. Later that day, near a village called Crépon, two of his men lay pinned in the open under a German field gun and as good as dead. He went back out for them, into the fire, and brought them in. He had taken them in there, was his reasoning, so it fell to him to get them out.

That is more or less the whole of it. No speech, no pageant, no press release. A lorry driver from Teesside decided that other men's lives were his to answer for, and walked into the guns, twice, to make it good.

My dad was born in '61. We often sit and marvel at the fact that he is the full-way, and me half-way, through our fighting ages as men, and neither of us have ever been called up to war. We are the lucky few. But it is worth being honest, on this morning of all mornings, about what has thinned out between the country my dad and I have known, and Sgt. Major Hollis'.

Hollis did not wait to be told. He did not film the pillbox and tag the relevant authority. He saw what needed doing, judged it his to do, and did it. That mortal reflex - take responsibility, act, and expect no official to come and save you - was once an ordinary thing here, bred into ordinary men. Two generations of being managed and waited upon have quietly bred much of it not out but into deep dormancy.

The men of that generation did not cross the Channel in 1944 for a Britain that waits for permission to act, nor for one that watches its own dying boys handcuffed on the pavement. They did it for something they felt in their bones and would never have trusted to an institutional memorandum: a free people, fit to govern and defend itself, worth the dying for.

We owe them more than a poppy and a minute's silence. We owe them the vision of that country.

Stanley Hollis came home, kept a pub, and died in 1972. There are barely any of them left now, very old and very quiet. The decent thing would be to become a country of which they might be proud.

[Smoke 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 @London__Smoke]

Vance is wrong, Starmer is wrong.
One wants us at each other's throats, the other wants to ignore every problem. Both want this fight totally removed from a young man bleeding to death ignored and insulted by the police and his murderer both. The tribal shit is sickening.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@Richy_GITC This was the point of RP: a standardised form of English that everyone could understand, though hardly anyone spoke it at home. Then some idiot decided it was "elitist" or some such bullshit, and now you get gibberish.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@MarkHay55822123 No-one's ever complained before!

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

Just checked in to the Hotel That Time Forgot. Visible disapproval when I said I wasn't taking dinner or breakfast.

If you *have* to be out after 10pm, your key will open the side door.

All it's missing is Joyce Grenfell on reception.

[Mary Harrington @moveincircles]

“Many people get into car accidents having not taken out car insurance, giving them limited legal protections. Labour is consulting on ways to give them your money instead, because no one should be punished for refusing to manage their own life responsibly like a normal adult”

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@AspireTechno @arbuthnotting "How can you shoot women and children?"

"It's easy. You just don't lead 'em as much."

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

@OrganisedPauper Sorry to hear it Mrs OP.

Cheese on toast followed by Rennies should be fine though!

[Chamberlain's Ghost @RSA_Observer]

The Henry Nowak thing. If you watch the video, before Nowak complains of being unable to breathe and having been stabbed, the one police officer notes that "he has a mouthful of blood". Now when a person with a mouthful of blood starts complaining that they can't breathe and that they have been stabbed, alarm bells should be starting to go off. Then, a few moments later a policewoman requests an ambulance saying "His pupils aren't even reacting". By that point anyone with any bit of sense would surely have realised that there was a very serious problem. Now these same officers, apparently having been bereft of anything approaching basic common sense, are blaming their DEI training.

[Simon Levack✝️🇬🇧🇮🇱🦁☀️ @SimonLevack]

Trouble with Heinlein is that he could write something like this but make you wade through hundreds of pages of didactic guff before you get to it.

[Rebecca 📖 @Avonleebythesea]

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. But a great artist—a master—can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…no matter what the merciless hours have done to her.
Look at her.”
~From Robert Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’