Went to see the above exhibition at the British Library at the weekend.
It’s a celebration of 100 years of newspaper headlines and it includes such classics as The Sun’s bellicose ‘Gotcha!’ during the Falklands Conflict in 1982 and its damning ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights’…’ indictment of Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party on the day of the 1998 General Election.
Other memorable entries included the Daily Express’ hopeful but tragically inaccurate ‘Titanic sunk: no Lives lost’ in 1912 and the Daily Sketch’s fantastically wrong ‘Peace in our time’ boast from Neville Chamberlain in 1938.
The exhibition is well laid out and it’s not so comprehensive or technically demanding that it would put off non-journalists either. It’s very much the headline-as-social-document and well worth a look.
I also had a wander around the British Library for the first time since it was refurbished and it truly is a fantastic place, with the Ritblat Gallery housing the Magna Carta, early folios of Shakespeare plays, Shakespeare’s signature and Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook among other things.
Bizarrely libraries are under major threat at the moment because funds are apparently needed elsewhere and a swathe of them are soon to be closing on a permanent basis.
The British Library is thankfully not one of these but it still remains a national disgrace that Blair can find money for tanks and bombs in a far-off country but not for education (or ‘Education, education, education…’ as he once put it) at this sort of basic local level.
Shame on this government for letting that happen – and for slowly selling off another piece of our national heritage.
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