Interesting Story From The Irish Times Today | Unlikely tale of the playwright and the pugilist – The Irish Times – Thu, Sep 23, 2010

Shaw & the boxer to boil it down, worth reading!

He was introduced to the bard by a fellow marine en route to France with the American Expeditionary Force; by the time he fought for the heavyweight championship he had plowed his way through the collected works of Shakespeare, and could recite Hamlet in its entirety. Invited to Yale to lecture on Shakespeare, he did so creditably, and without notes.

Tunney’s intellectual bent was not universally admired. Will Rogers (no relation to Roy), wrote in his folksy newspaper column, “Let’s have prizefighters with harder wallops and less Shakespeare”, and Paul Gallico, the Columbia-educated sports editor of the New York Daily News�, made light of Tunney’s chances in his 1926 challenge to Jack Dempsey, opining: “I think Tunney has hurt his own game with his cultural nonsense.

via Unlikely tale of the playwright and the pugilist – The Irish Times – Thu, Sep 23, 2010.

The Rise and Fall of the Scottish Cotton Industry 1778-1914

I read a great book review for The Rise and Fall of the Scottish Cotton Industry 1778-1914: ‘the Secret Spring’ by Anthony Cooke over at Reviews In History:

While it is undoubtedly the case that the Scottish cotton industry had shrunk dramatically by 1914, there was, in fact, quite a lot left, highly specialised though it was. Notable among surviving firms were the great Paisley thread manufacturing firms, which as Cooke points out, had become multi-national, much as had the major jute enterprises in Dundee which also managed to survive in an increasingly globalised sector. New Lanark was extensively modernised as late as the 1950s, remaining a significant employer locally, and managed to keep going until 1968. The Stanley complex, built around the original mill, survived even longer, outliving many of the major Lancashire firms. It is thus incongruous that the enterprises that survived longest were the very ones that had pioneered the factory system while later enterprises succumbed long beforehand.

It sounds rather excellent and I may well go ahead an buy it but that £60 price tag is a little rich.
Eoin