An extraordinary critic and journalist and thinker, Richard Marshall's home at 3am magazine continually makes me feel pale in his shadow, which I undoubtedly am. The End of Times series is the apogee of his consistently incisive journalism, he has perfected the particularly difficult art of interviewing philosophers (which I have done and failed with Zizek, Critchley, Grayling etc... ) and every interview of his I read educates me (I always suspected that despite my BA and MA in philosophy I was hopelessly out of the loop, and so it has proved).

This review of Owen Hatherley's Journeys through urban Britain, entitled his bleak interregnum is a really lesson on pointedness and concision inhttp://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/his-bleak-interregnum/ I quote liberally ....

"When Cameron took his Tory/Whig alliance to war in Libya, it was a piece of PR. As a consequence, mercenary fighters for Gaddafi have subsequently left Libya and are currently taking down Mali. The Tory/Whig alliance is happy that no one is making this a story. The defeat of a dictator is the story they like us to like.

David Cameron asked taxpayers to pay over £21,000 for a second constituency home after taking out a taxpayer funded £350,000 mortgage in Oxfordshire whilst paying off the full £75,000 mortgage on his £1.5 million spread in North Kensington. This millionaire Prime Minister and leader of the Tory/Whig alliance comes from a very rich family and inherited his wealth. He supplemented his fortune by marrying a millionaire. Was he cheating when he asked people poorer than him for £21,000? A mystic says: ‘to burn the bones of the King of Edom for lime seems no irrational ferity, but to drink of the ashes of dead relatives seems a primative wrong.’ It is a salvo requiring the analysis of fire rather than the compounding of sun. This is written as a subsidence in fire’s coal, calx and ash.

Emile Levita was his great great grandfather, a director of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China with offices in Threadneedle Street in the City. He owned a grouse moor in Wales. His other great great grandfather was Sir Ewen Cameron, who worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking (HSBC) cooperation. He helped Rothschilds sell war bonds during the Russio-Japanese war. Both Cameron’s grandfathers and his father were stockbrokers. His father Ian Cameron worked for Panmure Gordon.

David Cameron’s father was very wealthy. David Cameron thinks that his father was hard done by but heroically non-complaining. He is quoted as saying, ‘My father always used to say that nothing in life is fair, but he was of the view that you had to muck in and get on with things and deal with the difficult stuff that comes your way.’ Ian Cameron owned racehorses. His best horse was Hello trained by John Dunlop which won the Criterion Stakes in Milan. The median price of a racehorse today is just under £15,000. The average price to keep a horse in training per year is about £16,000. But a winner yearling costs more like £300,000. Ian and David Cameron talking about themselves ‘mucking in’ is comparable to Helena Bonham-Carter discussing the hardships of being a pretty, upper middle class white actress. When she did that Kathy Burke told Bonham-Carter: ‘shut up you stupid cunt’. That seems good advice for the leader of the Tory/Whig alliance too. It seems good advice for everyone in the alliance."