Gormenghast was published in 1950 and after that he was increasingly a lost soul

Gormenghast was published in 1950, and after that he was increasingly a lost soul.His visit to Belsen in 1945 is particularly significant. Winnington gives it only a page – not nearly enough to unpack its implications – but we discover that he went not as an official war artist, but for a current affairs magazine, The Leader. That would better explain his subsequent guilty feelings – treating suffering as copy.Nor can Belsen be regarded as the source of Peake’s gruesome iconography It was more a case of his being the right man for the job. In a previous official war commission, Peake had drawn for propaganda purposes a set of ghastly atrocities entirely from his own imagination.The reviewer wrote the libretto for the fantasy opera ‘Gormenghast’, with music by Irmin Schmidt. The brains of London taxi drivers grow because they are storing detailed knowledge of the city’s streets and landmarks, scientists have found. The brains of London taxi drivers grow because they are storing detailed knowledge of the city’s streets and landmarks, scientists have found.
A study of London cabbies used brain scanners to show that a part of the brain linked with navigational skills is bigger in taxi drivers than in other members of the public.

The scientists also found that the size of the hippocampus – which lies deep within the temporal lobes of the brain just behind the eyes – gets bigger in proportion to a taxi driver’s length of service.Eleanor Maguire, who conducted the study at the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology at University College London, said the findings strongly support the idea that the hippocampus grows in relation to the amount of map information a person acquires and uses regularly. Dr Maguire said that the tissue at the back of the hippocampus appears to be redistributed in taxi drivers, enabling them to store and use the vast quantity of map-reading information they build up during the course of their daily routine.Previous research using a functional brain scanner identified the most active regions of taxi drivers’ brains when they were asked mentally to navigate from one place to another.The latest research, which is based on an analysis of 16 drivers and 50 other members of the public, used a structural brain scanner to investigate the relative size of the hippocampus in different subjects. Dr Maguire said: “There seems to be a definite relationship between the navigating they do as a taxi driver and the brain changes. The hippocampus has changed its structure to accommodate their huge navigating experience.”London taxi drivers undergo extensive training before getting a licence and have to navigate between thousands of places in the city after taking a map test known as “the knowledge”.The youngest taxi driver in the study was 32 and the oldest 64. Dr Maguire said that although the scanner could identify increases in volume of the hippocampus with length of service, the technique was unable precisely to quantify just how much bigger a taxi driver’s brain grows over the course of a working life.The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have implications for debilitating brain disorders that may be helped by tissue regeneration, Dr Maguire said.”It has long been thought that if there’s damage to the brain there’s only a limited amount of plasticity in an adult that can help them recover. Now, direct things in the environment, like navigation, appear to show changes to the brain, so we could in the future see some rehabilitation programmes that use that kind of knowledge.”.

A final decision in a 27-year EU battle over British chocolate has been postponed. A final decision in a 27-year EU battle over British chocolate has been postponed.
Euro MPs were expected to vote to allow chocolate made with up to 5 per cent vegetable fats to be marketed in all 15 member states – ending discrimination against the UK’s favoured chocolate bars in some continental markets.But the decision in the European Parliament in Strasbourg was postponed until tomorrow.If MEPs vote in favour, high milk content chocolate bars from Britain will have to be labelled as Family Milk Chocolate in other parts of Europe.The concession is a small price to pay after years in which the UK confectionery industry has fought off repeated attempts to force changes in the content of UK chocolate bars – and to refuse to allow it to be called chocolate at all.An updated EU Chocolate Directive looks certain to oblige EU countries to accept all chocolate, as long as the vegetable fat content does not exceed 5% of the finished product and there is clear labelling.British milk chocolate will continue to be called Milk Chocolate on the home market, but will have to be labelled Family Milk Chocolate if exported to the rest of the EU.. Frank Dobson’s campaign for the mayor of London was dealt a fresh blow yesterday when Tony Blair appeared to ignore a plea to step up his support for the Labour candidate. Mr Dobson had called for the Prime Minister to “spell out very clearly” his backing and appear publicly with him on the campaign trail.