The Virtual Stoa

Wang Hongwen, Chinese communist and youngest member of the Gang of Four; born around 1934; arrested in 1976 and sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment; died 3 August 1992.

For much of the Summer I’ve found Test Match Special pretty hard to listen to; yesterday and today I’ve been hooked. It could just be that the compellingness of TMS directly correlates to the compellingness of the match, and when the cricket’s not that interesting, then all the reasons that make you think, “God, the commentators really annoy me” come to the fore and you switch off the radio. Or it could just be that they haven’t had Geoffrey Boycott on this morning, so it’s a lot less irritating than usual. Does Boycott not work on Saturdays? Or have they realised he’s really annoying and sacked him?

Also - why on earth is the final day of Test cricket this Summer  Monday 11 August (assuming the game makes it to the fifth day)? That’s preposterously early. Grr.

Edward Aveling, English socialist; Eleanor Marx’s partner, and a participant in the English translation of Capital. From the ODNB:

Notorious both for the debts which he habitually incurred and for his numerous affairs with women, Aveling was widely regarded as being without scruples in his private life. The many accounts of his repulsive physical appearance are not borne out by surviving photographs and seem to be informed more by the ‘moral dread’ which he occasioned in some people than by his unremarkable features. William Morris’s daughter called him a ‘little lizard of a man’ and Olive Schreiner said that he looked like an illicit diamond buyer. According to Hyndman, ‘nobody can be as bad as Aveling looks’.

He was born in Stoke Newington, 29 November 1849, and died in Battersea, 2 August 1898.

Paul Collingwood’s just hit a century, in what’s turning out to be a smashing Test Match.

Over here at CiF.