Jackie Kemp’s opinion piece on National Theatre show “this House” from “The Scotsman”, published Friday 12 October 2012
A CRUCIAL period for Scotland has been virtually erased from history in a play about Labour’s bid to stay in power in the 70s, writes Jackie Kemp
From The Herald, April 15, 2013.
ARNOLD Kemp, a former editor of The Herald, was toasted as “one of Scotland’s finest ever journalists” during an event to celebrate his life at the Aye Write! Festival in Glasgow.
TRIBUTE: Robin McKie, Jackie Kemp, Julie Davidson and Magnus Llewellin celebrate Arnold Kemp at the Aye Write! festival. Picture: Gordon Terris arnold kemp: Editor of The Herald between 1981 and 1994.
Robin McKie, The Observer’s science correspondent, made the tribute during a wide-ranging, amusing and at times surprising debate that was prompted by his life and work.
Mr Kemp, who died suddenly in 2002 aged 63, would have loved the conversation.
Rosemary Goring’s take on the Creative Scotland debate from the Herald Saturday arts section September 22, 2012
“There is no such thing as art. There are only artists,” said E H Gombrich in The Story of Art. It’s a dictum that the architects of Creative Scotland should have noted. Much of the firestorm that has engulfed that beleaguered institution of late might have been averted if its apparatchiks had had the wisdom and humility to appreciate that the state’s function in funding the arts is solely to disburse money to artists in the most effective and simple manner possible.
Friday comment column from the website allmediascotland 14/9/2012
READING a quality Scottish daily newspaper remains indispensable for anyone who wants to be well-informed about Scottish affairs.
This book,subtitled ‘Time Travels in Scotland and England’, by journalist and editor Arnold Kemp is a personal rumination on Scottish history seen through the prism of his own family’s records….
‘SINCE THE WAR SCOTLAND HAS been profoundly altered. Its native tradition of entrepreneurial capitalism has disappeared. Its heavy industries have rapidly declined. It has become a branch economy soliciting international…
Arnold Kemp was a well-known Scottish journalist and editor whose work spans the post-war period in Scotland, Britain and Europe. Many of the well-known figures of the day such as…
Robin McKie The Observer, Sunday 9 September 2012
Arnold Kemp in a bar, where he would lead glorious conversations that could go anywhere. Photograph: Observer.
You can buy a copy of “Confusion to our Enemies: selected journalism of Arnold Kemp” direct from me. The cost is £3.99 including postage. Email me if you cannot get this…
The presbyterian minster of the last century has often been caricatured but a box of Arnold Low Kemp’s hand-written sermons which survive in the National Library of Scotland reveal a kindly man attempting to give comfort to his parishioners in troubled times. For some of this period, his own younger son Arnold Kemp was missing though he did survive. (Read the story of this escape here)
On April 15 1934, Arnold Low Kemp gave a sermon in his parish at Longhope on Hoy in the Orkney Islands in which he condemned the treatment of Jews in Germany from the pulpit, asking people to take an interest in matters that may have seemed far away: ”There are people who cannot see beyond themselves, or their kin, or their own country… we share in the amazement at so-called Chrstian Germany ‘s treatment of Jews.”
Just days before Germany invaded Poland, on August 20 1939, Arnold, who was by now the minister at Birse in Aberdeenshire gave a sermon on the text:
I APPRECIATED the tribute to the late Arnold Kemp by John McKie (alias Myops) incorporated into the Wee Stinker crossword on September 23. It was, as usual, very clever yet…
IT is one of the odd characteristics of our political life that the little things may be more dangerous than the large. Chancellor Norman Lamont may with impunity squander billions on the fruitless defence of sterling. This matters little in the public mind beside his inability to keep his Access bill inside its credit limit.
Perhaps there is some validity in this way of assessing the real person. A character in a Jane Austen novel — one of her succession of charming men who turn out to be scoundrels — was found to be of light and careless disposition because he went to London to get his haircut.
And in London this week another victim of the treacherous turns of political life was making a triumphant return. They used to call him Tricky Dick but, thin as a cheroot, he received a standing ovation from a highly discriminating audience after a speech to a private dinner. Delivered with passion and fluency, without notes of any kind, it could only be described as a tour de force.
When I opened an email on a grim winter’s day offering a holiday house swap for a cottage in the mountains near the border of France and Switzerland, it didn’t take me too long to reply “ooh, quelle bonne idee”. We hadn’t planned a foreign holiday but free accommodation in beautiful surroundings seemed too good to turn down.
Comment piece from the Observer September 2 2012
Batsheva, the Israeli contemporary dance group, should have been one of the hits of this year’s Edinburgh international festival. They got five-star reviews for their witty, sexy and creative show.
“Twice before in my life I have seen Europe go dark and watched the doves of peace having their necks wrung. …”
Playwright and journalist Robert Kemp wrote this celebration of Edinburgh Festival for the Scottish Field in 1967 in the build up the Arab Israeli war. It was one of the last things he wrote as he died later that year.
Festivals are not like people. They never “grow up”. So perhaps it would be a mistake to make too much of the 21st Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama (to bestow upon it the full title which leaves out a lot of what happens), except that to say that its continuance for all of those years proves that the original idea was a durable one.
All those years…I , who happen to have seen something of them all, find it difficult to believe that among this years’ audience there will be those who were not born when the early Festivals took place. For them it may seem a venerable institution this Edinburgh Festival Society which some at first predicted would not last for more than a few years.
Comment piece by Jackie Kemp from Scotland on Sunday August 18. `Does any group have the right to demand that a word be redefined?` GAY marriage is a subject which arouses strong emotions. Many support it in the name of equality and human rights – including, apparently, virtually the entire Scottish Cabinet. Some oppose it in the name of religion. Unpleasant names are hurled across the gulf. Surely, however, this is an issue which merits dispassionate consideration.
“He was a man you don’t meet every day.” Literary journalist Alan Taylor remembers Arnold Kemp in a review of the forthcoming anthology ‘Confusion to our Enemies’. From the Scottish Review of Books, August 11, 2012. (Note by JK at the end)
‘Like my fellow countrymen,’ he wrote in The Hollow Drum, the only book he published in his lifetime, ‘I am a confused traveller, but I travel hopefully.’ Kemp was writing in 1993 when devolution, let alone independence, seemed a distant prospect. Separatism, as he surmised, was ‘theoretically remote’, not least because of the attitude of Scottish business community who, then as now, were fearful of any change to the status quo. With uncommon prescience, he noted the power of ‘foreign exchange dealers’ and ‘major industrial and commercial enterprises’ and the influence which they exerted over national governments.
Arnold Kemp’s companion to post-war Scottish politics, ‘The Hollow Drum’, is now available as a Kindle edition from Amazon.The book has been described by Magnus Linklater as “an indispensable guide…
From a Scottish Review special on memorable Scottish holidays. Perhaps the most memorable Scottish holiday I know of was not mine but someone else’s. Once, I took a taxi in Coatbridge driven by a man with a fund of stories. A couple have stuck in my mind. Once he was booked to take an elderly resident to Asda. He waited for her in the car park on a sunny day and when she emerged, hot and laden with bags, she said to him: ‘Take me to Largs, son, take me to Largs’.
This brilliant and informative column appeared in Le Monde on the weekend of June 23/24. Translated by Tiffany Reed and Jackie Kemp
A few days before the European Council of June 28 and 29, the Franco-German discussion is becoming a dialogue of the deaf. The French want to strengthen economic union, the Germans want progress on political union. Neither can hear the other.
The Germans understand the French proposals as a new version of the slogan “Germany will pay”, which reverberated through French politics after the First World War; the French see political integration with Germany as handing over the right to inspect their welfare system.
The lack of mutual understanding is actually a symptom of the underlying problem. The euro is rudderless, a currency union adrift.