Daily catch-up: Beautiful libraries, tiny cars and Cameron's 'blurt'
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Your support makes all the difference.The Admont Library, Austria, offered by Xlibris1 as an entry for the Most Beautiful Library in the World, an impromptu competition started by Steampunk Tendencies, who nominated the Klementinum, in Prague. Other contenders include the St Florian Monastery library, Austria, the Strahov Monastery library, Prague, and the Public Library, Lima.
• Another chain of internet whimsy led from Moose Allain's idea for a theme park called Dream Park, in which the carriages for the rides are so small you can hardly squeeze in, to Anthony Veitch recalling an article in The Economist from six years ago about tiny Hungarian cars designed to circumvent Stalin's ban on car manufacture.
• Janan Ganesh is very good again in the Financial Times, about the triviality of Tory leadership speculation:
Mr Cameron won a general election only nine months ago. He is not yet 50. Next to the prime ministers who were physically hollowed out by the stresses of power, he looks like he has spent the past five years in a spa. He still often scores a net-positive approval rating in a country that has had a decade to tire of his patter. Were he to renege on his commitment to quit, the only mystery at the next election would be whether Labour emerges with enough votes to bother carrying on as a party.
Ganesh blames Cameron himself for the speculation, which has infected politics coverage "since David Cameron blurted his intention to step down as prime minister before 2020". I thought Cameron's announcement, to a surprised and delighted James Landale, that three parliamentary terms would be too many, was premeditated. Ganesh says he shared my view but now thinks it was "definitely" unplanned. One for the memoirs.
• "The tiresome 'Let Miliband be Miliband' turned out to be a shorthand for 'Let Cameron be re-elected'." Stephen Bush reflects on The British General Election of 2015, by Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh.
• Peter Tatchell has changed his mind on the gay cake case.
• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this:
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