EDITORIAL

SPOOKS AND SAUSAGE DOGS

FROM SALISBURY WITH LOVE

The UK news media, both mainstream and ‘alternative’, have unsurprisingly been preoccupied with the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal (see p5), a former Russian double agent, with what appears to be a mysterious substance called Novichok, a product of Soviet-era secret chemical weapons research. Skripal, 66, imprisoned for spying in Russia and released in a prisoner exchange, was found collapsed on a park bench in the middle of Salisbury along with his daughterYulia, 33. The smallish cathedral city in Wiltshire is not usually noted for international espionage dramas (or the biohazard-suited emergency services pictured at right), but residents who might have visited a branch of Zizzi restaurant, now screened off and surrounded by police, are being told to wash their clothes; which may or not be effective at removing mysterious Soviet nerve agents. Indeed, you may want to be careful where you eat in Salisbury; there are now reports of a woman in a black “SARS mask” being spotted in a nearby Pret a Manger just before the attack.

As we go to press, the Prime Minister has announced that Russian involvement in the affair seems “highly likely” and has given Putin’s administration a deadline to explain its actions, while US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has declared that the attack “clearly came from Russia” – which does, of course, have form for this sort of thing. Nevertheless, Andrei Lugovoi, almost certainly one of the assassins who poisoned Alexander Litvinenko in a Mayfair hotel back in 2006, has suggested the whole affair has been got up by the British government to “demonise” Moscow.

Further Russian weirdness abounds in this issue. In his Science column (p14), David Hambling takes a look at another bit of Cold War-era research that’s been making a comeback: it involves immersing dachshunds in tanks of oxygenated liquid. Meanwhile, SD Tucker (p48) goes back to the early years of the Soviet Union to explore the work of the Russian Cosmists and their plan to extend State control of every aspect of human life to time itself.

ERRATA

FT364:1: Rob Gandy emailed to point out out that while the contents page refers to “the Ancient Roman spooks of Cheshire” and the cover to “the Ancient Roman spooks of Chester”, Alan Murdie’s Ghostwatch is actually about Harry Martindale’s celebrated sighting of Ancient Roman spooks in York.

We would like to apologise for not providing correct attribution for the photograph of Josef Jakobs, which should have been as follows: Copyright GK Jakobs / www. josefjakobs.com. Giselle Jakobs is one of Josef’s granddaughters and has been researching his life for the last 30 years; her website is an excellent resource for information about Josef’s life and times. FT364:40:

FT364:41: Michael Hunneman spotted a classic howler in the footnotes to Cathi Unsworth’s cover feature, “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?”, where note 22 refers to “the capture of Herman Hess [sic] in Scotland on 10 May 1941”. Clearly this was meant to refer to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, captured after his bizarre solo flight to Scotland to negotiate peace with the British government. The Germanborn writer Hermann Hesse, author of

Steppenwolf and Siddartha, was equally committed to peace, of course, his books being later taken up enthusiastically by the counterculture of the 1960s. Hesse had become a Swiss citizen in 1923, his works having been banned in Germany since the late-1930s. In 1941 he was at work on The

Glass Bead Game, which was eventually printed in Switzerland in 1943.

FT364:67: The review of Electric Dreams was wrongly attributed to Martin Parsons. It was, in fact, written by Daniel King.