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2 months ago | 
thetimes.com | David Baddiel
Thirty-five years on from The Mary Whitehouse Experience, could the comedian keep up with his old friend on the towpaths of France? (Clue: the ebike helped)
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Richard Ayoade |William Boyd |Bernardine Evaristo |David Baddiel |Sara Collins |Tom Holland | +1 more
1.Richard Ayoade: The line “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” is from which novel? 2.What is the colour of Holden Caulfield’s hunting hat? 3.What is Bertie Wooster’s middle name? 4.William Boyd: In which James Bond novel did Bond get married? On Her Majesty’s Secret Service5.Which one of these American poets did not die by suicide? 6.Which of these South American writers did not win the Nobel prize?
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Nov 2, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | David Baddiel
I was not friends with my parents. I loved them, despite their many transgressions and Olympian levels of neglect. But we didn’t do much hanging out. My dad had his mates and my mum had her golf memorabilia lover (I refer you to other things I’ve written). I, however, am very close friends with my now-adult children. This is a generational thing.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
thejc.com | David Baddiel
Yesterday, my daughter asked a pertinent question about where we are heading at the time of writing. It was: “Do they have uncensored internet in Taiwan?” I wasn’t sure, but assumed that the Chinese Communist Party, with its looming invasion plans foreshadowed by its insistence on calling the country Chinese Tapei at the Olympics, would make that a no, and that, like the rest of China, internet access in Taiwan would be confined to state-controlled platforms.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
jewishbookcouncil.org | Marc Katz |David Baddiel |Andrea Weiss |Lisa Weinberger
Part memoir and part journalistic exploration, Tablets Shattered by Joshua Leifer looks critically at the contemporary American Jewish political scene. Beginning with his ancestors’ story of immigration to the US, Leifer charts how American Jewry got to where it is now, focusing especially on the differences between the various movements and ideologies that make up American Judaism today. Leifer does not pull his punches.
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | David Baddiel
One problem with writing a diary for this particular week is that there is an event at the end of it that will change the character of all that came before. I’m writing this first entry before I know the result of the Euro 2024 final, so it feels like diarising in the dark.
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
thejc.com | David Baddiel
I have written a memoir. It’s about my family. My family, as you may know, are/were Jews. But the truth – which the book is very committed to – mixes that up a bit. For example. I say early on that I went to an Orthodox Jewish Primary School – that, every day, I wore a yarmulke and tzitzit, learnt Hebrew, said blessings before every meal – but was often, every morning before I got there, eating bacon and eggs for breakfast.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | David Baddiel
One thing I’ve been wrestling with all week is lots of people very kindly inviting me to places – to their houses, to pubs, to parties – to watch the football. I never want to do this. I am puritanical about big games on TV.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
thejc.com | David Baddiel |Jennifer Lipman
My Family: The Memoir by David Baddiel 4th Estate, £22 As the writer and comedian David Baddiel often likes to clarify, comedy is how he processes everything. As this wince-inducing family memoir testifies, this includes his parents’ general disinterest in him and his brothers during their childhood and, indeed, into adulthood. Long before Jews didn’t count, the junior Baddiels were invariably an afterthought in the natural disaster that was Sarah and Colin’s marriage. It wasn’t all bad.
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May 23, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | David Baddiel
It’s, I’d guess, 1977. Which would make me 13. I’m in our back garden. Our back garden is a wilderness. It has a large tree in the middle that sheds a lot of leaves which never get raked. Beyond that is an area of mainly bald grass — mainly dried mud would be a better description — bounded by a hedge. In front of the hedge is a shit goal. I don’t mean a poor life ambition. I mean a junior football goal, a toy, basically, with blue posts and orange netting.
