But my sister knew different: she’d read the headlines; she’d watched the outraged Councillor Bull on the evening news; she’d seen a government minister quoted as calling on local councils to view and ban the film, and the only thing she had not seen was the film.Believe me, there is such a thing as bad publicity, and my liberal sister is a barometer of its effect. Four front-page banner headlines, and leader articles to match, is a lot of firepower: my in-laws rang from the country.My older sister told me over dinner that she couldn’t possibly see the film – she knew it would be too “violent”. It’s a sensation I last experienced exactly a year ago in Cannes, when the well-known critic of a London evening paper stormed out of the press conference for our film Crash, wagging his finger like an outraged Mr Chips in the face of director David Cronenberg. Last week, exactly a year later, I was choking again, this time in Westminster Council chamber on the Marylebone Road as I stood up to hear Councillor John Bull (sic) announce that Crash, despite its 18 certificate, was banned from playing in the borough.

It would provide cover for all sides to abandon their entrenched positions and search for some kind of single currency compromise.Although French Socialists resent comparisons with the culturally reformed New Labour in Britain (they claim to have moved to the centre years ago), there is much in Jospin’s programme which sounds like old-time Socialist medicine. Streets closed, halls, clubs and cafes filled for 200 concerts over the bank holiday weekend But, on the air, you had to search. The frequency of each waveform is carefully calculated using prime number ratios and then specially tuned by Young. As you enter the space, all you hear is a loud, dense drone, like a deranged factory; but then, as you walk around or simply turn your head, individual notes leap out from the background. Tiny harmonies float in their own very specific space; in some parts of the room a great lumpen bass thunders at a frequency so low it’s almost a pulsating rhythm. What’s happening is that the sine waves are literally sculpting the air, setting up very stable high and low pressure areas in the room.

As listeners investigate this material, they generate their own private melodies by moving through space and time. A symphony of spaces for those that have ears to hearn’Music for Spaces’: Mon-Fri 5pm Radio 3. The passage in question amounts to no more than four or so minutes of music and concludes Act 1 – the original Act 1, that is, of what was Britten’s four-act opera Billy Budd Captain Vere musters his “gallant crew” to the quarter deck “I speak to all,” he says. “Veteran and novice, sailor and marine, officer and man, we share a common duty, we fight a common foe…” And the response comes back loud and clear, the sailors’ voices – and that of one in particular, Able Seaman William Budd – rising to a Jolly Rogerish shout of affirmation. The critic Ernest Newman famously (and naughtily) wrote that it put him in mind of HMS Pinafore Quite a compliment, though not, of course, intended as such. He was implying, I imagine, that it was a little too pat and pompous, jolly exciting (in the time-honoured tradition of Act 1 curtains) but functional rather than inspirational And he had a point. It’s true that this boisterous little scene lends a certain ironic symmetry to the four-act structure, contrasting long-term with the mutinous howls of derision that poleaxe Vere and his officers at the close of Act 4.

Mercury manages funds for more than 50 of the biggest companies in the FT-SE100 index and runs five of the ten largest pension funds in world.. There’s something very uncomfortable about spitting with rage and roaring with laughter at the same time You neither spit nor roar You choke. Her role in the epic Forte battle won Ms Galley the title of the City’s Ice Maiden. She has a reputation of being a workaholic, arriving at MAM’s offices near London Bridge before 8am and rarely leaving until late at night.She is married to a German stockbroker and has no children.

She and her husband relax at the weekends at a cottage in the south of France.The daughter of a local government officer in Newcastle upon Tyne, Ms Galley studied modern languages at Leicester University and then joined the library of the investment department of SG Warburg, later to become MAM.It was there that she honed her forensic skills in fund management, developing a reputation for being better briefed on company performance than some of the senior investment managers she was working for.The reward fees paid to Mercury Asset Management’s top managers reflect the company’s huge success in building up a business that now controls pounds 90bn of pensions in Britain. Before that, she had claimed the scalp of Sir Christopher Bland, now the chairman of the BBC, by supporting Granada’s bid for LWT, the tele- vision company that he once chaired.Sir Rocco still holds Ms Galley responsible for the demise of his empire, believing that MAM egged Granada into launching its bid for the business. Revelations about the huge payouts made to Ms Galley and senior colleagues at MAM are certain to rekindle the row over the size of rewards on offer in the City.Ms Galley was the fund manager who sealed the fate of Sir Rocco Forte by backing Granada’s pounds 3.8bn bid for his hotel and restaurant chain last year. This did not stop the column becoming a successful West End revue.The same fate befell its successor, the fictitious letters of Denis Thatcher to his supposed drinking and golfing partner Bill Deedes. Dear Bill was turned into a play that the Thatchers actually went to see.