Alan Little emailed me today about an interesting piece he has up at his blog about the unease he felt listening to – and liking a great deal – a Wilhelm Fürtwangler recording of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, which was made in 1944 with the Vienna Philharmonic. However the points he raises struck me as being of more than merely "cultural" interest, as the date and the city has probably already suggested to you, so I linked to and commented on his posting at Samizdata.

I also thank him for linking back to a piece I did here, way back in September, about Hitler's love of classical music.

One of the things I most like about blogging is that your better bits have a habit of sticking around and being linked back to. Not by very many people, true, but the more I experience it, the more I disagree with the "here today gone tomorrow" complaint about blogging. In fact, I would say that the most important difference between being on talk radio (which I still do occasionally but did a lot more in the past) and doing blogging is precisely that blogs are not "gone tomorrow". At present most blogs have a far smaller readership than the audience of the radio stations I've chatted on, but the difference between readership and audience is, for me, all the difference. Talk is indeed gone, almost immediately. Writing can stick around, and the software that bloggers use ensures that at its best, that is just what it does.