fascist coups and bookplates

I've been listening to quite a lot of radio recently; I spend a good chunk of my day in a windowless room designing stuff, and one of the things that gets me through it is having a giant pair of wireless headphones stuck on my head so I can listen to bbc radio one, four and seven. I was going to post a link here to a documentary I listened to on radio four, but I'll be buggered if I can ever find anything on the BBC site unless I remember to bookmark the appropriate page immediately.

If you can find it (edit - found it! But you'll need realplayer. Ech), the documentary makes for excellent - and worrying - listening. It concerns the uncovering of an apparent scheme in the 1930's to topple the elected American government and replace it with a fascist dictatorship, in a system modelled after those then existing in Italy and Germany. Many major financiers - well-known names today - were allegedly prepared to back this up with the necessary bucks. And one of the principal characters supposedly involved? None other than Prescott Bush, Dubya's granddaddy ... and once you listen to this documentary (if you can find it), the past few years political events in both the USA and even over here take on a worrying new slant.

On an entirely personal note, this is also interesting to me on a purely storywriting level. There's an idea I've had for a long time for a story - non-genre - set in Hollywood, and listening to this, a piece suddenly slid into place and the story finally, and completely, came together (Phil, this is the one you reminded me of that I almost forgot).

Other stuff: Pan are sending me up bookplates to sign for when Stealing Light goes on sale in London's Forbidden Planet in a couple of months. That's another personal first.