James Austin

Sure. He's the leader of a major political party. Im not.

I also do the same with Donald Trump and Starmer

'I do my experiments on vulnerable women for free' is a line

I mean, just look at the response to the interviewer (who seems genuinely outraged by him) going 'you could be misleading vulnerable people here':

The interview actually makes me wonder if it's the former.

Yeah, and speaks before about repeatedly clients.

I'm going to guess the Sun jurno heard someone was doing this and approached him on that basis.

The interviewer raises that this could be misleading people who are vulnerable and... this is his answer. Which isn't great.

That's because it wasn't a hit piece - he hadn't joined the LD's at that point IIRC. Politics wasn't, as he says, part of the plan.

I don't think ther eis a answer in there are all. He avoids the question both times!

(Also: I do think the issue is the feature! He agreed to do a soft publicity piece, which misled women with body dysmorphia that he could use hypnotherapy to change their bodies! That's really not a good thing to do!)

Given he says in the interview he repeatedly tried it with clients (tho never charged) I'm sure the next thing will be jurnos trying to find who those clients were

The issue has never particularly been the original daft Sun feature, which (as Greens like to note) was more than a decade ago. It's been the almost entirely unnecessary dishonesty around it, which is much more recent.

He says in the interview he's done it repeatedly.

His story never really added up.

If he was misrepresented and wanted to correct the record, why did he never do it on his website? Why did The Sun journo approach him for the soft-soap piece? etc etc

He was clearly misleading people for, at best, publicity. And says The Sun thing wasn't a one off

I am *shocked* that it turns out Polanski has been lying about the boob hypnotherapy thing. Shocked.

They'll be along in a min I'm sure

lol, someone got the receipts.

I got shouted at for this; but I think one of the challenges is that many English people confuse their Englishness for Britishness and visa versa. They see the same picture.

Whereas 'British' is far more distinct from nation in Scotland/Wales/Ireland

I mean, one of the challenges is most British institutions are, in fact, English institutions extended to the wider state

Aye, but one was a emporer and the other a lad from Nazareth. You wouldn't expect that.

The comparison is more 'JFK' vs 'Chad Chadson who played baseball for the Mets and was killed on D-Day but randomly ended up a major cult figureleader 30 years later'

I'm not jealous, honest

I'm not sure I agree with that anology given 20 - 60 years for written accounts to emerge is quite different to 500!

(I actually think the most interesting bit with Jesus isn't his life, which is remarkable, but *why* he went on to inspire a Church that was so successful and how much of that relates to him)

And, to be the fair, the Church thing also complicates the 'what did he actually do/who was he' debate because of the whole, you know, son of god belief bit which makes it... tricky.

Equally Alexander fought a dragon so whose to say what is true?

Equally, to take it back to Jesus, there was this whole Church thing based around him which became quite important.

But, you know, it's like learning about Clem Attlee solely through John Bew's book. Yes, it was written 60 years after the events in question, but is clearly sourced (and those around when published had access to those sources) so we can probably trust it to a extent

Yeah - that was my reference to biographies etc which later works that do survive refer to.

Think the same applies to a lot of similar era figures? Secondary sources that are explicitly based on primary sources which are now lost

So I guess you can sort of take Holland, from what I gather, as basically 'about as revisionist as possible, while still remaining credible' and work inward from that.

Exactly. You can say:

a) he was incredibly well attested to for a non-monarch during this period

b) He almost certainly existed and his life, and particularly the last 3 years, followed the basic strokes of the bible

c) Treat any detail with a big pinch of salt

I read some of the commentary on Holland's book and I think it's fair to say he takes a fairly outerlying position in his eventual conclusions... but the broad thrust seems likely (ie. that the Quran is a very polished version of his life and beliefs with some inaccuracies on details)

As someone whose very dyslexic trust me - hardly a issue!