Dr. David Kelly
Harrowdown Hill is the place in which was found Dr. Kelly’s dead body. He was a microbiologist expert in ‘biological warfare’ and he worked for the MoD (United Kingdom Ministry of Defence). He became popular after an interview for Panorama in which he talked about the British government’s dossier on weapons mass destruction in Iraqi (WMD). The interview, although wasn’t broadcast, caused a big political scandal. Dr. Kelly died some days after he had appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
“They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were-facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons."
The source of this quote was confirmed to be Dr. Kelly in the Hutton Inquiry.
BBC News about Kelly and WMD
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3411073.stm
Wikipedia EN about Dr. David Kelly and Hutton Inquiry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry
The song’s title ‘Harrowdown Hill’ by Thom Yorke clearly refers to Kelly’s death. Thom writes the lyric using the 1st singular person and, in this way, tries to make Kelly able to speak again. In my opinion the result is really moving and makes the song sad and sweet at the same time.
‘The ministry’ is referred to the British Ministry of Defence who was, in Yorke’s opinion, responsible with the whole government “for outing him and that put him in a position of unbearable pressure that he couldn't deal with, and they knew they were doing it and what it would do to him” (Thom Yorke in an interview with The Globe and Mail).
Thank you, Rachel, for your post about the ‘information structure’: it’s a very interesting argument! Italian organises information in a very different way. In fact we normally put new information at the beginning of a sentence and not at the end. Anyway I’ll consult an Italian grammar to find out more and I’ll post my research’s results!
There is a very interesting difference about adjectives’ position. In Italian they are often put after a noun instead of before. So you give firstly the information about the subject/object and then ones about the attributes. The exact contrary then in English! “Rachel is a fantastic English teacher” is “Rachel รจ (is) una (a) professoressa (teacher) Inglese (English) fantastica (fantastic)”.
Good night
See you tomorrow
Antonio
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