They are also expected to quiz car importer Robert Edmiston – who lent the

They are also expected to quiz car importer Robert Edmiston – who lent the Conservative Party £2m and was blocked by the Lords Appointments Commission along with four of the Labour lenders.A police source said: “This is a high-profile inquiry and everyone will be watching, so we are going to be very thorough and question all the main players involved.”Senior officers are anxious to avoid the inquiry being seen as a whitewash – a view that could explain their decision to arrest Mr Smith. He said backers could be considered for an honour but “there is certainly no guarantee and nothing we have done would suggest that that is the case”.While the SSAT advised on potential sponsors, Mr Rammell said that the final decision rested with the Department for Education and Skills and sufficient safeguards were in place.The Metropolitan Police, who released Mr Smith on bail, refused to comment on reports that detectives were preparing to interview 12 wealthy Labour supporters who secretly lent the party £14m. “I think we need a series of discussions as to whether this has a viable future,” he said.But Bill Rammell, the Education minister, insisted the academies had raised standards in some of the poorest parts of the country. One of the things that this policy has done is to create huge pressure on the organisations involved in raising sponsorship to find new sponsors and get the projects up and running as fast as possible.”Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, which supports city academies, said the whole programme was now in question. He said Mr Blair’s desire to push through his education reforms as quickly as possible may lead to “the cutting of some corners”.He added: “Certainly the model whereby it is one individual buying a significant amount of influence for £2m, I don’t think is acceptable.”Tom Bentley, director of the think-tank Demos and a former government education adviser, said: “I think probably the Government hasn’t been careful enough.

The 1970s Yorkshire TV documentary Johnny Go Home shocked the nation with its portrait of teenage runaways forced into prostitution in places such as the Playland amusement arcade in Piccadilly Circus. But our lives will not be enlivened by the poor versions he passes on. It is sad that he could not serve better the man he so admires.David Constantine’s translation of Goethe’s ‘Faust Pt 1′ is published by Penguin. Armstrong zealously wishes us to know what Goethe is “getting at”, “going on about”, what the message is that Goethe “is trying to send us”.

But they are a fit part of the whole endeavour which is, to be brutal, the sloppy domestication of a great (and very recalcitrant) subject into something we might be able to manage without discomfort. The book is littered with confusions, misreadings, misquotations, mistranslations, errors of fact. Reading that adequately might indeed change our lives.Armstrong will keep demolishing views – on Goethe’s sex life, on his role as the “Sage of Weimar” – that nobody has held for decades Worse, he cannot be bothered to get things right. The deed of life is there, in the neologisms, the new rhythms, the wit, the hungry appropriation of other cultures for a dynamic self to express itself. A mercy; but also the fatal hole in the heart of the entire undertaking.

For Goethe’s great achievement, that flings the reader’s eyes wide open in amazement, is the stupendous breakthrough of the early 1770s; the erotic delight of the playing of hexameter and pentameter in the Roman Elegies and other poems after Italy; the wonderful abundance of the West-Eastern Divan nearly 30 years later. Goethe did indeed have opinions – on dogs and crucifixes, for example – but he is chiefly remembered as a poet.Poetry being, even by John Armstrong, less able to be paraphrased into cosy homily, we experience little of Goethe’s in this book. His paraphrase of the plot of Faust is a horrid debacle.For John Armstrong’s purposes Goethe would have done much better to write nothing but a weekly column in the ‘Weimar Mail on Sunday’. Out of that no doubt you might bodge together a philosophy for rubbing along quite nicely in this naughty world.

No complexity, no shifting of sense according to whose perspective you adopt. In Armstrong’s favourite among Goethe’s works, Wilhelm Meister, he notices neither Mignon nor any irony; no irony either in Elective Affinities or Faust. This from the account of Egmont: “It might be tempting to keep your teenagers under lock and key but to be a genuine parent requires allowing some degree of autonomy, and that is painful because it might be used badly.” He reads Tasso and Iphigenie as though they were versified treatises on how to behave at court or among barbarians. Armstrong paraphrases the works one after the other in the same spirit in which he paraphrases the life. Indeed, the two are much the same; they are material for banal moralizing.