20th Century
Ends and Means
Back Channels The events in Londonderry on the 30th January 1972 that became known as Bloody Sunday are still in the news today and still a cause of controversy. Whilst the shooting of civilians by [more…]
Articles by Colin Crosss
20th Century
The Reimagined Past & Disneyfication of PIRA Terrorism
Bloody Friday was one of the worst atrocities of the Northern Ireland troubles but you will seldom hear it mentioned. It was the deliberate targeting of civilians by the Provisional IRA (PIRA), with approximately twenty [more…]
19th Century
Postcard from Smardale Gill
Retirement, as I’ve mentioned previously, takes some getting used to, especially when you’ve become accustomed to a kind of semi-formalised regimen that has developed over the best part of 50 years. Although not without things [more…]
Hobbies
Postcard from The West of Scotland
We’d been promising ourselves a trip to the West of Scotland for some time, once we’d decided broadly where we wanted to be we started to look for a suitable place to stay. The Mallaig [more…]
Arts
19th Century
Women of the 18th and 19th Century (An occasional series) 1. Sarah Losh
Sometimes I get to wondering, do things simply happen randomly or do they happen for a reason? Like many other people, no doubt, I’ve been watching “Gentleman Jack”, the dramatised version of The Diaries of [more…]
Authoritarianism
From Draft to Bookshop – A Journey
Almost two years ago this weekend my wife and I, rather nervously, drove into a small Devon village on our way to visit a family that I had only met through Going Postal but who [more…]
America
An Eventful Ride, Part Two
When spending several weeks in Northern California with Bestie, seeing a lynx down by the pond, having a Crystal Meth junkie gal banging on the truck door and then, finally, getting to where we had [more…]
Fiction
“Smashing Hate”
Imagine the scene, a large sparsely furnished room with brick walls and whitewashed windows. The light in the room, although it is sunny outside, is opaque. Motes of dust float through the filtered sunlight. Brick [more…]