Fiction
Those Who Play With Fire, Chapter Nineteen
They sat in the back of the Range Rover as they were whisked off to the rear entrance to Downing Street. Dave and Sally were led in through a guarded doorway. The passes were now [more…]
Blog
Arts
A History of Pop Music – 1966
Featured song: The beach Boys – Good Vibrations This is a series of articles looking at pop music from 1955 when in my opinion proper pop music began up to 1999 when they stopped making [more…]
Arts
Always Worth Saying’s Question Time Review
Question Time 21st November 2024 The Panel: Nick Thomas-Symonds (Labour) Harriett Baldwin (Conservative) Daisy Cooper (LibDem) Minette Batters (former NFU president) Venue: Trowbridge Nick Thomas-Symonds, not his real name (not double-barrelled; Thomas was his mother’s [more…]
Fiction
Jinnie’s Story – Book Seven, Chapter Twenty-Two
Jinnie pushed the button that changed the Trattoria Trevi Group boardroom’s glazed partitions from transparent to opaque and called the meeting to order. Before talking about the project, she impressed on everyone the importance of [more…]
America
Decline & Fall
The final stage of a great power’s decline is often marked by a shift towards finance-driven capitalism. In the 1980s and ’90s, finance-driven capitalism was touted as the future of economic prosperity. However, this narrative [more…]
20th Century
Whittaker Chambers, Part Three
In 1938 Whittaker Chambers defected. Well they call it defected but he was an American in the USA who worked for the NKVD but saw the light and severed relations with the Soviets. Defection is [more…]
Authoritarianism
First Came The Floods…
First came the floods that washed away people’s homes, then came the bulldozers that destroyed everything that was left. Before the mass revolt in Kenya spread countrywide in June, it had already started in the [more…]
Politics
Of Squirrels, Unicorns, Electricity Storage & Flywheels, Part One
For my sins, I’ve been trying to make sense of the UK Government’s ambition to de-carbonise the domestic electric grid by 2030. Because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, a [more…]
20th Century
The Barbers of Palermo
22 January 1944 And so we came to Palermo. A crumbling, pink-and-white little town where they sell oranges and almonds and mandolins and guitars, and very little else. Such an insignificant little town that even [more…]