Arts
A History of Pop Music – 1961
Featured song: The Shadows – FBI – as performed on Crackerjack (It’s Friday what do we all say?) This is a series of articles looking at pop music from 1955 when in my opinion proper [more…]
Blog
Arts
Sock Puppets
Have you noticed how easily the left get the rest of us and especially the right to read tweets or watch a short video of a left-wing politician or indeed any Schwab type person? They [more…]
Fiction
Jinnie’s Story – Book Seven, Chapter Eight
On Monday afternoon Freddie, Nigel’s chauffeur and general factotum, dropped Jinnie, Izzy and Sir Nigel off outside the offices of Mann, Coombes and Company. Freddie headed off in the Rolls to the public car park [more…]
Authoritarianism
Riots, Royals & Petitions For Parliamentary Reform
It’s standard practice when a making a complaint that one: articulates the complaint to the appropriate person in writing says what would resolve the complaint i.e. what you want them to do Why should it [more…]
20th Century
Desert Fox: Erwin Rommel’s Photograph Collection
The Vietnam War started in 1955 and ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975 when the Americans left in a hurry. It has been described as the first televised war but a claim to [more…]
21st Century
Hatuwezi Ishi Hivi (We Can’t Live This Way)
Police brutality during the #RejectFinanceBill protests has shown us that while politicians can afford to sit back and wait for the 2027 general election, we the citizens of Kenya do not have that luxury. They [more…]
Book Review
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Lucky Jim was (Sir) Kingsley Amis’s first novel published in 1954. It is the funniest novel that I have read I think, and contains many genuinely laugh out loud passages. Amis was inspired to write [more…]
20th Century
Report From Kenya, 1955 – Part Eight
In 1955, at the height of the Mau Mau Rebellion, my uncle John Alldridge produced a series of reports from Kenya for the Birmingham Mail and the Manchester Evening News – Jerry F Wally’s lion [more…]
Elections
General Elections 1959 to 2024
After the predictable but sickening claims by Labour that they have a mandate following the 2024 election it is time to check out what happened previously. The sight of Crayons with a permanent smug look [more…]