The regular writer on local personalities and local history for a free guide, the Lymington Directory, is incapacitated.  I was asked to step in.  Desperate for a subject I looked on Wikipedia for a list of famous names associated with the town I’ve lived in for the past 31 years (next year 40 years living …

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It’s now over two years since my mother’s funeral, her body returned to the church in Coventry where she had worshipped for so long.  Born and brought up in Ireland, she died in a coastal care home close to me.  Yet for eighty years Frances Smith had lived in her adopted city, much of that …

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In mid-April a shared statue is to be unveiled outside the CBS Arena in Coventry, home of the city’s Championship football team, the Sky Blues.  The statue will be of John Sillett and George Curtis,  the duo of ex-CCFC defenders who were joint managers and masterminds of Coventry’s 1987 FA Cup triumph.  John Sillett died …

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The Anglo-Irish novelist JG Farrell would have been ninety in January had he not drowned in August 1979 while fishing in Bantry Bay.  It was an anniversary that passed without comment.  The harsh legacy of polio, contracted in Farrell’s first year at Oxford, renders it unlikely that he would have reached old age, but what …

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It augured well when on the way to the cinema we passed a busker playing ‘The Wicked Messenger’ (how many buskers know John Wesley Harding, in advanced years my favourite Dylan album?).  This is not a review of A Complete Unknown, not least as there are so many out there by cineastes far better qualified …

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I was asked to contribute to the 10th Anniversary Commemorative Volume of The History and Philosophy of Physics Centre at Oxford, drawing on a lecture that I gave at the annual HAPP conference about ten years ago: ‘Warfare and wind tunnel: engineers, physicists, and the evolution of combat aircraft 1914-1918’ Journal of Physics: Conference Series …

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I was privileged to deliver this year’s Wellington Lecture at the University of Southampton, and here’s the text of the lecture: Introduction Some time in the summer of 1945 Captain Alf Smith, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, staff officer 21st Army Group, Brussels HQ, spent a day south of the city sightseeing.  He toured the battlefield at …

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Today marks the end of the Evening Standard in printed form.  Outside London no-one cares, and within the capital the paper’s absence will be scarcely be noticed by the end of the week, let alone the end of the month.  London’s last surviving multi-edition newspaper has been on a downward spiral for years, and its …

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A much shorter version of the following will appear in a future issue of the bimonthly magazine, the Idler: These days Breton folk music rarely travels east of Rennes or south of Nantes, let alone north of Roscoff.  Radio 2’s flagship folk programme devotes airtime to francophone artists from Louisiana and Quebec, and yet it …

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With Labour securing only 34% of the popular vote despite the party’s huge parliamentary majority, and Reform securing 14.3%, the tide of populism this side of la manche still seems high – with the potential to rise a lot higher.  Nevertheless, we can now place the UK alongside Portugal, and to a degree Spain, in …

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