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 …
Category Archive: Uncategorized
Feb 18
Fashionably unfashionable – the afterlife of JG Farrell
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 …
Jan 19
Random thoughts on Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown
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 …
Nov 12
Physicists and the evolution of WW1 combat aircraft – an essay
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 …
Oct 31
35th Wellington Lecture: ‘Wellington and two world wars’, 29 October 2024
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 …
Sep 17
Goodbye Evening Standard
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 …
Sep 03
When bagpipes rocked the world – Alan Stivell and the making of modern Brittany
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 …
Jul 09
Putting the French election result in (a historical) perspective
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 …
Jun 09
Eightieth anniversary of Keith Douglas’s death in Normandy
Today is the eightieth anniversary of the death of the poet and memoirist. What follows is the piece I wrote ten years for the New Statesman to mark the seventieth anniversary: Keith Douglas was just 24 when killed only three days after landing in Normandy. As 8th Armoured Brigade sought a breakout south of Bayeux, …
Jun 05
D-Day New Forest talk: Sway and the Sherwood Rangers, spring 1944
SWAY AND THE SHERWOOD RANGERS, SPRING 1944 This was the basis for a talk I gave in Sway village hall on 4 June 2024 as part of the village’s impressive array of D-Day anniversary events, partly organised in conjunction with St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Lymington. My thanks to fellow St Barbe trustee …
Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, University of Southampton
