The review article by Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite replicated below appears in the current issue of New Left Review. I think that it’s one of the best pieces I have read this year on the General Strike, the centenary of which was commemorated in May. The reviewer rightly identifies the railway workers’ union leader Jimmy Thomas as …
Category Archive: Uncategorized
Jan 27
Greenland, Chagos and the long shadow of Suez
Sixty years ago this July the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Nasser needed revenue to fund construction of the Aswan dam and an ambitious programme of weapons purchase and reconstruction. The British prime minister interpreted the Egyptian takeover as a personal affront, Anthony Eden’s behaviour throughout the crisis belying his reputation …
Oct 03
Lymington’s unlikeliest hero – track star Gordon Pirie
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 …
May 05
One woman’s Catholicism: Frances Smith and her adopted city
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 …
Apr 09
George Curtis – Coventry’s favourite footballer?
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 …
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 …
Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, University of Southampton
