A family friend, Simone Guyonvarch, lives part of the year in Sutton and part of the year on the Quiberon peninsula. Her father, like many mariners from southern Brittany, served in the Free French Navy during the Second World War. Postwar he stayed in the Navy, serving as a ship’s carpenter and literally sailing around …
Category Archive: Uncategorized
Jul 19
My new book on Richard Thompson, guitar maestro and songwriter extraordinaire
I wrote a short book about for Bloomsbury Music’s 331/3 series on individual artists and albums, but things didn’t work out and it’s now been published by Takahe, the small outfit in Coventry run by Steve Hodder. It was Takahe which in 2020 published Slouching Towards Big Pink – essays on Bob Dylan and The …
Jul 04
Hottest June since 1940 – historians can’t ignore that!
According to the Met Office last month’s mean temperature of 14.9 celsius makes it the hottest June since 1940. A marked feature about weather patterns in the 1940s is the harshness of the winters across Europe, as the German Army found to its cost in Russia from late 1941. For the British it’s a postwar …
Jun 16
An unlikely role model for Keir Starmer – a more palatable Campbell Bannerman
David Campbell Bannerman has been in the news a great deal recently as a cheer leader for Boris Johnson. He is chair of the self-styled Conservative Democratic Organisation, a body loud in its criticism of Rishi Sunak’s premiership and its insistence that Johnson is innocent of all findings of the Commons’ Privileges Committee. Campbell Bannerman’s …
Jun 07
‘Nicko’ Henderson, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten and Europe – it was forty-four years today…
Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945-79 and the paperback edition of its prequel, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord were both published at the tail end of last year. There was so much that I couldn’t include in the second volume, including the following: On the first weekend in June 1979 Earl Mountbatten of Burma had no …
May 18
Early sixties music outside the charts; and, er, rugby league in Qatar
Nothing now surprises me given the events of the past seven years, but as mind boggling as Coventry City’s progress to the Championship play off final for promotion to the Premier League is surely the news that Qatar is giving serious thought to staging the 2025 Rugby League World Cup now that France have pulled …
May 08
New Statesman’s 110th anniversary – going back forty-odd years
Last month the New Statesman published a special edition to mark the magazine’s 110th anniversary. It was a more modest affair than the centenary issue, to which I contributed as the author of The New Statesman, 1913-1932 Portrait of a Political Weekly (and good luck if you can find let alone afford a copy of …
May 03
Resurrection of an old blog, but with a new purpose
The blog accompanying the research and writing of my life of aviation pioneer and industrialist Sir Richard Fairey ended with publication of the book five years ago. As then I remain Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. So why resurrect the blog under a new name – shameless self-promotion? Well yes, …
Mar 29
The Man Who Built The Swordfish publication by the end of April
The Man Who Built The Swordfish – The Life of Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 (I.B. Tauris, 2018, 455pp) will be available from the end of April 2018, priced £25. Cover: Swordfish-05-revised_design-alt
May 31
Signing off…
It totals 175,890 words, and it took four years to write, off and on (and a considerable part of those four years was ‘off’), but The Man Who Built The Swordfish: the Life of Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 is finally written. The next stage is compiling the bibliography and selecting the photographs, after which I …
Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, University of Southampton
