Category Archives: This sceptred isle

‘Who is that?’ asked a cousin last week. ‘That’s our great grandfather, Albert Luxton. His uniform was from when he was in the military police after the First World War.’ Born in 1880, he was the youngest among his siblings … Continue reading →

A suggested video on a social media site was of a yellow-fronted diesel locomotive approaching a railway station.  The briefest of searches would have produced thousands of such images from lines the length and breadth of Britain. Is there any … Continue reading →

Were I not resident in Ireland, I might be a prime target for Tory canvassers.  A Financial Times subscriber who teaches in a private girls’ school and who paid for the public school education of his own children, I should be … Continue reading →

‘Their name liveth for evermore’. It was Rudyard Kipling’s idea to put words from the Hewbrew Scriptures’ book of Ecclesiasticus on the Stone of Remembrance in each war cemetery.  Kipling similarly composed the lines, ‘A Soldier of the Great War. … Continue reading →

Darkness had fallen around the isolated farmhouse and the young single woman who lived there felt a sense of menace. Already there had been a prowler and the headlights she saw stopped outside created a growing sense of anxiety. When … Continue reading →