Category Archives: This sceptred isle

“When is a door not a door?” “When it’s ajar?” “What’s big and red and eats rocks?” “A big red rock eater.” “How do you make time fly?” “Throw the clock out of the window.” The silly riddles from childhood … Continue reading →

Our village is so rural that it has no street lights. Stand and look from the upstairs window of my mother’s house and for miles around the surrounding landscape is entirely agricultural, yet farming hardly features in the conversation. To … Continue reading →

Siegfried Sassoon was an extraordinary character. A soldier whose reckless regard for his own safety and his sacrificial concern for his men earned him the nickname “Mad Jack,” he was awarded the Military Cross for bringing back the wounded in … Continue reading →

The idea we have a choice is only an illusion. The multiplicity of channels trying to provide a twenty-four hour rolling news service, with each channel having increasingly finite resources, means that each channel will cover the same stories, that … Continue reading →

BBC Televisions’s The Good Old Days was for thirty years compered by Leonard Sachs, who is said to have introduced acts, “with a resounding barrage of garrulous and loquacious avidity.” Eighteenth Century memorial tablets on church walls seem often to … Continue reading →