Category Archives: This sceptred isle

The times are out of joint. Falls of snow in March and a late spring crashed into the arrival of an early summer in April. By June, record temperatures were accompanied by the onset of drought conditions. Now in the … Continue reading →

Forty years ago, Nottingham Forest won the football league championship. It was a season when Liverpool won the European Champions Cup, in those days a knockout competition in which only the champions from each country qualified to enter. Liverpool’s success … Continue reading →

Mr Buchanan’s history classes at Strode College forty years seem now to have been instilled with a prescience that could not have been imagined at the time. His teaching on how the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s developed through middle … Continue reading →

Following the Twitter feed of David Lammy, the member of parliament for Tottenham, there is a sense of astonishment at the abuse he suffers. Racism, profanities, semi-literate rants, the ramblings of angry and violent minds seem the stuff of everyday … Continue reading →

“Son, could you pass me my wallet?” I rose from the seat in the barber’s shop and took down my father’s coat from where it hung. “A good performance from the England football team, in the end,” said the barber. … Continue reading →