Watching ‘Wolf Hall’ this week, I was reminded of how Thomas Cromwell settled a few old scores when inventing evidence to condemn the luckless Anne Boleyn to a date with the executioner. He trawled through a list
Continue reading →The Sunday Post: A Confirmed Bachelor Boy
Confessions of a Crying Wolf
Confess! Confess! Confess! Hell, the Spanish Inquisition would have a far easier time of it today; back in the fifteenth century, they had to torture in order to grind out confessions; these days, people are queuing up
Continue reading →The Sunday Post: Eye Weren’t Even There, Guv!
Richard Ingrams once described Peter Cook as a conservative anarchist. The one-time editor of ‘Private Eye’ also regarded himself as such; it’s a canny label that expertly summarises the curious contradiction inherent within those sons of the
Continue reading →Cammin’ over ‘ere – Takin’ our Mansions!
Mayfair – a cosseted corner of England preserved in Edwardian amber, national exposure to which is guaranteed to bring out the worst inverted snobbery and chip-on-the-shoulder socialism of anyone from a working-class background. Who cares about these
Continue reading →Don’t Read All About It
Peter Oborne is not someone whose every word I either hang onto or agree with; but every now and again the recently resigned Chief Political Commentator of the Daily Telegraph, associate-editor of The Spectator, and occasional TV presenter makes a
Continue reading →Playing the Race (Music) Card
In ‘All You Need is Cash’, Eric Idle’s 1978 spoof documentary on his spoof Beatles, The Rutles, there’s a scene in which Idle as an inept interviewer grills a veteran bluesman called Ruttling Orange Peel; Mr Peel claims
Continue reading →The Cruel Sea
Hard to imagine such a scenario as you rest your flabby western butt on a comfy sofa and tear your hair out because you can’t find the latest must-see series as recommended by The Guardian on Netflix,
Continue reading →Sorry Seems To Be The Easiest Word
In the past few weeks, a proposal has been aired by several prominent public figures to ‘begin a discussion about pardoning all the men, alive or deceased, who like Alan Turing were convicted under the UK’s Gross
Continue reading →Someone’s Looking at You
Zirndorf is a seemingly nondescript German village on the outskirts of Nuremberg; in the foreboding shadow of a city that owes its location on the map of European history to grandiose public pronouncements of Aryan supremacy, Zirndorf is probably
Continue reading →Wilde Thing
It may sometimes seem like we are living through an age of finger-pointing paranoia unprecedented since the Taliban-esque era of the post-Civil War Puritans; but we have been here more recently, and a couple of centuries closer
Continue reading →The Man with the Child in His Eyes
A little girl kisses a melancholy man – the kind of sugary, sentimental image so beloved of the Victorian bourgeoisie and a variation on a theme that clings to the coat-tails of the twenty-first century as a nauseating mainstay
Continue reading →I Think, Therefore I Am (A Pervert)
Everyone reading this will have at some time been guilty of an occasional ‘unnatural sexual proclivity’. Don’t try and deny it, you dirty sods. You got away with it, as well. How do you sleep at night,
Continue reading →The Sunday Post: Land of Hope and Stories
Memories of how the world appeared when our eyes first looked out on it tend to form enduring impressions so that each change to this original template, whether the dress sense of pedestrians, the design of cars
Continue reading →When Yes Means No
A Victorian man denied his conjugal rights by his Victorian wife finally snaps and takes possession of his property in a manner the law tells him he is perfectly entitled to. From her perspective, it is not
Continue reading →Turn Left at Athens
Something of significance happened in Greece this week, an event that marked the end of an era, the passing of an age and a sign of the times. Demis Roussos died. One hopes the singing tent, who so
Continue reading →Let There Be Light
It could easily be dismissed as a cinematic myth, but I’m pretty damn sure it’s true that early Hollywood westerns simplified the distinction between hero and villain by cladding the good guys in light colours and the bad
Continue reading →For All Its Faults…
A detailed description of what happens when a man minding his own business collides with an Israeli air-strike in Gaza can paint remarkable pictures in the mind of the listener. I was exposed to just such a
Continue reading →Victoria’s Daughters and the Fine Line of Time
Many might think the complete and definitive history of the Victorian age has already been written; after all, there have been plenty of books and television documentaries filling the shelves and schedules since the old Queen died
Continue reading →I Know Thee Not, Old Man
Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons; if there happens to be any long-term tension within the family unit, more often than not the tension arises from strained relations between two males or two females. It becomes especially
Continue reading →What the Papers Said
Grecian 2000 (and 15)
Odd Men Out
POSH! – ‘Loved culture, poetry’ CREEPY! – ‘Loner with blue rinse hair’ WEIRD! – ‘Strange talk, strange walk’I was reminded of these devastating descriptions of the attributes that constitute a killer whilst
Continue reading →When is a Town not a Town?
Another Country
The Sunday Post: A Lost Lexicon of England
London Town is Falling Down
Wake Me Up on May 7
The absence of flexibility in the American Presidential system means either death or
Continue reading →Criminal History
Mother and Child Reunion
Credit Where Credit’s Due
