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Articles by Lavinia Thompson

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About Lavinia Thompson

A university lecturer for many years, both at home and abroad, Lavinia Thompson retired in 2008 and has since taken up freelance journalism. She is currently studying for a distant learning degree in geo-political science and lives in Norwich with her partner. More Posts

It’s going to get worse before it gets better

You’d think things couldn’t get much more extraordinary and depressing these days as we continue to inhabit the dark days of the Brexit crisis, the President Trump era and goodness knows what else. It is now 221 years since Thomas Malthus first published his Essay On The Principle of [...]

May 21, 2019 // 0 Comments

No change there, then?

These days the comedian Frankie Howerd has – as is sometimes the lot of showbiz people with a particular persona or style – somewhat fallen out of fashion and I doubt that anyone under the age of forty has ever heard of him. There was even a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s [...]

May 17, 2019 // 0 Comments

Rendering unto Caesar

According to legend – or rather Plutearch’s Life of Caesar – Julius Caesar used the phrase “Veni, vidi, vici” [translation: “I came, I saw, I conquered”] in a report to his friend Amantius after achieving a swift victory during his war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of [...]

May 7, 2019 // 0 Comments

You didn’t read it here first

On this organ we operate a straightforward editorial policy under which our columnists, under no obligation to contribute unless and until they feel like it or have something to say, are free to pontificate upon any subject they wish. Another golden unwritten rule is that we acknowledge that [...]

April 24, 2019 // 0 Comments

Where we are now

And so it has come to this … Never mind the entire from-start-to-finish Brexit horlicks; The original 2016 (“once in a generation”) EU Referendum, the result of which the Government promised in advance to implement; The allegations that the Leave campaign, or part of it, breached Electoral [...]

April 21, 2019 // 0 Comments

The art of getting the genie back in the bottle

It is in the nature of things that the ingenuity of Man will always outstrip his ability to control the product(s) of his inventions and therefore – should he attempt to do so – his attempts will lag way behind the actualité. In warfare, whether it be developing a fast-repeating machine [...]

March 27, 2019 // 0 Comments

Thoughts upon the word of news – and vaginas

One aspect of the universality of social media and the internet is that it has not just broken the mould of what used to be the traditional (and for ages presumed unchangeable) means of news dissemination but actually blow the whole world of news information and human interaction wide-open. For [...]

February 20, 2019 // 0 Comments

And yes, you couldn’t make it up!

The UK Ministry of Defence does not have a particularly good reputation – and, down through history, its predecessors likewise. It was said that British Army’s approach to strategic and tactical planning at the time of the Crimean War (1853-1856) had barely changed from time of the Battle of [...]

February 2, 2019 // 0 Comments

Remoaning across the land

It was as long ago as 1962 that he famously called the Daily Express “a bloody awful newspaper” but, if Prince Philip still casts his eye over the daily British press these days, my penny to a pound would be on the proposition that he would finger The Independent – now an unashamed pro-Remain [...]

January 26, 2019 // 0 Comments

A storm in a tea cup? Possibly yes and no …

Today, with an admitted smidgeon of nervousness, I step into the recent row that has blown up in the media and elsewhere over the BBC’s alleged biased and unfair treatment of Diane Abbott, Labour’s shadow home secretary, upon the BBC’s staple Question Time programme, which was recently hosted [...]

January 22, 2019 // 0 Comments

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