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Six Nations: Italy 20 Ireland 34

The non-UK countries in the Six Nations do not get too much coverage in the media and this year Italy have definitely slipped under the radar. Okay, they have lost all 3 games – but they play with brio and were unlucky to lose against France. Yesterday they more than competed against a very [...]

February 26, 2023 // 0 Comments

Six Nations: Wales 10 England 20

I suspect that when someone begins his tale with a line that – the day before – he had spent the day having a pub lunch and then watching the Six Nations clash between Wales and England on television together with a former England rugby player who made his international debut in Cardiff [...]

February 26, 2023 // 0 Comments

Motty R.I.P.

I cannot say Motty was a good friend but he was more than an acquaintance of mine. I do not know how many paying tribute to him actually knew him. The tributes did get one thing right: he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of football in an age where there was no internet resource. He kept rigorous [...]

February 24, 2023 // 0 Comments

All Quiet on the Western Front

Although All Quiet on the Western Front hoovered up the BAFTA awards I was a tad disappointed. It’s a German film so it was good that foreign films are recognised. The story is of German school friends who, persuaded by the xenophobic rhetoric of their headmaster, became conscripts in the [...]

February 21, 2023 // 0 Comments

Revival of Bill Naughton’s Spring and Port Wine

For personal reasons which I will divulge later I was so delighted to hear that Bill Naughton’s Spring and Port Wine is to be revived at the Octagon Theatre Bolton. Bill Naughton was of poor Irish stock in County Mayo and moved to Bolton where he bagged and delivered coal. His breakthrough as a [...]

February 11, 2023 // 0 Comments

Mother Goose (Chichester Festival Theatre)

Yesterday – having bought tickets on a relatively last-minute whim – my partner and I went to the Chichester Festival Theatre to see the 5.00pm performance of the touring pantomime Mother Goose, starring Sir Ian McKellen as Mother Goose and comedian John Bishop as his/her husband Vic Goose. The [...]

February 11, 2023 // 0 Comments

Sideways/Radio 4

Yesterday Matthew Syed presented a programme on the chess player Jonathan Nunn. He was something of a prodigy as a mathematician – he was the youngest person to gain admission to Oxford since Cardinal Wolsey. He switched to chess and, although excellent, he was never world grandmaster class. [...]

February 9, 2023 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard: a Spanish Day in London

Yesterday I went with Alice Mansfield to the Royal Academy to see the Spain and Hispanic World collection of Archer M Huntington, the son of a railroad magnate and avid collector around the turn of the twentieth century of Spanish paintings and artefacts. Alice considered Spanish art underrated [...]

February 6, 2023 // 0 Comments

The Other Side of the Hill

The title of the book is taken from the Duke of Wellington who always stressed the importance of knowing what your enemy is up to. The writer is the distinguished military historian and strategist Basil Liddell Hart, who advocated fast-moving armoured divisions striking quickly and deeply into the [...]

January 28, 2023 // 0 Comments

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