Just in

Life

Worrell/Simon Lister

This biography serves as an illuminating follow up to Who Only Cricket Knows.   Frank Worrell was the first black cricketer to captain the West Indies for a full series. A member of the three Ws triumvirate Caribbean; Clyde Walcott, who like Worrell went to Combermere school, and Everton Weekes [...]

August 10, 2024 // 0 Comments

Fascist lack of UK leadership

My late father was a keen observer of politics and life. Though I never knew him to read a newspaper he was always remarkably well informed. I had many interesting and informative conversations with him about growing up in Hackney in the 1930s. I asked him about the Fascist Marches. He replied that [...]

August 9, 2024 // 0 Comments

Great British failures

The failure to win gold by Team GB’s Matthew Hudson Smith was the 3rd such one after Adam Peaty and Josh Kerr. You would not have guessed it from the soft post-event interview – and now Peaty is blaming the food. He is pathetic. Footballers are overpaid but they have to put up with much [...]

August 8, 2024 // 0 Comments

Pride of Price?

Last weekend was Pride weekend which attracted 300,000 visitors to Brighton but is not universally accepted as A Good Thing by us residents. It’s impossible to cross Brighton because of road closures. The celebrants leave litter and worse, then some clog up the A & E dept as the cavorting [...]

August 7, 2024 // 0 Comments

buzzwords

The problem with buzzwords is they go out of fashion so quickly. Once “uptight” was the ‘in  word” for tense, but nowadays people are “stressed”. The currently fashionable buzzwords are “100% ” (“quite right”);  “you guys”‘ [...]

August 6, 2024 // 0 Comments

Praise given where due

A common theme in the Rust and elsewhere is the difficulty and frustrations for the elderly  in coping with the demands of the digital age. Thus, when I noted that my passport would expire at the end of 2024, I was naturally anxious that (1) it might take ages to be processed; and (2) I might [...]

August 5, 2024 // 0 Comments

The Olympics assessed

We are now more than a week beyond the opening ceremony ruined by rain which set the tone for an Olympiad not living up to expectation. Scarcely a day goes by without some scandalous happening – the latest being the barring of running Goddess Sha’carri Richardson to the stadium for the [...]

August 4, 2024 // 0 Comments

Tristan and Isolde/Glyndebourne

Yesterday I returned to Glyndebourne for the second time in a week for their production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.  They are arguably the most famous lovers in opera, that is, if we regard Romeo and Juliet as less the opera of Gounod and more the theatre of William Shakespeare. So [...]

August 3, 2024 // 0 Comments

Art appropriation

Looting of artworks existed long before the current cultural appropriation movement. Napoleon was probably the biggest looter in history. Still under 30 when he conquered Italy, he never actually occupied Venice but one of  of his art commissars drew up an inventory of art works to hand  over [...]

August 1, 2024 // 0 Comments

Who Only Cricket Knows/David Woodhouse

This is a book prize-winning account of the 1953-1954 tour to the Caribbean led by Len Hutton and managed by Charles Palmer. The title is an adaptation from Rudyard Kipling by the Marxist writer C.R James which reflected one of the tensions of the tour – nascent Caribbean nationalism – [...]

July 31, 2024 // 0 Comments

1 19 20 21 22 23 342