Month: January 2024

The Today Programme

”A diary is an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen.” (William Soutar, 1898 – 1943, Scottish poet diarist and epigrammatist)

Father and Son

Ambrosio Bernardo O’Higgins y O’Higgins, 1st Marquess of Osorno (1720 – 1801) was born on the eastern shore of Lough Arrow in Sligo.

The Duke of Cumberland

“The Titles Deprivation Act (1917) is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom which authorised enemies of the United Kingdom during the First World War to be deprived of their British peerages and royal titles.”(Wikipedia)

The D’Israeli Column

I hadn’t heard of Edward Buckton Lamb (1806 – 1869), a Victorian architect called “a Rogue Gothic Revivalist” criticised by his contemporaries but in the 20th century Pevsner called him “the most original though certainly not the most accomplished architect of his day”. I have now seen two of his works.

Moral Relativism

Hitherto I have not grasped the stinging nettle of anti-Semitism, indeed the word has only been used once here, in December 2019.

The Secret Annexe

A friend who read my anthology of diary entries in Advent and Epiphany recommends The Secret Annexe. The title references Anne Frank’s, The Secret Annex, a collection of fiction and non-fiction written while she was in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

From Rags to Riches

The OSCE has fifty-seven member States with more than a billion people in North America, Europe and Asia. In 1990, OSCE participating States pledged to hold free and fair elections (and to invite foreign observers to observe its elections).

Hughenden Revisited

28th May 1898; Queen Victoria attends William Gladstone’s State funeral in Westminster Abbey,

Daphne, John and Richard

Jack Thorne is an established playwright, television writer and screenwriter. He’s a name to look out for and as he’s only forty-five, something I wouldn’t have said fifty years ago; he has plenty more successes to look forward to.

Published
Categorised as Theatre