Category Archives: Uncategorized

My work on the late Victorian origins of the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch (The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987) obviously familiarised me with the ‘Whitechapel Murders’, but not to any great depth, as ‘Jack the Ripper’ was the … Continue reading →

Another long silence from me. Sorry. Medical again. I think the Creator was distracted when s/he designed the prostate. (It must have been a She, I think. Women don’t have them. And it probably serves us males right.) In the … Continue reading →

I once – or it may have been twice – wrote to Eton College to ask about its History syllabus: mainly in order to find out what may have lain behind the version of British history presented in the Old … Continue reading →

We went to a jazz performance the other evening in a pub back garden in Lidköping (Sweden). ‘Trad’, and pretty good. Also well attended – a couple of hundred at least. But …. nearly all of us, musicians and audience, … Continue reading →

Dickens’s Gradgrind would surely have approved of Rishi Sunak. And of the less familiar Orcadian Samuel Laing the Elder, whom I discovered and then wrote about in the historical journal Albion, thirty years ago. (The essay is recycled in my … Continue reading →

Sorry for the further delay. My medical problem is still holding me up. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is! Slightly embarrassing.) But I should be able to resume blogging soon. In the meantime I wonder how … Continue reading →

If he had not been so controversially dismissed on Sunday, Johnny Bairstow might possibly have won the match for England. He would probably have had the necessary 42 runs in him, which the tail-enders didn’t. But that isn’t the important … Continue reading →

I don’t believe that all those who voted for Brexit were racists; or – to put it differently, because I have no evidence for this – I don’t want to believe that they were racists. There were, and are, better … Continue reading →

It was John Stuart Mill who is supposed to have first called the Tories ‘the stupid party’; a reputation they seem to be intent on living up (or down) to today. This is not a partisan point, or intended to … Continue reading →

No-one comes out of this incident well. The Iraqi immigrant who burned the book outside a Stockholm mosque most obviously – the burning of books has a poor historical reputation in Europe. But also the crowds of Muslims who demonstrated … Continue reading →