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The Disunited Kingdom, June 2016

Here I shall be posting some of the better articles I’ve read on the ongoing British nightmare that David Cameron has bequeathed to us Brexit and our cultural identity. After the vote The historian Mary Beard reflects on whether Brexit

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Memories that will Kinder linger for ever …

[with apologies for the appalling title pun … :)] Last week, from 28 Sept – 1 Oct, I had an unusually rich four days in the hills with a reunion of Freda’s old University of East Anglia Mountaineering Club friends

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71st anniversary of the Battle of Arnhem, 2015

On this 71st anniversary of the Battle of Arnhem (17-26 September 1944), in which the 1st Airborne Division lost nearly three-quarters of its men, I have put up a new page on this web site featuring Peter Stainforth’s wartime drawings. Peter

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Failure to see the full picture

Surely the underlying problem with some (many? most?) politicians, like some (many? most?) notorious TV car programme presenters, is akin to tone deafness or colour blindness? Which is another way of saying they have an inability to see ‘the full

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Beethoven’s double resurrected from the dead

Exactly forty years ago, in my last year at the RCA Film School in London, I made a half-hour movie about Beethoven starring Tony Britton, called Out of the Labyrinth. It was never shown publicly and has lain in various

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An idyllic return to Harrison’s Rocks

On June 30, Chris Henshall, the master in charge of climbing at Tonbridge School, invited John and I down to their end of the year climbing meet at Harrison’s Rocks. (Along with Hugh Tassell and Grenville Byford, we had been

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On Style and Eloquence

Having touched on the question of style in my last blog about the elements of writing, I now want to consider it in greater detail. E.B. White, in the last chapter of The Elements of Style, turns to style in

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