Originally posted on Imperial & Global Forum:
Professor Richard Toye (University of Exeter) weighs in on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq for International Affairs and TRT World. Symposium: The Iraq war 20 years on Oula Kadhum, Louise Fawcett, Richard Toye, Aysegül Kibaroglu, and Ramazan Caner Sayan International Affairs 20 years on from…
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Tony Blair, the ‘Beeb’ & the ‘Blob’: The BBC & the Iraq War – Twenty Years Ago; Invasion & Insurgency, 2002-2005.
Originally posted on Andrew James:
The Business of Informing & Educating: John Simpson in his fortieth year of reporting for the BBC from war zones in 2006. In 2007, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, John Simpson wrote the following about the nature of the British Broadcasting Corporation, at a time of great controversy about its…
Orbán & Fidesz versus Soros, et. al: Whose Values? -The Continuing Confrontation.
Originally posted on Andrew James:
Extract from a Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 31st Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp, 23 July 2022, Tusnádfürdő [Băile Tuşnad]: We have managed to separate our big debate on the whole gender issue from the debate on EU money, and the two are now moving…
The ‘Other England’ of the Sixties: The Changing Faces of the West Midlands.
Originally posted on Andrew James:
The National Division – the ‘Two Englands’: In 1964, the well-known Guardian correspondent, Geoffrey Moorhouse (pictured above), ‘ventured’ out of his metropolitan England, caught up in the cobweb of roads and rails around London, into the interior of England to see how the other three-quarters live. The Penguin Special he produced was the first of its…
Windrush History – The Singing Stewarts, Britain’s First Gospel Group.
Originally posted on Andrew James:
The first black Gospel group to make an impact in Britain were ‘The Singing Stewarts’. They were originally from Trinidad and Aruba, where the five brothers and three sisters of the Stewart family were born. They migrated to Handsworth in Birmingham in 1961, part of the second major wave of Windrush migrants who came to…
Ukraine from Askold to Zelensky: Language, Culture, Art & Architecture, 862-2022.
“The British have not forgotten how the Nazis wiped out Coventry, … bombed forty-one times. They have not forgotten the Luftwaffe’s so-called ‘Moonlight Sonata’, in which the city was under contant air-raids for eleven hours. They have not forgotten how Coventry’s historic centre, how its factories, how St Michael’s Cathedral were destroyed. When they see the missiles hit Kharkiv and damage its historic centre, its factories and the Assumption Cathedral, they remember. … when they recall how Birmingham was bombed, and they see its sister city Zaporizhia under attack, they remember.”
Faith, Fantasy & Fairy Tales – Tolkien, ‘Jack’ Lewis & ‘The Inklings’, 1926-66: Part One – Creator & Sub-creators.
Entertaining Angels Unawares: When Tolkien returned to Oxford in 1925, an element was missing from his life. It had disappeared with the breaking of his fellowship of the TCBS at the Battle of the Somme, for not since those days had he enjoyed male friendship to the extent of emotional and intellectual commitment. He hadContinue reading “Faith, Fantasy & Fairy Tales – Tolkien, ‘Jack’ Lewis & ‘The Inklings’, 1926-66: Part One – Creator & Sub-creators.”
Britain, Europe and The World in 1937: A Moment in History Repeating itself? Part One
Originally posted on Andrew James:
Democracy and Dictatorship – 2022 & 1922-1937: The fall of the three great European empires at the end of the First World War – Austria, Germany and Russia – the chief centres of autocratic rule, seemed a happy augury for the future of democratic government. After the war, this was…
A Gentle Gulliver – Warwickshire Adventures & Sojourns
Originally posted on Andrew James:
Seymour and Vera Gulliver, in Leamington Spa in the 1970s. Photo by Arthur J Chandler Mooching with Seymour Henry: Forty years ago this summer (2022), my grandfather, Seymour Henry Gulliver, died aged eighty-two. He was born at the beginning of the twentieth century at Ufton-on-the-Hill, Warwickshire, the seventh child and…
Tolkien’s Shire: From Middle England to Middle-earth – People, Places & Past Times.
Sarehole as Hobbiton: J.R.R. Tolkien lived near Sarehole Mill as a child in what was then a Worcestershire village and is now part of the Hall Green district of Birmingham. Together with the neighbouring Moseley Bog, the Sarehole area inspired the Tolkien stories of Middle-earth. The Tolkien Trail – Late Victorian & Edwardian Birmingham. Birmingham’sContinue reading “Tolkien’s Shire: From Middle England to Middle-earth – People, Places & Past Times.”
Andrew James 