Flash Fiction: Hiraeth

 A yearning Errol slammed the car door and hunche

Flash fiction: Strange Places

Strange places. High places.

Attlee, Bevin and the New Jerusalem

The next UK government will inherit a mess, but n

A sideways journey

A little flash fiction… “We’ll go to Nidden

Displaced

A short story Grandpa’s 90.

Another short story

The theme for the writing group this time was &#8

A short story

I haven’t posted fiction on this blog; I ha

Original crime

Detective fiction is not dead.

Crime on the side

Crime writing is fun, but don’t give up the day job… A look at two vintage detective…

On change, war and the passage of time

A change in my life has made me aware of time passing, of one’s former world…

On the Rim of the Sea

 Enjoy the sea view. Don’t fall in At the end of 2012 I started this blog.…

The Red Wall: How Labour lost its safest seats

Britain’s Labour Party lost many of its “safe” seats in 2019. Can it get them back?…

The butler did it!

The butler did it! …Or did he? A trip back into the Golden Age of crime…

If not us, who? If not now, when?

German resistance to the Nazis was not that effective. But it was perhaps more widespread than…

Love in the time of Brexit

The 2016 Brexit referendum divided Britain along class lines. Why? Two novels on Brexit, class and…

The Polish Anne Frank

There will be few more memoirs of the Holocaust from the living. But there may yet…

The first book on the pandemic is here already

Before long we’ll have a tsunami of books about COVID-19. No surprise, perhaps, that Slavoj Žižek…

America by Meteor

For a year of my childhood, a huge 1966 Meteor sedan was my window on a…

Two fine new novels inspired by climate change

Climate change and the zeitgeist. Two stories of our time Who is John Truthing? A charismatic…

Travelling to the war

Travel writing is mostly seen as a distinct genre. But travel, war and history can come…

Doctor in Jail

Two recent books give a vivid insight into  what goes on in prison. It isn’t pretty  It’s…

The endgame in the age of stupid

Could our society collapse? Yes, and I think I know how Consider this as the plot…

The water jump

A hundred years ago today, a large biplane lumbered into the air at St John’s, Newfoundland.…

Why nations fail

In 2012 two economists claimed they knew why countries succeeded or failed. They didn’t. But they…

A coup, and a departure

Sudanese dictator Omar el-Bashir has fallen. I was in Sudan when he staged his own coup.…