What is it about trees that make them targets for attack? For many years, some of our fellow humans can’t see a tree without wanting to chop it down. In 2023, the iconic Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall in northern England was vandalised using a chainsaw. The two men involved in this mindless act were…
I’m sitting here on a lazy afternoon re-watching the 1974 classic disaster movie The Towering Inferno for the umpteenth time. A star studded cast, including Faye Dunaway, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and Fred Astaire, struggle to escape from the mother of all skyscraper fires. But how many towering infernos have there been in reality? As…
On 15 April, 1912, the biggest ever ocean liner, the Titanic, set sail from Southampton, bound for New York with 2,240 passengers and crew. In the mid-Atlantic, it struck an iceberg and sank with the loss of 1,500 lives. This still ranks as one of the worst maritime tragedies in history. But let’s look at…
It’s the year 1936. A king who is about to be crowned abdicates. Officially it’s because he’s having a steamy affair with an American divorcee that scandalises the British establishment. Unofficially it’s widely known in elite circles that this American and the new king have Nazi sympathies. When he does relinquish the throne, British fascists…
In today’s toxic political climate, intersex and non-binary people have been weaponised in a cynical so-called “culture war” over gender. Non-binary is dismissed as a new-fangled concept dreamed up in university ivory towers. But browse through 18th century newspapers and court records, and stories about “hermaphrodites” leap off the pages. Complex sexual identities are as…
London has seen an outbreak of measles in schools impacting children who have not been fully immunised. This is astonishing given that the measles vaccination has been with us since 1963, consigning to history the epidemics that used to sweept the city every other year, resulting in over half a million cases. Small children were…
There’s a lot of discussion these days about big age gaps in relationships and whether they matter. Some studies indicate that there’s more social disapproval of an age difference than the sexuality or ethnicity of the couple. Social anxiety over this issue isn’t new and the debate has raged for a very long time, polarising…
Why are we still teaching the works of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in schools? This monster joined the eugenics movement in the early 20th century advocating – in no uncertain terms – the mass killing in “lethal chambers” of people who were not useful to society. Not surprisingly, he then became a cheerleader…
Thousands of LGBT people were killed by the Nazis in concentrations camps between 1933 and 1945 – the duration of Adolf Hitler’s grip on power in Germany. However, the demonising of German gays in the 1930s came just as much from the political Left as the Nazis. Depressingly, Socialists and Communists used homosexuality as a…
I’ve been travelling around Europe this year and seen some beautiful images in churches, abbeys, and convents depicting the early family life of Jesus Christ. From the Canary Islands to Prague, here is a selection of medieval statues and paintings showing the nativity and other key events in the infancy of the Messiah. A visual…