Monthly Archives: May 2012


By 1892, William Ewart Gladstone was the Grand Old Man of Liberal politics, about to embark on his fourth term of office as Prime Minister at the age of 82. His three previous premierships had followed four spells as Chancellor of the Exchequer and a period as President of the Board of Trade. He was leader of the Liberal Party for 24 years, between 1865 and […]

Gladstone and slavery – the liberal lie?


Stephen Irvine, 17 May 2012 To explain my recent absence, dear readers, I ask you to look back almost 200 years to the epic journey undertaken by Captain George Pollard of the doomed whaleship Essex, as I too found myself clinging on to sanity in the face of unimaginable despair this week; the slow procession of time showing no mercy as the end of everything neared. […]

We Are Experiencing Turbulence



The city of Chelyabinsk is situated to the south-east of the Urals, close to Kazakhstan and serves as a gateway to Russia’s vast Asian expanses. It lies on the Trans-Siberian Railway and is one of a string of railway towns that grew to service this immense trans-continental corridor. It was this geographic location that ensured Chelyabinsk would grow to become a town of 45,000 by 1913. […]

Tankograd – Chelyabinsk and the salvation of the Soviet Union


It is a vast structure, larger than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, wider than Rome’s Parthenon and bigger than the dome of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. It is Britain’s biggest unsupported dome and was, for over two decades, the world’s biggest such structure. This nineteenth century wonder was built to create a roof over the middle of an eighteenth century octagonal building. So […]

The Derbyshire Dome – horses to hospital to hospitality



Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 2 May – 8 May 2012  James ‘Jim’ Callaghan is the only person to have served in all four of the Great Offices of State – Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Yes, Prime Minister – don’t give me any First Lord of the Treasury nonsense – the  Ministers of the Crown Act 1937 gives unequivocal legal recognition to […]


What springs to mind if you think of the phrase ‘white elephant’? Monuments to a politician’s hubris? The Millennium Dome? Unused and unloved Olympic venues around the world? Few people in England would associate this idiom directly with Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant, or imagine its roots in the royal courts of Burma and Siam. The Oxford English Dictionary hints at the two meanings for white […]

White elephants and the King of Siam



The headlines in the UK press following local elections made grim reading for the Coalition leaders. The Guardian lead with “Election drubbing piles pressure on Cameron” and The Times stated that “Labour thrive on bad day for Tories”. The I on Saturday condemned the entire political class with the headline “Britain’s vote of no confidence”. It certainly wasn’t a good night for the Conservatives or Liberal […]

Mid-term blues, reds and yellows


It is an iconic image symbolising the continuity, stability and tradition at the heart of Brtiain’s monarchy. The photograph depicts three Queens in mourning at the Windsor Castle funeral of George VI, the King-Emperor who had died nine days earlier on 6 February 1952. But this is not a collection of foreign royals assembling to pay their respects to the British monarch. This is a unique […]

Three Queens of England united in grief