The land in which I grew up was mostly famous for its witches, but there was also an ogre. He was fierce and cruel yet he was able to give the people magnificent gifts because he had absolute power over the thing most people cared about. This was Bob Lord, chairman of Burnley Football Club […]
Author: Lincoln Allison
The True Meaning of Alastair Campbell
About thirty years ago my wife and I attended a wedding at the House of Commons. At the drinks between the ceremony and the reception proper the two of us were talking to a young journalist. We asked him exactly what his job was and he said he was the political editor of the Daily […]
Expat Storm
It would be normal to think of the Scots as the second biggest nation in the British Isles with a population a little under five and a half million. But there is arguably a bigger tribe with a population over five and a half million, which is British expats. Expatriates are people with a country’s […]
In Which America Goes Crazy
So this is me doing what I am sworn not to do. That is, write briefly about the contemporary events that everyone else is writing about and for no money. It’s almost like tweeting – but not quite. On January 6th 2021 a bunch of hooligans as we would call them became the first people […]
A BBC Sports Channel?
Five old men meet in a park during lockdown. Within a minute and from a stimulus that nobody remembers we are quoting the holy texts: “The bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey.” (Brian Johnston) “And for those of you watching in black and white the pink is next to the green.” (“Whispering” Ted Lowe) “Oh. I […]
Life with the Blind
One night in late 1964 I assisted at a bizarre ritual which involved three blind men climbing up a drainpipe. It led them to the easily opened window of the Junior Common Room in Queen’s College, Oxford. I had been drinking with them because they were school friends, from Worcester Royal College for the Blind, […]
The Golden Age of London, 1980-2020?
It’s a commonplace observation, revealed in numerous interviews and heartfelt observations expressed online, that a pandemic takes away the benefits and increases the costs and dangers of living in a city. According to surveys conducted for the London Assembly Housing Committee in August 2020 14% of the population of London wants to move out and […]
Sport and Liberty
This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England 1760-1960 by Robert Colls, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 391, £25.00. This Sporting Life begins with Minna Burnaby, an American lady married to a Leicestershire landowner. Her diary tells us that in the 1909-10 season she rode to hounds on 108 occasions, falling ten times. In the […]
The Professorial Class
My involvement in universities goes back well over half a century and I think it’s safe to say that the changes in universities during that time vastly exceed those in the half century before that. They have increased enormously in scale, shifted to much more vocational emphases, are much more international in nature and are […]
How Much Work should You Do?
In 1971 the National Board for Prices and Incomes felt itself obliged to research how much work university employees did. Lord Redcliffe-Maud, the Master of University College, Oxford, but also the person most associated with the reform of local government as he had chaired the recent Royal Commission on the subject, offered a simple piece […]