There’s a family legend that I was present when Aneurin (“Nye”) Bevan called the Tories “vermin”. I was three years old, on my father’s shoulders, and allegedly roared with anger. This incident was supposed to have taken place at the “Big Meeting” (aka the Durham Miners’ Gala) in 1950. Unfortunately, as so often with family […]
Author: Lincoln Allison
Grade Inflation
I was super cool about my degree result: I was away when it was announced and made no efforts to find out what had happened until about a week later when I had a party to attend in Oxford. This was partly adolescent bravado, but it was also a firm belief that intellectual life was […]
Professionals and Eccentrics
When you deliver a lecture course you want people to turn up and listen, particularly the people who are supposed to turn up. And at the end when your performance is evaluated you want them to say nice things, stressing that you delivered on aims and met the needs of those to whom you would […]
O Canada
During September 2019 we were in many places and that included Jerusalem at the start of the month and Ottawa at the end. It would have been difficult to avoid the thought that these were opposite cities. From the Mount of Olives you can look down and across at Old Jerusalem, its walls and surroundings. […]
A Note on North American Beer
Back in the day, which in this case means when we lived in America in the mid-seventies, beer in North America meant stuff like Budweiser and Coors or, north of the border, Labatt’s. It was refreshing enough, served cold when you were thirsty, but if you closed your eyes while drinking it was fairly difficult […]
Two and a Half Journeys: the A-team in 2019
Apart from snapping the odd passing couple who want to be photographed together I haven’t taken photographs since 2004, but there are two much appreciated souvenir photos in my study. The one printed out shows the four Leamington granddaughters on the top of Pendle Hill. Sylvie, the youngest, is standing on the trig point, arms […]
Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich
The Tourist’s Third Reich Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich, The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People, Elliott and Thompson, 2017, pp. 456. Despite a misleading title and sub-title, Julia Boyd’s book is actually about travellers in Germany in the entire period 1918-45 and is, of course, about the rise of […]
Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness
Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: a Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy, OUP, 2019 (hardback 2016), pp. xi + 252. As a young adult my principal activities were the learning and teaching of political philosophy. The subject had been prominently declared “dead”, but was able to continue in the forms of biography and autopsy. […]
Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece
Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece, What Everyone Needs to Know, OUP, 2015, pp. 242 You can’t really trust an historian who tells you (p.66) that Lloyd George was prime minister of the UK in 1913, but this is not history as such, but an historical essay aimed at understanding Greece’s economic and political traumas in […]
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Vintage Books, 2003, pp. 272. So, at last, on a library exit-grab, I read the book that everybody was reading in 2004. Curious is about an idiot-savant boy living in Swindon. (The author later said that his character, Christopher Boone, could be said to […]