Edmund Burke First of all, I don’t consider myself left or right wing. I consider myself of the left on some issues, of the right on others. But I do think this: right wing writers write better than their left wing counterparts. Or at least, they do when their writing is explicitly political (let’s leave the Romantics out of this)....

Let’s say you want to be a prostitute, or sleep with one. In theory, it’s a rational agreement between two adults which doesn’t harm anyone else, and so it’s not illegal to do either of these things. It is, however, illegal to loiter around on the street looking for a client, or to drive around looking for a lady of the night. This...

What was…The Ike and Mac Show? It is 1959, and President Eisenhower is on a tour of Europe. Things could be going better – Khrushchev has just become Premier of the Soviet Union, and Castro is kicking up a storm in Cuba. Meanwhile, Harold MacMillan has been the British Prime Minister for two years. He will have to fight his first...

What was…the Guinness Clock? It’s 1951, and the Festival of Britain is in full swing – sort of. There’s a suspicion that the whole thing is a bit of a white elephant, and it’s nine bloody shillings for a coffee. The display of British achievements in arts and science on the South Bank has been described as a ‘tonic for the...

Mary Ann Cotton has not passed into popular awareness in the way other female serial killers have. She retains notoriety around the county of Durham where she committed her crimes – one who says her name to a local will invariably hear the next lines of an old nursery rhyme by way of a reply: Mary Ann Cotton, She’s dead and...

Edmund Gurney 1 Thomas Raikes was the epitome of the high-flying man about Victorian London. An Old Etonian, he became a partner in his father’s merchant banking business at the start of the 19th Century. He was a renowned dandy, a member of the Carlton Club, Watier’s and White’s.  In the City, he was nicknamed ‘Apollo’,...