The Mirror Crack'd

BBC1 opened its autumn season (in August - go figure) with an historical drama about events leading up to the Battle of Hastings, featuring as much embroidery as the Bayeux Tapestry. It's always frustrated me, as a bit of a history buff, when such dramatisations depart radically from the truth - or as near the truth as one is ever likely to come with history, axiomatically, being written by the victors. With historical events as exciting and improbable as these, why gild the lily? Truth is usually stranger than fiction so if it isn't already dramatic enough for your tastes, make Game of Thrones instead. Admittedly,  King & Conqueror, the BBC television offering in question, has a lot of ground to cover and a lot of characters to work with - or gloss over, if not excise entirely. The storyline is also pretty convoluted so elision and omission is the order of the day if the plot is not to become bogged down in tedious explication. Some artistic licence must be granted the scr...

Putin and Trump - or Tart and Fart as I refer to this shameless pair of scoundrels - have had their summit or, as we say in Yorkshire, summat and nowt.   Former KGB agent meets former estate agent - who would you sooner trust? Yes, the respective Presidents of the Russian Federation and the United States of America have met - this time in Anchorage, Alaska, on a flying visit (two shits that pass in the night one might say) - and once again Putin has played Trump like a fiddle. Initially, Trump seemed to be of the opinion that Alaska was in Russia, when even a cursory glance at a map shows it to be a US state. (Given how keen he seems to claim Canada, Greenland, Panama etc you'd think he'd know the fifty he's already got.) True, Alaska was once Russian but that was before 1867, when it was bought from Tsar Alexander II by President Andrew Jackson. This was hardly an auspicious start. Imagine Trump's withering scorn had that rudimentary mistake (or misspeak) been made by ...

The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, assures us she proscribed Palestine Action based on reliable intelligence that the organisation was planning acts of violence. I am not reassured. After Saturday's debacle in Parliament Square in Westminster, where the Metropolitan Police spent hours arresting 522 peaceful protesters, many of them pensioners sitting on the grass holding placards supporting Palestine Action, she needs to come clean. Precisely what advice did she receive? When trust in the government is at an all-time low she surely cannot expect us to believe this on her say-so alone. The cost of Saturday's policing, not just in the Square itself but of the march through London that accompanied it, must have been astronomical, with police reinforcements drafted in from as far away as Wales. Then there's the cost of processing all the arrestees, charging and trying them (if it comes to that) and then, if found guilty under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, imprisoning them fo...

I don't know where Yvette Cooper was today but she certainly wasn't in Parliament Square to witness the inevitable consequences of her proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. While her Cabinet colleague, David Lammy, enjoys his bromance with JD Vance at his grand 18th century country residence of Chevening House in Kent, Cooper will have to make her own summer arrangements. Wherever these may be I hope she can live with her conscience as she relaxes in her garden hammock. Actually, I hope she can't. Had she seen what I saw today as an observer in the Square, I wonder if she would have been as unrepentant as her recent statements suggest? Almost certainly. She claims to have received intelligence suggesting that Palestine Action is planning violent action. That may be correct and we await to hear precisely what that information is but until she makes it public we will have to take it on trust that her proscription was justified - and few of us, I suspec...

The following extract is the opening of a novella, 'The Summer of Liberation', begun in 2005, completed after a research trip to Rennes in 2011 and subsequently abandoned. To mark the anniversary of the liberation of Rennes on 4 August 1944 I am considering rework ing it into the short story format I originally envisaged: Sunday 30 July 1944 He steadied his bicycle at the brow of the hill as he prepared to launch himself down the steep slope with his usual reckless abandon. This hazardous ride had become a Sunday morning ritual over the past couple of years since the death of his mother, replacing attendance at Mass. Unlike the dreary church service it always induced in him a heady sense of liberation, a precious commodity in these troubled times. The heavy old bike had brakes in name only and, after long and sometimes painful experience, he had learned to apply a wooden-soled galoche to the rough surface of the lane at strategic points on his descent in order to avoid collisio...