Authors Electric

  Photo to accompany Lionesses' letter to the  candidates for PM, asking for better opportunities   for girls football The football Lionesses who caught our hearts as well as winning the European Cup were clear that they were a fortunate generation, building on the stubbornness of those who’d gone before. Interviewees referred to the players of the c20th who’d given their own money and time, as well as their hearts and skills, to the game they loved.  Not everyone was prepared to gloss over past rejections. The clubs who’d refused to host their games because ‘no one’s interested in women’s football,’ weren’t going to be forgiven and forgotten, as the team packed Wembley Stadium with a record 87,192 attendance and won the first major competition for England since 1966. Former player turned presenter, Alex Scott, said, ‘Let’s just remind ourselves as well, back in 2018, we were begging people to host in their stadiums a women’s game for this Euros. So many people ...

This week began on Monday (as they  so often do). Private Eye magazine was almost ready to go to press and Francis, who was in charge, was privately congratulating himself that everyone was likely to get away for home in good time. Then in came the Metropolitan Police, clearing the building. An unexploded WW2 bomb had been discovered in neighbouring Dean Street and the Soho area of London was being evacuated.  The Private Eye office is in Carlisle Street, one of those hit on ‘the longest night’ – that raid May 10 th -11 th 1941 when 550 bombers, dropped 700 tonnes of high explosive on the city, killing 1500 civilians and taking the death toll since September 1940 over 43,000    ‘The explosion tore through the western end of Carlisle Street, damaged Richmond Buildings – two streets south – and blocked off Dean Street. The heavy blast also completely demolished Carlisle House, an elegant eighteenth century city mansion, home to the British Board of Film Censors ...

On September 3 rd 2019 I had the perfect invitation – I was asked to talk about my father, George Jones’s book, The Cruise of Naromis , to members of the Little Ship Club in London. The Cruise of Naromis , you may remember, is the slim volume I was able to make from my father’s 1939 diary, a suitcase of somewhat random photographs and papers from his wartime RNVR service and the account he wrote of his trip to the Baltic in August 1939. He had returned home on Sept 2 nd to find that his call up papers had been waiting for a week. On September 3 rd 1939 therefore he was hurrying north to join the submarine depot ship HMS Forth at Rosyth. The Forth was a floating workshop, a hotel, an operational centre. She had a crew of over 1,100 men, displacement 8,999 tons and was armed with 16 AA guns. Quite a contrast with the trim little pleasure yacht he had just left .   HMS Forth  Both vessels had been launched during 1938 but whereas HMS Forth had been built by ...

"I wish, I wish ...." Peter Duck 2014 If I had One Wish and wasn't allowed to use for anything altruistic (eradicating poverty & inequality, enforcing world peace etc) I think I would wish to learn how to write short stories. I've never wanted this before. I'm a very quick and gulpy reader, too impatient (in the past) to savour the subtle pleasures of a good short story. These are the stories that force you to close the book, turn off the e-reader and let them linger in your mind. I've always been over-eager to race on, read more.  Occasionally binge-reading works even for short stories. As a child I read obsessively   MauriceGriffiths 's Ten Small Yachts, his 1933 follow-up to his masterpiece, The Magic of the Swatchways (1932) I read that book too but without the same compulsion. Ten Small Yachts  told me story after story (they were true) of MG's relationships with his successive boats. I would end one story satisfied, momentarily, th...