Authors Electric

60 Years Ago Today   Memory is notoriously selective. In 1963 in the UK it was the coldest winter anyone could remember and my father had died the previous year. Talking this over with my brother recently, he remembers fondly how we made a fabulous slide from frozen snow in the side passage of our house - and of course1963 was also the year that The Beatles released  Please, Please Me  and began to take over the musical world. As Annie Ernaux says in her memoir, The Years (2017) – ‘Just listening to them you wanted to be happy’.   The Beatles: I have this idea about the circular nature of time and how we are able to revisit ourselves as we get older. This happened again when I caught sight of an article in my Sunday paper, ‘Why lost Beatles school gig tape could be saved for the nation’. It was an article about how The Beatles had played a gig at Stowe School in April 1963 and it featured the story of how 15 year old John Bloomfield had made a tape recording of the s...

  Saucy Jack! Black Jack! Leather Apron! Oh no, no. One name alone does justice to your deathless razzmatazz. And nothing can do justice to the leap from your brief reign to world-wide Rippermania. It all started on four fog-swept nights... The Facts Scene: The impoverished areas in and around Whitechapel, London. Year: 1888. Five prostitutes--Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly--were murdered between 31 August and 9 November 1888. These women are the "canonical five", believed to have been murdered by a single killer. Three had had internal organs removed with surgical precision. And the fifth kill was the grisliest.  Why Black Magic Beats Mere Numbers Oh, Jack. You might have been only a footnote in the annals of serial killers. The competition today is tremendous: Luis Garavito.  Colombian child-murderer, torture-killer, and rapist known as ”La Bestia”. Confessed to killing 140 children over...