Why should somebody like me, who does not own a dog, who has never owned a dog, be interested in a book with the cover tagline “a must read for all dog lovers”? Predisposed to dismiss it as uninteresting reading, I took a dip inside and quickly concluded that the tagline does the book a… Continue reading
Glasgow’s Grand Central recalls great days of station hotels
I have experienced several spirit-sapping, early morning departures from UK airports (mainly Luton) recently. This makes me wonder, and not for the first time, whether flying (early, it is always early) with budget airlines was worth the effort. On one occasion, at Luton, we had to leave the car we were travelling in well short… Continue reading →
How good food became Northern Ireland’s big selling point
Wine and Brine, a small restaurant in Northern Ireland, was named as local restaurant of the year in the Waitrose Good Food Guide 2017. Another culinary coup for the province in 2016, which is Northern Ireland Year of Food and Drink. —- I was delighted to see Wine and Brine in the small Northern Irish town of Moira… Continue reading →
Stopped at signals – the trains in The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins has just published her second novel Into the Water. It will certainly be made into a film, as was her debut thriller The Girl on the Train, which sold 20m worldwide. The movie of that book starred Emily Blunt as the dysfunctional protagonist. My article below, posted in October 2016, explores the way the writer used… Continue reading →
Scoop – how Welsh journalist Gareth Jones shared a flight with Hitler
The great Welsh journalist Gareth Jones was murdered one day short of his 30th birthday in China on August 12th, 1935. My monograph – click here – briefly outlines his life and describes a flight he took with the electioneering Hitler in 1933. It’s free to download on multiple platforms. —————————————————————————————————- “I was there” The following words… Continue reading →
Could perovskite power the next generation of renewable energy?
Perovskite. It took from the early 1960s until just a few years ago for the conventional solar panel to get about as far as is going to go with current technology, where panels, made up of silicon-based solar cells, can turn 20-22% of the energy in sunlight into electricity. So that’s about 50 years. Scientists… Continue reading →