After a career as a documentary-maker with ITV, Graham Hurley now writes full time. Two of his Faraday and Winter novels were shortlisted for the Theakston Crime Prize, while the launch title for his WW2 series – Finisterre – was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing award. He lives with his wife, Lin, in East Devon. More at grahamhurley.co.uk.
The Royal Shambolica Express has finally hit the buffers, thanks to those gorgeous voters up in North Shropshire, and there remains only the traditional offer of the ‘last rights’ to the King of Bluster who is, even now, eyeing all that gold wallpaper and packing his bags. £890 a roll for a couple of months’ […]
The former French ambassador to the UK, Sylvie Bermann, went into print a couple of days ago to reflect on what remains of her country’s relationship with the Brits. When she left office in 2017, there was a measure of mutual trust and conversations were conducted in good faith. Since then, Boris Johnson has barged into […]
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad“. Sophocles did not, of course, have Boris Johnson in mind, but the dramatist’s line from Antigone has survived the passage of time, and two recent speeches – coupled with Johnson’s usual insouciance about the gathering storms that beset us all – suggest that Greek […]
Watching Priti Patel tossing chunks of glistening legislation to the rapt audience at the Tory Party Conference is to be powerfully reminded of feeding time at the zoo. The same Pavlovian flutter of audience hands at the applause lines; the same salivating eagerness for yet more blood, yet more political protein; the same smacking of […]
As the Conservative party conference ploughs on, welcome to the Kingdom of Shambolica: 137,000 deaths from Covid (official figures), but probably a great deal more blowing over £37 billion on a test-and-trace programme that never worked properly an NHS on its knees and menaced with yet more privatisation growing evidence of dodgy Russian donors to […]
Cape Canaveral, home of the Kennedy Space Centre, is in Florida. The Sunshine State has long been the favourite destination for hundreds of thousands of tourists, many of them British, in search of warmth, fabulous beaches, and the many excitements of Disneyworld. More recently, along with neighbouring Alabama and Louisiana, it has also become ground […]
The role of leader of the opposition can be a curse, as well as an opportunity, and just now – as Johnson completes his second drive-by reshuffle – must be the perfect moment for Sir Keir Starmer to pause and take stock. The worst government in living memory is beset by crisis after crisis, and […]
The TV pictures from Kabul last weekend were apocalyptic: thousands of desperate Afghans converging on the airport, families and a handful of belongings crammed into their cars. Already refugees in the face of the breaking wave of Taliban at the city’s gates, many of them chose to spend the night parked up around the airport […]
Gleichschaltung is one of history’s most sinister euphemisms. The word is German and it means ‘co-ordination’. Hitler and other architects of the Third Reich used it to build a totalitarian state that purged Germany of all opposition. From 1933 onwards, das Volk, the people, were urged to march in perfect formation towards a future that […]