John Rambo and Odysseus are two war heroes trying to get back home. They are traumatised by the horrors they have witnessed on the battlefield and guilt-ridden by their failure to protect their fallen comrades.
On their long journey, they will have to fight off monsters and overcome numerous obstacles that threaten to derail their progress. And when they do finally return home, they find it much changed and unwelcoming. Continue reading
A chronology of the 14-year campaign to build a bypass around Bridge and confront the hazards on Kent’s “death highway” (1962-76)
In September 1802, four of the five Wordsworth siblings, Richard, William, Dorothy and John, gathered in London for a financial planning meeting. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that the inheritance from their late father, withheld by his employer Lord Lonsdale for two decades, had finally been agreed and would amount to the not inconsiderable sum of £10,388. 6s. 8d.
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Within the space of just over a year, two major buildings in the historic city of Canterbury have gone up in flames. Both structures dated from the interwar period and both had been abandoned for several years. One was a former department store, slated for redevelopment, the other, a cinema closed down during the Covid pandemic and never reopened.
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Decades of abuse scandals and patriarchal cover-ups have taken their toll on the Church of England. In an attempt at redress, on 28 January this year, the Right Reverend and Right Honourable Dame Sarah Mullally DBE was confirmed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury during a ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral.
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In January 2026, I gave a talk at the Bridge and District History Society on the country estate on the edge of the village that was one of the most important cricketing venues in England during the late 18th century, featuring the best players in the land in several landmark matches, before the establishment of Lords cricket ground in London in 1787.
At the request of those who missed it, here is a transcript and a few selected images from the presentation. I have added links to individual player profiles. Continue reading
During the last years of her life, my mother lived in a quiet retirement community on St. Radigund’s Street in Canterbury. She had been a high school history teacher who specialised in the Tudor era but I am not sure even she was aware of the fact that, six centuries ago, her street had been the site of an abortive uprising that would eventually lead to one of the most celebrated dynastic struggles in English history.
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My fifteenth birthday passed uneventfully with Wednesday morning classes as usual at my high school. At the same time, 12,000 kilometres to the south, several thousand students in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, about my age or younger, staged a march in protest at the government’s decision to make Afrikaans a medium of instruction in their schools. The introduction of “the language of the oppressor” was the final straw for students who had endured years of overcrowded, restrictive and repressive schooling. Their parents had failed to make a stand. They had no choice but to fight back.
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Sitting on a coffee table in the library of Belmont House, a graceful 18th century mansion nestled in the heart of the Kent countryside, is a bulky metallic souvenir, presented to the owner of the property, the fourth Lord Harris, in March 1904 by the employees of Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa, Ltd. in Johannesburg. The inscription thanks his lordship, who was company chairman at the time of his visit, for “the kindly interest displayed in their welfare.”
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Back when she was still publicly accessible, Ivanka Trump used to tell a story about her father’s reaction to seeing a homeless man sitting in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York during the 1990s:
“I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know, that guy has US$8 billion more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point.”