Neil Datson
The Good Soldier Svejk:a hero for troubled times?
As we in Britain – and it seems more or less everywhere in the ‘free’ world – are finding our civil rights under attack by increasingly...
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Neil Datson
Sep 914 min read
Dividing the National tribe
Sir Keir Starmer in the Downing Street rose garden, 27 August 2024 As Rousseau didn’t put it: ‘Man is born in the wild and everywhere he...
Neil Datson
Feb 2115 min read
Turner, Thackeray and the Guardians of morality
The Slave Ship . J M W Turner. Readers who have seen Mike Leigh’s film Mr Turner may recall a scene in which the artist meets an old...
Neil Datson
Feb 511 min read
Let them fly logs!
The aeronautical battering ram Royal Air Force Quarterly, April 1937 Through the 1930s there was, within the pages of the Royal Air Force...
Neil Datson
Jan 303 min read
A Quick Update
A few weeks ago I published a short essay, framed as a critique of Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill, and titled The Johnson Factor:...
Neil Datson
Jan 410 min read
Boris Johnson: how one man failed history
Seeking to understand Boris Johnson’s behaviour in March 2020 I set about reading his biography of an earlier Prime Minister: The...
Neil Datson
Oct 23, 202322 min read
Getting it Right: Operation Albion
In the early dawn of 12 October 1917 the German dreadnought SMS Bayern opened fire on a submarine in the northern Baltic. Her target was...
Neil Datson
Sep 19, 20236 min read
13 June 1917
On 13 June 1917 seventeen German aircraft flew over London and dropped seventy-two bombs on the city.
Neil Datson
Aug 5, 20204 min read
Covid, and some thoughts on the news
How does the ordinary person, ‘the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus’ decide what to believe and what to distrust in the great flood of...
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