Why my Uncle Bill was Contemptible
When Germany invaded Belgium and France in August 1914, many people on both sides thought it was going to be something of a walk over. The Germans put two and a half million armed…
richard@richardmilton.co.uk
Who is the worst villain in fiction?
Who is the worst villain in fiction? There is no shortage of candidates from which to choose in this game that anyone can play. There are the most–wanted criminals, Professor…
Should Eliza Doolittle marry Professor Higgins?
George Bernard Shaw wrote his celebrated play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, in 1912. It opened in New York in March 1914 and London in April 1914, with Mrs Patrick…
The Wisdom of Crowds
Since the beginning of the “age of the common man” in the nineteenth century, there has been a widely held belief that, as Henry Thoreau put it, ‘The mass never comes up to…
What makes a novel good?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Elizabeth Bennett might have put it, that the novel is a story about people. No-one could disagree with this definition, but it is…
Why SOE gave away Britain’s top war secret to the Nazis
At a crucial stage of World War II, the Special Operations Executive deliberately allowed one of its most closely guarded top secrets to fall into Nazi hands – as part of a…
Remain v Leave: two awkward truths
My first awkward truth is one that both Remainers and Leavers can agree on, if they are honest with each other. It is that no-one really knows what will happen when the UK leaves…
How to tell bad companies
Some years back, I published a book titled Bad Company: Behind the corporate mask, which the Sunday Times was generous enough to nominate as its Business Book of the Week. The…
The myth of the Brexit “Cliff Edge”
Before the Brexit referendum we had Project Fear. We now have the myth of the Cliff Edge that British businesses are going to stumble over in March 2019 – causing us to beg the…
Why Freud is important to the future of science
Most of Freud’s ideas are considered rather old-fashioned today, but I suspect that, before we exiled the old boy so completely, we should have checked his luggage more…