Category: News

The counter-offensive

There’s been a fair bit of criticism lately of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and its failure to make rapid progress. Western allies are now making noises about withholding support unless they see some progress. With some justification the Ukrainian government has responded by saying every “square centimetre of Ukrainian soil has to be retaken with blood”. […]

War in Europe again

Unbelievably, 76 years after the Nazis were forced out of Ukraine by the Russian army, the Russian army is back once more, this time as the aggressor rather than the liberator. Back in 1944 some (non-Jewish) Ukrainians may have wondered whether being liberated by the Russians was an improvement on occupation by the Nazis, recalling […]

D-Day, 75 years on

It’s been a while between drinks on this site, my apologies, I’ve been busy getting a new company off the ground. The 6th of June always resonates for me because it’s the day of the biggest seaborne invasion in history and the start of the liberation of France from the Nazis. By June 1944 the […]

Would you like nukes with that?

When I was a teenager I was strangely obsessed with the possibility of nuclear war. Whether it was that we were all going to die in a nuclear conflagration, wither away from radiation poisoning, or starve to death in a nuclear winter, I was convinced it was going to happen. I would talk about it […]

It’s only taken four years…

…but I’m about to publish the sequel to Blood and Blitzkrieg. It’s called ‘Butcher and Bolt’, which was the instruction Winston Churchill gave to the Commandos, an elite unit set up specifically to harass the Germans along the coast of all the Occupied Territories. In the meantime, I’ve decided to make my books free, so […]

Remembering Pearl Harbour

Last Sunday was Pearl Harbour Day, a day my late father always remembered and pointed out to me each year, as it was a day of massive significance to him and to Australia. Before 7 December 1941, the Japanese had been rampaging through China for years, and immediately after that day, they charged through South-East […]

The horror of the RFP

Today I finished that most dreaded of writing projects: a response to a Request for Proposal (RFP) or ‘tender’ as it’s more commonly known. I was invited to participate in this by an old colleague who is now working in Marketing in the Australian arm of a large multinational technology company. They got me in […]

100 words

A very good customer of mine recently asked me to write “exactly 100 words” to present their products in a conference workbook … by tomorrow. I duly dropped everything and did this, agonising over the sentence structure, cutting adjectives, checking the word count, then sent it off, a masterpiece! Only then to be told “Oh, […]

Decline and Fall

I’ve recently been listening on Audible to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the greatest works of history ever written. It’s great for a number for reasons, not least its size: I seem to have been listening for an eternity but I’m still only in part three of five and […]

How to grow a novel

I’ve been reading a superb book by Sol Stein called “How to grow a novel”. Mr Stein is a hugely-successful US publisher and author, and this book is a distillation of what he has said to his writers over his career. It’s a practical, useful guide to writing, that shows you all the most common […]