Christopher Shale

A leading Conservative Party figure has been found dead at the Glastonbury Festival, on the very day that this article appeared in the Mail on Sunday, based on documents he had written about the future direction of the party.

Medawar thinks that Mr Shale's final thoughts deserve to be taken proper notice of, and not buried under a thick blanket of warm words from his increasingly heedless former protegé.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nuns, monks, priests and believers: writing about spiritual matters in English historical fiction

Image
I once told a friend that it was impossible for me to write a novel without a nun or a priest in it. In my household this has become a bit of a joke; my husband likes to say, “Oh you wouldn’t like this book or movie! No one’s searching for God!” Well, sometimes it is true. I am myself a church mouse; I can hardly pass an old church or chapel in England without slipping inside. Oh the history! Sometimes a thousand years or more in one church. Women were praying for families seven hundred years ago in the very spot where you stand. Roughly I can put the nuns, priests and devout characters in novels in three categories: sleuth, spiritual seekers, and secondary characters who slip in and out of pages baptizing and burying (in the many periods of historical fiction, religion was a major part of one’s life.)   And of course the first two categories intermingle. There are so many such novels or series that I can mention only a few. The sleuth nuns in both THE CROWN by Nancy Bilyeau and th...
Read more

The Federal Reserve ADMITS that Its 12 Banks Are PRIVATE - Not Government - Entities

Much of the tens of trillions in bailout money and "easy" money from quantitative easing went to foreign banks (and see this , this and this ). Indeed, Ron Paul noted recently that one-third of all fed bailout loans - and essentially 100% of loans from the New York Fed - went to foreign banks. The New York Fed is the most important Fed bank. As Bloomberg pointed out in 2020: The New York Fed is one of 12 regional Federal Reserve banks and the one charged with monitoring capital markets. It is also managing $1.7 trillion [now up to at least $1.9 trillion] of emergency lending programs [and accepting collateral from the banks in return]. However, the country's most powerful "agency" - the Federal Reserve - is actually no more federal than Federal Express . The Fed itself admitted (via Bloomberg): While the Fed’s Washington-based Board of Governors is a federal agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act and other government rules, the New York...
Read more

Let's Go A' Barbering

Image
By Katherine Pym First, a little technical history: Back in the day, monks were barber-surgeons.  They took care of all men's needs, from spiritual to physical. They groomed men and performed surgery on them. It was a monopoly. But in 1163 at the Council of Tours, Pope Alexander III declared clergy getting their hands bloody was contrary to healing souls, and they were therefore banned from the practice. Enter the lay person where the profession of Barbery combined the services of grooming and doctoring.  Barbers let passersby know they'd leech or perform surgery by putting a bowl of blood in their windows, but in 1307 an Ordinance forbade that little advertisement. Accumulated blood must be privately taken to the River Thames and dumped into its waters. If not, barbers were fined 2 shillings by the sheriff. Not to be outdone, barbers continued to advertise with red rags in the window. The next year in 1308, the barber guild was formed. The first master of Barber's Company ...
Read more