There have been many false alarms that could have led to nuclear retaliation. A chance of large-scale disarmament was missed in the mid-1990s, when US-Russia relations were good. Former US Defence Secretary William J Perry thinks nuclear catastrophe is likelier…
Monthly Archives: March 2017
Inspirations: Living in a nuclear-armed world
Tagged with: Analysis, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Apocalypse, Atom bomb, Atom Man, BBC, Boris Yeltsin, Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, George W Bush, Gold code, History, How Do you Launch a Nuclear Missile?, ICBM, Igor Sutyagin, Inquiry, Mutually assured destruction, NATO, Nuclear football, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear winter, Radio 4, Ruth Alexander, SLBM, SSBN, Strategic Defence Initiative, Terrorism, Tong Zhao, Vanguard class, Vladimir Putin, William J Perry, World Service
Posted in Inspirations, Wednesday Pontification
Posted in Inspirations, Wednesday Pontification
Coldwater Cottage – 2: The Dive
Previous instalments: 1 “You know what to do when I come up?” “If you do nothing, I do nothing. If you wave, I turn the clutch,” she fingered the lever on the outboard, “and drive over to you.” Ian heard…
Tagged with: Coldwater Cottage, fantasy, horror, short story, Urban fantasy
Posted in Coldwater Cottage, Uncategorized
Posted in Coldwater Cottage, Uncategorized
Bertha’s Handbag
“You can have the chocolate when we get home, Sam,” said Bertha. “You promised to be good and I promised you the chocolate if you were. But until we get home, I can’t tell if you were good the whole…
Coldwater Cottage – 1: The Surface
Welcome to the promised new serialisation from the Eclectics, which will post at the same time every Monday for the next few weeks. I have fond memories of outlining Coldwater Cottage in a bar in Dahab, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula,…
Tagged with: Coldwater Cottage, fantasy, horror, short story, Urban fantasy
Posted in Coldwater Cottage, Uncategorized
Posted in Coldwater Cottage, Uncategorized
The Magnet’s Pupils
I swear, we only wanted a coffee until Phil set eyes on the barista. He walked into the place, took one look at her, then grabbed Andy and I and bundled us outside. “What d’you think?” “Huh?” Andy wasn’t the…
The pontifications go irregular
On the high note of the squabble over the morality of coffee in Restoration-era England, I now declare that I will no longer be pontificating to a weekly schedule. They’re a lot of fun to research and write, but…
Posted in Notification, Wednesday Pontification
Inspirations: The gendered war on coffee
In 1674, a ‘women’s petition’ denounced the craze for coffee in England. It claimed that it lured Englishmen away from ale and rendered them impotent and effeminate. The men’s response declared that Englishmen were so virile that they all had…
The Scent of Sea and Nectar
It came back to me last week, when I was wheeling my chair between crocuses and daffodils. They’re hardly unusual flowers. They come out every spring. This spring, I happened to be visiting our grandchildren and I could hear waves…
The Casual Conjurings of Perchance to Dream
What would happen if a Second World War Spitfire pilot found himself in the ancient Greek underworld? That was the starting point for Perchance to Dream, which became my first published short story. That was longer ago than I care…
Non-fiction Review: The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carré
I discovered John Le Carré in Bangkok’s Chatuchak Market. I picked out a battered paperback Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from a tiny used book stall. It looked as though it had been round Southeast Asia in a few backpacks, but…
Tagged with: Autobiography, George Smiley, History, John Le Carré, Karla trilogy, Memoir, MI6, Nicholas Elliott, The Pigeon Tunnel
Posted in Book review: non-fiction, Wednesday Pontification
Posted in Book review: non-fiction, Wednesday Pontification
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Cockburn's Eclectics 