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Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2009, UK interest rates have fallen to an all-time low, averaging 0.5% and eroding the value of past savings, discouraging future savings and reducing the value of pension funds, Low interest rates remain part of the government’s package of monetary measures designed to boost manufacturing investment, consumer […]

Since the 1960’s Europe has feared inflation, rather than its opposite – deflation. Germany in particular has been stringent in its policies to protect the value of savings, pensions and avoid the buildup of personal debt. Now a new spectre is beginning to haunt the Euro zone, particularly in those countries where the economic recovery […]

28th June 2014 was the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo, by a 19 year old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip. Gavrilo was born in a remote hamlet in northern Bosnia into a peasant family who were ruthlessly exploited by their […]

The dominant themes in the rise of China as a world power depend on an adequate supply of foodstuffs to feed its growing millions, and on fossil fuels to drive industrialisation; many times in the past, Chinese imperial elites have fallen as a result of overpopulation and famine. Abandoning her historical isolationism from the West, […]

Flora Sands was the only British woman to fight as an active combatant in the First World War. She was born in Yorkshire on January 22nd, 1876. Her early childhood was spent in County Cork, where her father was a minister of the church. When she was nine, the family moved to Marksford, Suffolk and […]

Football has its earliest roots in Ancient Greek. Known as cuju (which means kick-ball), the game was played by the military as a form of exercise. Its first mention appears in a military manual from the third and second centuries BC. It wasn’t only the Ancient Greeks who used cuju in this way. Documentary evidence […]

The battle of Jutland was the only large scale naval engagement of the First World War, when the German High Sea Fleet left its anchorage in the Baltic to engage the Royal Navy Grand Fleet in the North Sea, off the coast of Jutland. This engagement lasted from 31st May to June 1st, 1916. It […]

Over the past 25 years, governments have attempted to make the UK labour market more flexible in order to control wage costs and encourage labour mobility. To this end, trade unions have been marginalised, the size of the public sector reduced, employment protection eroded, and industries privatised. It is a heady brew of contentious politics […]

Michael Gove intends to restrict the texts that are studied at Key Stage 4 English to include only those that come ‘from the British Isles from 1914 onwards’. This seems at odds with the planned English Baccalaureate – that which was meant to broaden the education of our secondary school pupils – as with one […]

The Hollywood of the late 1920’s and early 30’2 reflects the widespread pessimism and loss of confidence that was the initial reaction of the American people to the Wall Street Crash, the worst financial crisis of modern times. As with the rest of American industry, Hollywood was forced to adapt to economic recession: to cut […]