Recent content by Colin

Interesting question, some thoughts. 1) I don't think that Victoria's education has too much to do with it, as against social changes, urbanisation, rise of a large middle class, extension of the franchise etc. But I think there are things the crown could have done to retain greater...

Brief Encounter A day by day dramatisation of the Boris Johnson government, the last ever one of the Conservative and Unionist Party

Enemy at the Gates Animation set in the Thomas the Tank engine universe as plans are made and begun to totally electrify all the railways on Sodor. Will Gordon and Thomas be sold for scrap?

THE BRIDGE A Swedish and Danish musician collaborate on a particularly tricky song but the 'bridge' that brings it back to the original melody eludes them. The two are mismatched, the Dane is a young woman with a troubled past and no social skills, the older Swede seems on the face of it more...

Star Wars. Amusing drama doc currently in production about a group dedicated to defacing or eradicating Donald Trump’s Hollywood star. Ending not yet written.

I think its more bye bye peace process

It's all about the profits

Ice Cold in Alex Sci Fi film with a sudden onset massive glaciation where the day if finally saved by the oil and coal industries massively expanding and with the resultant greenhouse effect halting the new ice age in its tracks. The film is found to be funded by those who deny global warming.

Again not necessarily true, just as Hitler was unable to get Franco to fight on his side, perhaps the allies wouldn't be able to get a republican/left Spain to fight with it. Also the pyrenees present a huge obstacle to an armoured thrust. Not insurmountable but problematic, particularly for an...

It's an interesting point. The rising was launched without any promises of help from Italy or Germany as the plotters hoped to be universally successful, but through a combination of incompetence, poor timing and strong opposition from popular socialist and anarchist forces the rising failed...

I've just started a thread in post 1900 that's going to look at this. All readers welcome.

Vladimir Illych Ullyanov had had a long journey, a journey that he feared would just end in arrest and interrogation. For just as surely as he saw the officials of the provisional government as his enemies and as all of those who supported them as collaborators and traitors, surely they would...

Post civil war Spain was exhausted and in no position to join the war I could see a republican Spain falling over itself to remain neutral. Possibly the communists would be dumped from the government post Barbarossa. In part depends on how long and devastating the civil war was.

Lenin on his own did not and could not have stopped the war. The Russian army post the first revolution was barely having on, Brusilov who was a Russian Nationalist if ever there was one, begged Kerensky to not go forward with the disastrous summer offensive as he realised the Russian army was...

One of my continuing irritations is that timelines and discussions around the Spanish Civil War tend to concentrate on foreign interventions rather than the Spanish causes and dynamics that caused and drove the war. Foreign interventions were important, I would argue that the only crucial one...