In a public service information film from 1948, Charley has the workings of the National Health Service explained to him. By Halas & Batchelor from the fascinating collection of British Government Public Information Films at archive.org.

Alan Turing, OBE, did a great deal to hasten the end of World War Two through his work at Bletchley Park and the design of the bombe – the machine used to break three- and four- rotor Enigma cyphers. He’s also known for the Turing Test of artificial intelligence – can a machine convince a [...]

Iain Dale and Donal Blaney are terribly upset that Jade Goody’s estate is liable for £1.8m inheritance tax on its value of £4m. I wouldn’t take their advice for the minor detail that the liability isn’t £1.8m, but £1,350,400. The sums are below the fold. Oh, crocodile tears. Donal refers to the PM as ‘Gordon [...]

Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the sixteenth President of the United States of America – Abraham Lincoln. Variously commemorated in Washington, DC, in his memorial, at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the capital of Nebraska, an aircraft carrier and, I should think, umpteen high schools across the USA, Lincoln figures [...]

Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics. 1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average [...]

On a recent trip to Hammersmith, I saw something of a blast from the past. The cash machines in the Broadway advertise themselves as being available for customers of, amongst others, Midland Bank. So old was the sign that it had the griffin-in-a-circle motif rather. Midland was, as we know, bought by HSBC; before the [...]

James ‘Nourishing Obscurity’ Higham asks: “Which individual has had the most influence on humanity worldwide since WW2, such that if they had not been around, human history would have had a significantly different outcome” I don’t really subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of history, but I think someone who doesn’t have enough prominence and [...]

The twenty-third of April is traditionally the feast day of Saint George. Saint George was a Christian from Anatolia, then a Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire but now part of Turkey. He is the patron saint of many countries, but veneration of him in England goes back at least to the ninth century, the [...]