17th November 2019

On Friday, Sky News broadcast a special programme about Extinction Rebellion, a group strangely reminiscent of yesterday’s Green Peace warriors. Meanwhile, the UK and mainland Europe’s been awash with rising floodwaters, especially severe in Yorkshire, the Avon and Venice. Elsewhere, Australia’s suffered horrendous bushfires. The big question: can man do anything about it or is it, as many scientists believe, part of a natural, planetary realignment that man can do nothing about? Writing as Isabella Mancini, I’ve set out - as part of a hopefully-engaging novel - one old professor’s take on it all. In his hut, deep in the Arctic, he ponders an outrageous plan involving the whole world. Does he succeed? Although the novel’s full release date isn’t ‘til 5 January, the paperback is available right now. Just click on the cover image above. Hope you enjoy it. One way to avoid the vexatious political shenanigans all around us at the moment!

10th November 2019

Yesterday was 91119. Yesterday was also the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht, a seminal point in the persecution of one, innocent, group of people. What triggered it? In 1938, although there had been much discrimination in Germany against  the Jewish community, e.g. attacks on synagogues, the boycott of Jewish shops and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Kristallnacht is generally viewed as the start of the Holocaust. Fast forward to today. Attacks yet again on synagogues, media defamations, antisemitic graffiti etc.  So, what can we do to stop the path to yet another Kristallnacht? Study the backgrounds of all election candidates before they gain power. Have they befriended terrorists or human rights abusers in the past? Don’t give power to a budding Hitler, whether from the right or left wing. Look back at history. Don’t sleepwalk into yet another abuse against innocents.

3rd November 2019

A General Election. This one is different. One of the PM contenders poses a huge threat to one group of British citizens, innocent people who now fear for their future. Some facts. 2006 Corbyn (JC) campaigned to release 2 convicted terrorists who set off a bomb. 2009 JC warmly called Hezbollah, a terrorist group who bombed and killed 85, his “friends”; also hosted the group in parliament, who had published a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler. JC at first denied knowing them until a photo later showed them together. JC campaigned in support of suicide bombers, suggesting the murders were “understandable”. 2010 JC hosted an event comparing Israel to Nazis - deemed antisemitic by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. 2011 JC wrote a gushing forward for an antisemitic book that claims capitalism is controlled by “men of a peculiar race who have many centuries of financial experience” and blames “the house of Rothschild” for European wars! JC uses Israel as today’s ‘more acceptable’ form of antisemitism. But make no mistake: JC is rabidly, subliminally antisemitic.
Whatever political wing you espouse in this democracy, never before has the UK allowed such a person to stand as a potential PM. The Labour party should be forced to choose another leader IMMEDIATELY.

27th October 2019

Clocks were turned back this morning. The news also constantly looks back. “The people didn’t vote for a No-Deal” they keep telling us. But that’s not what I remember. I can’t understand why the media reiterates the ‘facts’ with today’s hindsight but forgets yesterday’s mindset. What the people were actually saying in 2016, before the referendum, were two things: 1. We’re fed up with Brussels bureaucracy; 2. The UK is tiny and Blair opened the floodgates to far too many global migrants and we’ve lost our British identity. History books always talk about the facts but rarely about what actual people were saying at the time. That’s why it’s so important for young people to talk to the oldest family member and note down their oldest memories. That’s the only way to get a true record. The people are the history far more than the events, which are often spun to suit a different future. And me? Very soon I’ll announce a new novel - set in the past of course! Watch this space...

20th October 2020

I’m off to London for the day to meet my publisher. One place I’ll definitely be avoiding is Westminster. I still believe that the problem with the UK is we constantly show the world our ‘sore toe’, revealing every minute, excruciating detail about our political machinations. I can’t think of any other country, including the US, who would do such a thing in such camera-panning detail. Why do we always ‘wash our dirty linen’ in public?  When we lived in France and watched the excellent France24 news channel, all we saw were nice, posed shots of the president at the Elysée Palace. Similarly, on our frequent trips to the US, despite much  negative publicity about the president, never were we presented with actual, as it happened, minutae of meetings on TV.  We can learn a lot from other nations. Today’s your chance. Read more about France and the US. Download your copy of each of these today only FOR FREE. Don’t sit and stare. Click on the images on the right.

13th October 2019

As I grow older, I spend a lot of time thinking about the past. Recently I gave a book talk where I recounted why my aunt moved to the US at the age of 17 and how she managed to overcome the immense differences between the old English culture and the go-getting American style. She was born in 1906 Birmingham. The family was poor so she was wearing charity boots and clothes until 1924 when she was one of the ‘huddled masses’ arriving at Ellis Island, as described by Emma Lazarus on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. In NY she coped with the burgeoning Wall St Crash until slowly, slowly her life improved. An important thing she learned about her new life in the US: no-one was going to help you there. If you were fit and healthy, it was up to you to improve your life, no-one else. That’s something we in the UK need to re-learn today.

6th October 2019

October. Growing up in Birmingham in the ‘50s, it was common to live through terrible yellow smog and choking smoke from local factory chimneys. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Today in the city, the air is clear. Tonight on BBC 2 a programme shows the shrinking glaciers in N. Alaska and Greta cries it’s all man’s fault. Yet no-one asks what caused the ice age and global warming which occurred millions of years before the advent of man. There’s a plethora of, unheard, peer-reviewed climatologists who reveal these phenomena as being caused by complex solar changes. If this is true, Greta should be concentrating on the effects of global warming rather than a cause we can do nothing about. Start by moving man away from low-lying coastal and river areas, evacuate tiny islands in the middle of the ocean and volcanic areas, and build houses on stilts. That’s what Greta should be advocating before it’s too late.