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Jan 23, 2025 | 
the-fence.com | Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe
An oil trader and an Old Etonian with a genius for PR, was Justin Welby the worst Archbishop of Canterbury since Thomas Arundel? ‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.’John 16:33In the spring of 1974, an 18-year-old Justin Welby decided to climb Mount Kenya. He’d arrived in Africa following a turbulent year at Eton.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Claudia Cockerell |John Banville |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe
A trip to Bamford country. I am at the flagship Daylesford Organic in the Cotswolds, holding up a strange receptacle that looks like something you’d leave outside your house with a ‘please take me’ sign taped to it. Instead, this functionless pile of twigs – a ‘coppice basket’ – bears the same price tag as an iPhone 13. I ask a shop assistant why it costs £595, and am met with a withering look.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
computerweekly.com | Bill Goodwin |Cormac Kehoe
Mat Hayward - stock.adobe.comDarren Ellis, who led a surveillance operation against journalists who exposed police failures, wrongly accused a solicitor of attempting to buy armsByBill Goodwin and Cormac KehoePublished: 04 Oct 2024 10:00 A former detective wrongly claimed that a solicitor representing journalists who had been subject to unlawful police surveillance attempted to buy a firearm, a tribunal heard.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | John Banville |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
Lunch in an Umbrian tavern. We were on holiday in the hills outside Spoleto. It was the early 1980s, so Italy was not as dense with the locust clouds of tourists as it is now. We were not tourists, of course, oh, no – we were visitors, and we could prove it, too, because we were staying at the house of a friend.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
computerweekly.com | Bill Goodwin |Cormac Kehoe
Former Durham detective Darren Ellis told the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that he had concerns about lawyers acting for journalists placed under surveillance by Northern Irish policeByBill Goodwin & Cormac KehoePublished: 01 Oct 2024 19:34 A former detective brought in to investigate the confidential sources of two journalists who exposed collusion between police in Northern Ireland and paramilitary groups reported solicitors acting on their behalf to the Law Society of Northern Ireland.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Grace Linden |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
Marvelling at gymnastic displays in Hackney. Beginning in the 1930s, as the cult of healthy living continued to spread across the United States, a handful of gymnasts and athletes began to gather on the beaches of Santa Monica to practise human pyramids, and throngs flocked to watch bronzed babes perform tricks. Inspired by the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the city installed a wooden platform, parallel bars and a set of rings. Muscle Beach was born.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
George Martin was the man who made The Beatles. Here's an interview with his daughter. When the legendary music producer George Martin, known as the ‘Fifth Beatle’, died in 2016, Paul McCartney offered his condolences to George’s ‘wife Judy and their kids Giles and Lucy[sic], and the grandkids.’But Giles and Lucie aren’t George Martin’s only children. Before he married Judy Lockhart-Smith, Martin had another wife, Sheena Chisholm, and with her, two children: Alexis and Greg.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Stephen Smith |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
Living your childhood dreams. There aren’t too many places in the world where you’d think Xanadu might be found, certainly not the London suburb where I found it for myself. Yet there it was, Coleridge’s stately pleasure-dome, climbing into the cloudless skies over Beckenham. Admittedly, it was well disguised. Strictly speaking, this was the indoor training ground of Crystal Palace Football Club’s academy: the dome was basically a big top for kicking a ball about in.
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Aug 14, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Charles Ross |Cormac Kehoe
Matt Ridley wasn’t angry, he was just disappointed. For the first time since 2010, he told the Spectator in June, he was going to vote in a general election – and yet those who really run Britain weren’t even on the ballot paper. “Real political power has been stripped from elected councillors, MPs and even ministers” and “handed to ‘experts’ in quangos, nationalised industries, arms-length bodies and courts,” Ridley lamented.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | John Phipps |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
What drives a man to local history? On the morning of 20 May 2000, perhaps a dozen men and women holding printed placards walked into St Mary’s churchyard in the Irish town of Drogheda. They had come to protest an exhibition taking place at the deconsecrated church, which featured a provocative historical relic: the death mask of the English soldier-statesman, Oliver Cromwell. In Ireland, the name Oliver Cromwell is remembered with unanimous horror.
