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My mother-in-law, Jane, will be ninety-nine years old in February. Her first forty-five years – working in the UK's Land Army during World War 2, engaged at seventeen to a man killed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, escaping a first marriage in Tanganyika to find a second husband in Kenya, widowed at thirty with an eighteen-month old daughter (my wife), rebuilding a life in England with almost no money, married for a third time to a man eight years younger than her – were

If you were living in a country on a temporary basis, would you expect to be able to vote in their elections? I am pretty sure it is not a question many people have thought to ask themselves. They would have thought the answer was self-evident.  Nor are they likely to have considered the flipside of the coin. How many foreigners who are not UK citizens, many  living in our country on temporary visas, are entitled to vote both in our local and our national elections? Rather la

Oh, how we Brits are enjoying France’s political travails! The UK’s mainstream media, reliably francophobe when it comes to politics, economic policy and business, have revelled in the inability of President Emmanuel Macron to keep his prime ministers for longer than a few months. They have welcomed his attempts to reform the French economy but mock the French people’s unwillingness to accept the consequences - working longer hours, retiring later, and taking smaller pensions

“Very flat, Norfolk” Noel Coward wrote in Private Lives (though I prefer the legend that he said it to the Queen Mother after she referred to a Royal weekend at Sandringham).  Norfolk certainly has that reputation; flat and remote with big skies.  North Norfolk, where your correspondent generally deploys his quill pen, is not flat; it is rolling, and wooded, and really rather mysterious and beautiful.  Move east from here though and there is a definite feeling that the land i

At 6am Eastern Time in the USA on November 5 last year – election day – something strange started happening. Google’s search engine began to register this question: “Did Joe Biden drop out?”. It soon became the number one enquiry on Google, peaking at midnight Eastern Time, after the voting booths closed on the West Coast. The next morning, as the results began to show that Donald Trump had beaten Kamala Harris to the Presidency, the same question was number one on Google Sea