Michael Mackintosh Foot was a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. Foot began his career as a journalist on Tribune and the Evening Standard. He co-wrote the 1940 polemic against appeasement of Hitler, Guilty Men, under a pseudonym.
Harry Norman Turtledove is an American author who is best known for his work in the genres of alternate history, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery fiction. He is a student of history and completed his PhD in Byzantine history. His dissertation was on the period AD 565–582. He lives in Southern California.
The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize the best alternate history stories and novels of the year.
William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, generally known as Lord Beaverbrook, was a Canadian-British newspaper publisher and backstage politician who was an influential figure in British media and politics of the first half of the 20th century. His base of power was the largest circulation newspaper in the world, the Daily Express, which appealed to the conservative working class with intensely patriotic news and editorials. During the Second World War, he played a major role in mobilising industrial resources as Winston Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production.
In early December 1936, a constitutional crisis in the British Empire arose when King Edward VIII proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who was divorced from her first husband and was in the process of divorcing her second.
Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is an English actor, film producer, and director. A Shakespeare interpreter, he excelled onstage at the Royal National Theatre before having further success at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has received various accolades including a BAFTA Award and a Tony Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and an Emmy Award.
The "Rivers of Blood" speech was made by British Member of Parliament (MP) Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, England. His speech strongly criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the United Kingdom and the proposed Race Relations Act. It became known as the "Rivers of Blood" speech, although Powell always referred to it as "the Birmingham speech". The former name alludes to a prophecy from Virgil's Aeneid which Powell quoted:
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.
Ian R. MacLeod is a British science fiction and fantasy writer.
The Daily Express is a national daily United Kingdom middle-market newspaper printed in tabloid format. Published in London, it is the flagship of Express Newspapers, owned by publisher Reach plc. It was first published as a broadsheet in 1900 by Sir Arthur Pearson. Its sister paper, the Sunday Express, was launched in 1918. In June 2022, it had an average daily circulation of 201,608.
Daniel John Hannan, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere is a British writer, journalist and politician. He is currently a sitting member of the House of Lords where he takes the Conservative whip, and has since 2020 served as an adviser to the Board of Trade. He is the founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade. A member of the Conservative Party, he was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 to 2020.
Simon James Heffer is an English historian, journalist, author and political commentator. He has published several biographies and a series of books on the social history of Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the First World War. He was appointed professorial research fellow at the University of Buckingham in 2017.
Christopher John Sansom is a British writer of historical crime novels, best known for his Matthew Shardlake series. He was born in Edinburgh and attended George Watson's College in that city, but left the school with no qualifications. Sansom has written about the bullying he suffered there. Subsequently he was educated at the University of Birmingham, where he took a BA and then a PhD in history. After working in a variety of jobs, he decided to retrain as a solicitor. He practised in Sussex as a lawyer for the disadvantaged, before leaving the legal profession to become a full-time writer. He lives in Sussex.
Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, was a leading British newspaper proprietor who owned Associated Newspapers Ltd. He is best known, like his brother Alfred Harmsworth, later Viscount Northcliffe, for the development of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Rothermere was a pioneer of popular tabloid journalism, and an enthusiastic proponent of closer links between the UK and Nazi Germany of which he was a prominent British admirer.
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery is a public art gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. It is named after William Maxwell "Max" Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, who funded the building of the gallery and assembled the original collection. It opened in 1959 with over 300 works, including paintings by J. M. W. Turner and Salvador Dalí. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery is New Brunswick's officially designated provincial art gallery.
Allan Johnstone Massie is a Scottish journalist, columnist, sports writer and novelist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has lived in the Scottish Borders for the last 25 years, and now lives in Selkirk.
Sam Taylor is a British author, translator and former pop culture correspondent for The Observer, a job he left in 2001. His first book, The Republic of Trees, was published in 2005 and received critical acclaim. His second novel, The Amnesiac, tells the story of James Purdew, a man obsessed with uncovering the events of three years of his life about which he remembers nothing. Taylor lives in Texas with his family.
Alex Massie is a Scottish freelance journalist commentator based in Edinburgh. He is Scotland editor for The Spectator, and writes a political column for The Times and The Sunday Times. He is also a regular contributor to ITV Border, BBC Television and BBC Radio.
Ian Sales is a British science fiction writer, editor and founder of the SF Mistressworks website. Although born in the UK, he grew up in the Middle-East, in Qatar, Oman, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Racism is alleged to have existed in the Conservative Party since at least 1964. Conservative shadow defence minister Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968 was both influential and widely regarded as anti-immigrant with racist overtones; the party's leader at the time, Edward Heath, condemned it, although some Conservative MPs defended Powell's speech. Since then, accusations have been made about several leading members of the party and its policies; these have related to prejudice against non-white people.
Middle England is a 2018 novel by Jonathan Coe. It is the third novel in a trilogy, following The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004). The novel explores the experiences of characters from those earlier novels against the backdrop of the major events taking place before, during and after the Brexit referendum.
