How you make me feel; projection and its identification.

Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why do we admire some people?   Why do some people make us uncomfortable?  Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher?   Are... Read more »

Love and Glory; the wondrous madness of it all.

'It’s still the same old story; a fight for love and glory; a case of do or die.’  It is 1885 and there’s  trouble in the Balkans – as usual!  Sergius, so ambitious for glory, leads a foolhardy cavalry charge against the Serbian machine guns.  He’s not to know that the... Read more »

In search of meaning

‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is any purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying.  But no man can tell another what this purpose is.  Each must find out for himself, and... Read more »

Hey,hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?

Mao Tse Tung said “first the mountains, then the countryside, then the cities.” But he left out the fourth: the home front.  If you can attack the enemy at their soft under-belly, their home front, using behavioural psychology, stirring up feelings against the immorality of war, then this is a... Read more »

Dulce et decorum est …..

Have you read ‘All quiet on the western front?’  I hadn’t until this week.  It is a remarkable work, shocking, poignant but  at the same time uplifting and hopeful.  It’s a story of survival, but all war stories are of survival.  Remarque’s novel tells it you feel it really was;... Read more »

When honour is betrayed

It is 1918, the Bolsheviks have taken over in Russia and sued for peace,  Germany has annexed Ukraine and installed a pro-tsarist puppet government under Skoropadsky, the Hetman, but Tsa Nikolai  II and his family have been murdered in Ekaterinberg.   The remnants of the old White Guard have migrated to... Read more »

The trainspotter’s guide to survival and forgiveness

What was it about Eric Lomax that enabled him to survive the most extreme imprisonment and torture when so many of his colleagues died?   What strength of character allowed him to return to normal job in Edinburgh after such devastating trauma?   And how could he actually bring himself to forgive... Read more »

War without end; Amen.

Armies pursued each other around Europe; soldiers, little better than animals laid waste the countryside, taking what they wanted, burning, raping, killing, no longer knowing, if they ever did, the reason why.  It had been a good war for Mother Courage, for a time. She became a camp follower, trailing... Read more »