<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nagasaki morning 7 August 1945<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The B-29\u2019s take off at night and reach the outlying enemy islands soon after dawn. The US Air Force bomb, a plutonium device nicknamed \u2018Fat Man\u2019, is released through a hole in the clouds at 11.01, and explodes at 1650 feet, 40 seconds later – almost directly over Japan\u2019s only Catholic Cathedral. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the second atomic attack, two days after the uranium bombing of Hiroshima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the 30,000 people of Nagasaki who are closest to the epicentre and who die within seconds are 1310 teachers and children at Shiroyama Primary School, 1300 at Yamazato Primary School and 582 pupils and staff at other nearby schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dead total 70,000 by the end of the year. 3% are military personnel, 13% percent worked in war industries and 84% are civilians, mostly elderly people, students or children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in fractions of a second. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But the bombs of August 1945 have been greatly improved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the fears of the Cold War grew, the weapons became more powerful. And more frightening. Leading to still more powerful weapons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fear and power spiralled upwards, hand in hand, promising wider and wider zones of destruction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The mission of the empire that had been founded on a weapon, became the creation and destruction of its enemies. Its economy became a system dedicated to warfare, threats and the invention of weapons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It became a machine for the creation of fear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tuesday 11 November 2025<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite his age, 89, David Cornwell remained focussed on current events to the end. Unlike many literary giants who are dependent on public approval he never pulled his punches, joined fashionable lobbies or failed to speak his mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In May, at the height of lockdown, a writer asked for his technical guidance while working on redacted secret service files in the National Archives at Kew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the fact that he too was \u2018in the very middle\u2019 of writing a new book David Cornwell replied promptly, in longhand, over 4 pages, with helpful advice for an author he had never met. He ended his letter: \u2018What times! The past dead, the future unborn. Will it be the same old stuff, or will we get a fairer, less greedy world? Will we get men and women who are competent and capable of leadership? Or re-treads who are neither?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sadly, he did not live to finish the book – or share his views on the final outcome of the long-running Brexit debacle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We do know how much he loved his country, and that he spoke for millions when he once said: \u2018My England would be the one that recognises its place in the EU. The jingoistic England that is trying to march us out of the EU, that is an England I don\u2019t want to know\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The last V.C. awarded in the First World War went to Major Brett Cloutman, of the 59th<\/sup> Field Company, Corps of Royal Engineers. When he was a little boy Brett\u2019s mother died and his father remarried my great-aunt Alice, who brought him up. I never knew him, but my father knew him well because Sir Brett, as he became, was a regular attender at Marnham family reunions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In November 2018 I attended the ceremony held in Highgate in his honour, by the Royal Engineers and the V.C. Association. I was proud to be there, although we have no blood connection, and found to my surprise that I was the only living relative present on that day, none of the closer family having turned up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tuesday 11 September 2025<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alexander Chancellor\u2019s last column in The Spectator<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This column was published The Spectator on 28 January 2017, the day Alexander died.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I am very bad at remembering my dreams: I would have been a poor patient for Dr Freud. But I know that as a little boy most of my dreams were rather frightening, even if I can\u2019t recall them in detail. An oft-repeated dream involved a monstrous apparition that would rush down from the sky into my bedroom and be about to attack me or gobble me up, when I would suddenly leap awake, much relieved that nothing unpleasant had happened. I can\u2019t describe what the monster looked like, except that it was amorphous and not human. Occasionally the dressing-gown hanging from my door would suddenly transform itself into its hideous form and rush at me from across the bedroom. Then, too, I would wake up in time to save myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other kind of dream I had as a child was of an opposite kind and would credit me with some great achievement. I would dream that I had written a verse of poetry unequalled in beauty and wisdom anywhere in literature, but would wake up without remembering any bit of it. On one occasion, however, I did recall something of the kind. I dreamt that I had written the most beautiful tune in all of music; but, unlike Sir Arthur Sullivan\u2019s \u2018The Lost Chord\u2019, some of it remained in the mind even when I woke. The only problem was that it was a very feeble tune that I remembered, a tune that was similar to that of the national anthem, but not even as good as that. Waking up on these occasions was less a relief than a disappointment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I grew up, waking from dreams became even more disappointing, for they didn\u2019t celebrate any imagined achievement but encouraged hopes that would then be cruelly dashed. I would tentatively dream that Brigitte Bardot was craving for my company, or that I was about to be offered the editorship of the Daily Mirror<\/em>, although there wasn\u2019t the slightest chance of either. I even dreamt I was a favourite candidate to become Bishop of Bath and Wells and live in his magnificent palace, but this, too, was just a pipe dream. It must have happened because my father had once recommended that I seek a career in the Church of England on the grounds that I would have better prospects of promotion there than in some more challenging field of endeavour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The monster that had haunted me in my childhood had thankfully disappeared, but I did continue to have nightmares from time to time. They might involve car crashes or exploding aeroplanes or acts of terrorism involving the IRA. Or they might concern nothing more than social embarrassment, such as behaviour causing the displeasure of someone important like Rupert Murdoch, which might not really matter at all but would still feel devastating in my sleep. Fortunately, I put my foot in it much more often in dreams than in real life, in which the worst thing I once did was meddle with a television set at one of the late Lord Hartwell\u2019s glamorous general election parties, thereby silencing all the tellies in his Westminster house as his distinguished guests started watching the first results come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that I\u2019m old, I still dream quite a lot; but my dreams now tend to reflect the fears that trouble most old people in real life. I dream that I have forgotten to feed the chickens or the dog, which will be starving as a result. I dream I have lost my hearing aids, on which I have just spent a large fortune, and can no longer understand the radio or take part in conversations. I dream I have mislaid my spectacles, and consequently find it impossible to write the column that The<\/em> Spectator<\/em> is waiting for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Old age is fertile terrain for unsettling dreams. To dream of dying is one of the more disconcerting experiences, for you can\u2019t be sure that you haven\u2019t really died until you have pinched yourself a number of times after waking up: you might just have been experiencing the afterlife. But death apart, most of the things I dream about have an unfortunate way of actually happening. I have lost both my hearing aids and spectacles on several occasions, sometimes irremediably, and I have yet to dream of finding them again. It is in one\u2019s final years that dreams and reality can seem to merge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Monday, 11 August 2025<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n On 11 August 1969 three journalists were killed in a car crash in Suffolk. They were all in their 20\u2019s and were returning to London very early in the morning so as not to be late for work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They had spent the weekend at a holiday cottage that they shared with a group of friends. The driver of their car, who was going too fast, lost control on a bend and had a head on collision with a brick lorry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gina, the best known among them, was being bullied by her editor and threatened with dismissal if she was ever late for work again. Her interviews with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful have passed into the 60\u2019s record books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stefan, the youngest was already an award-winning photographer. He was probably the driver since neither of the others had a car. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Catherine was a trainee researcher on her first job. She was from a famous literary family. Her dog was also killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the weeks that followed the surviving members of their circle met each other repeatedly, at their funerals. Today most of those survivors are also dead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of the writing that grew out of that tragedy is now being published for the first time. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nagasaki morning 7 August 1945 The B-29\u2019s take off at night and reach the outlying enemy islands soon after dawn. The US Air Force bomb, a plutonium device nicknamed \u2018Fat Man\u2019, is released through a hole in the clouds at 11.01, and explodes at 1650 feet, 40 seconds later – almost directly over Japan\u2019s only Catholic Cathedral. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-220","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":347,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/220\/revisions\/347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmarnham.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The late John Le Carr\u00e9<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Last VC…<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Long Life <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
11 August, 1969<\/h2>\n\n\n\n