Archive for January, 2026
A review of the new sports movie “Saipan”
January 29th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Never heard of Saipan? It is the largest island of the Northern Mariana Islands, an unincorporated territory of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean. Never hear of the Saipan incident? This was a public quarrel in May 2002 between the Republic of Ireland national football team’s captain Roy Keane and manager Mick McCarthy […]
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Ever heard of Louis Spohr?
January 23rd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
I hadn’t until I was told about him by a patient to whom I was talking while doing my weekly volunteering at the Older Persons’ Unit of St Thomas Hospital in central London. According to the entry in Wikipedia: “Louis Spohr, 5 April 1784 – 22 October 1859), baptized Ludewig Spohr, later often in the modern German form […]
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Why do we need to sleep?
January 23rd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
A new study has shed light on a profound connection between humans and jellyfish while illustrating the importance of one of the most fundamental human needs. According to “Discover Magazine”, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel discovered one of the biggest reasons animals rest and sleep, courtesy of looking at jellyfish and other species without brains […]
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A review of the new book “This Is For Everyone” by Tim Berners-Lee (2025)
January 22nd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
The World Wide Web is one of the most transformative technological developments in the history of humankind. It was invented by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 when he was 34 and working at CERN in Switzerland. He chose to give it to the world for free. In 1999, he wrote a book called […]
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A review of the new award-winning film “Hamnet”
January 18th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
We know so little about the life of the greatest English writer William Shakespeare, but that does not stop us wanting invented stories about him including earlier films “Shakespeare In Love” (1998) and “All Is True” (2018). What we do know is that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet who died aged 11 in 1596, […]
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Happy birthday (and thank you) to Wikipedia
January 15th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
On 15 January 2001, a new online encyclopaedia was born: it was originally called Nupedia. The concept then was to invite experts to contribute articles and, by the end of the first year, they had a grand total of 22. The next year was not that much better. The plan changed dramatically when the founders […]
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Regulation of the Internet: then and now
January 12th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Once again, we have a fierce debate about Internet content that may not be illegal but could be harmful and is certainly grossly offensive. In this case, it is sexualised images of people without their knowledge or consent created by the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok supported by the social media site X. In Britain, the […]
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It’s time for another revolution in Iran
January 10th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
No regime lasts forever. Totalitarian regimes frequently look immovable but often collapse surprisingly quickly. Think of apartheid in South Africa or Communism in Central & Eastern Europe. What is happening in Iran right now may be the death throes of the current regime. We must hope so. I visited the country in 2009, a year […]
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A review pf the new blockbuster movie “Avatar: Fire And Ash”
January 9th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Any film directed by James Cameron is a must-see and any film in his “Avatar” franchise is a veritable spectacular. We had to wait 13 years for the first sequel but only another three years for this third adventure. As with all the “Avatar” movies, I choose to see this in IMAX and 3D on […]
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A review of the 2021 film “Operation Mincemeat”
January 8th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
This is the unlikely – and, for a long time, totally secret – story of a World War Two subterfuge that persuaded Hitler to believe that, in 1943, the Allies were going to make the first invasion of Europe in Greece instead of Sicily. The film stays close to the true details of the operation, […]
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