Home Views & Blogs Columnists Peter Elson

And the rich just keep on getting richer

AS MOST of us busily toil away in the termite hill batting away the next bill, there’s little time to wonder about who really has most of the money. Read

A Royal boost for the heritage of our beautiful city

SAILING into the Mersey or simply crossing the river over the last few years has treated observers to the rapidly changing face of Liverpool. Read

Where does progress come from?

WHERE does progress come from? Several hundreds of years ago, Francis Bacon wrote that “The benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race”. Read

This is what express service is really all about

IN MY quest for family days out that involve industrial heritage, nostalgia and, crucially, the chance to sit down and drink steaming mugs of tea, I bring you The Cotton Mill Express. Read

Make a monkey of the boss and succeed in business

THE politics of the office are thought to be a matter peculiar to western culture. For the office politician to be able to deploy his or her Machiavellian tactics and chicanery, it is necessary to have a large corporate setting to manoeuvre among staff and management. Read

24-hour drinking at the last bastion of clean-living

It's a sign of the times when those former bastions of clean-living, albeit somewhat spartan and rather chilly, are now set to join the country’s drinking culture round the clock. Read

Where have all the yuppies gone?

ASK anyone who has lived through the past 30 years or more and they will concur that life in Britain has changed by an astonishing amount. Most of the old certainties have gone, yet one aspect which has remained entrenched and seemingly immovable is the stark gap between rich and poor, which is as rigid as it was in the 1970s. Read

Well-meaning but heading down the path to oblivion

GIVEN this column’s love affair with the British countryside, it was with alarm that I read about the threat to kissing gates and stiles from what can only be described as yet another bout of political correctness. Read

It’s not the innocents who suffer, it’s their poor parents

IT IS a question as old as time. Are we born with original sin as imperfect beings? This nagging anxiety has latterly translated itself into the nature versus nurture argument. Do we possess a sense of innate goodness, an in-built ability to distinguish between right and wrong? Read

We all deserve an encore from humorous performer

BREAKING out of a retirement that would have put the late Ronnie Barker to shame, Liverpool’s one and only Peter Moloney will make a rare public speaking appearance which has already caused a scramble for seats. Read

Squeezing into our green and pleasant land

FOLLOWING previous columns dealing with the green belt, there now appears to be only one outcome the Government is considering: not so much tightening it as squeezing. Read

Wainwright would be more downcast than podcast

IN THEORY, I think all those headphones, cordless phone receivers and other assorted audio aids that visitors are given to guide them around any historic site or building are a great idea. Not that I’ve ever used one, of course. I’ve been too busy on such visits stopping my children and their friends talking too loudly, squealing, shouting, running, skipping, jumping and parking half-chewed lollipops on works of art to have the remotest chance of listening to the dulcet tones of some “expert” guide me through the finer points of whatever I’m looking at. Read

Energy questions that will need to be answered

THE other week, I joked about the new nature reserve of Wallasea Island being preserved in perpetuity until oil and natural gas is found beneath it. I now discover from a new report that the future lack of fuels could cause consequen- ces far more dire than this. Read

Breathing new life into city’s green lung

YOU’VE got to hand it to Alan Titchmarsh: undaunted, he’s at it again in spite of the critical panning of his turkey of a television series, Saving Planet Earth, exploring the world’s landscapes. Read

The thin end of the green wedge may be all there is

THOSE of you old enough to remember Mrs Thatcher’s former Environment Minister, Nicholas Ridley, may recall his remark, over some scrape with the Germans, I think, that he had no intention of resigning to spend more time with his family. Read

Russian resurgence on the back of

THIS could be a revelation that hoists me by own petard into outer space, but there was a suggestion prior to my birth in 1957 that I could be nicknamed “Sputnik”, inspired by the successful Russian launch of the first man-made satellite. Read

Drawing on a childhood steeped in the supernatural

IS IT any surprise that novelist Susan Hill, whose ghost story, The Woman in Black, has enjoyed stupendous worldwide stage success, is attracted to supernatural tales? Read

Soldier’s story brought to life on the big screen

WHAT is it like to see a person you know in real life played on screen? This experience recently happened to historian and writer Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, who had interviewed many veterans for his highly successful book Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man. Read

Scouse, subversive and immensely proud of it

HAVING revealed my “Mersey moonwalk” as second civilian on Liverpool’s new Princes Landing Stage, unsurprisingly, further correspondence has ensued. Read

It’s the arrival in Liverpool that pleases me now

TO PARAPHRASE Bob Dylan, “it’s been a slow stage coming”, but it’s finally here. I was the second civilian to set foot (by a couple of yards) behind my esteemed colleague Larry Neild on the new Princes Landing Stage or, as it’s officially known, the City of Liverpool Cruise Liner Terminal. Read