CHRIS WEST

The answer was that he was a composite figure of two Chancellors in the 1950s, Hugh Gaitskell and RA Butler. He was created by Economist writer Norman McCrae, who was angered by the fact that Butler, an incoming Conservative, did little to change the economic policies of Gaitskell, his outgoing predecessor. Was McCrae's criticism fair? https://chriswest449.substack.com/p/the-mysterious-mr-butskell?r=12b36q

M usic plays a key role in my novel ‘The Enlightenment Club’, so I thought I’d compile a playlist for it. Requiem by WA Mozart. Introit...

Yesterday might well have been the Last Day of Summer. Sunny but not relentlessly so – a smattering of fleecy clouds – a bit of breeze,...

I went to Oxford yesterday – purely as a tourist – and enjoyed wandering around the beautiful old buildings, designed as places where...

The Hero’s Journey is a staple in therapy / personal development – not to mention Hollywood scriptwriting. It begins with the ‘hero’ (of...

As one gets older, one’s teenage heroes start dying. Especially in music, most of them have vanished from the public eye for years – how...

I must admit, my preferred type of crime story is reasonably hard-edged. I’ve been reading George Pelecanos recently, and loving it....

An excellent evening courtesy of the Royal Television Society – thanks to them for organizing and running the event – on ‘How to Win...

Yesterday, I attended the most remarkable zoom call in my life. ‘I’ and hundreds of students and academics on one end, and on the other,...

Last Saturday, the UK became loved in Europe again (for the moment, at least). We came second in the Eurovision Song Contest, something...