News

University of Hull Professor Martin Goodman describes how Polish migrants have become integrated into the Hull community, and how the university is even home now to a Polish consulate.

I can’t really pinpoint an exact moment when I stopped feeling British; it was more of a process than a single event. There was a time just a few years ago when I remember feeling very proud to be both English and British, though always in that order, writes Ben Alltimes.

Bringing the crucial work of the World Monuments Fund alive away from the actual buildings being restored is a difficult task. The Giving our Past a Future exhibition doesn’t quite manage it. Instead the hidden passages and untouched bookshelves of the Sir John Soane Museum were far more captivating, and well worth a look, writes Georgia Hussey.

“Football is not for a Yiddisher boy,” Anthony Clavane is told at school and so has a football confiscated, followed in turn by a tennis ball, an apple core and an orange peel. This Pythonesque anecdote suggests English Jews were hostile to “footbollick”; that they considered the sport unfitting for the people of the book.

It’s the town where Dr Marten’s first made their mark, and Oliver Cromwell got his marching boots; British Future’s Rachael Jolley returns to Britain’s shoe town Northampton.

British sport has a “special responsibility” to commemorate the centenary of the war because sport was “the most effective recruiting sergeant in sending men to the trenches,” say British Future’s Matthew Rhodes and Sunder Katwala in an essay published this Remembrance weekend.

The largest collective acts of commemoration this remembrance weekend will take place at sporting events. The Millennium Stadium at Cardiff Arms Park, Murrayfield and Twickenham will fall silent ahead of the rugby internationals, and more than half a million supporters will pay their respects at club grounds, large and small, around Britain, with red poppies embroidered into football shirts in the English and Scottish premier leagues, writes Matthew Rhodes.

The Republicans used to routinely win Presidential elections. Now the party will have to have a fundamental rethink if it is to win again. The central key to Republican dominance a generation ago was race and demography. The same factors are now the key barrier to the party winning again.

Back in April Frank Sharry of America’s Voice predicted the Hispanic vote would be a huge factor in the upcoming US election, at a parliamentary seminar hosted by British Future. Post-election we thought you might like to re-read his foresight.