The Electric Pitchfork

Battle of the Somme   -  1st July 1916 The Battle of the Somme (French: Bataille de la Somme, German: Schlacht an der Somme), also known as the Somme Offensive, was a battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British andFrench empires against the German Empire. It took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 on both sides of upper reaches of the River Somme in France. It was the largest battle of the First World War on the Western Front; more than one million men were wounded or killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles in human history. The French and British had committed themselves to an offensive on the Somme during Allied discussions at Chantilly, Oise, in December 1915. The Allies agreed upon a strategy of combined offensives against the Central Powers in 1916, by the French, Russian, British and Italian armies, with the Somme offensive as the Franco-British contribution. Initial plans called for the French army to undertake the main part of t...

Brexit ...... Is it the beginning of the end of the EU ??? Is this is actually the beginning of the end for the EU ?? ..  Will it will be looked back in history as another failed experiment ?? ,  We are talking roughly half a century , a mere blip in time in the overall history of Europe going back thousands of years. A European Economic Union was an idea hatched during the end Hitlers reign and carried on by same German originators well after the war , up to 1953 in fact.  The Dark Roots of the “Brussels EU” The EEC/EU has resulted in vast improvements in roads and services for it's poorer entrants from 1970's on .. Ireland being one of the countries that did extremely well. 1999 and the introduction of the Euro has proved over a decade and a half to have damned the poorer nations to decades in debt paying for the folly of bankers greed and stupidity.  1999 The name euro was officially adopted on 16 Dec...

Tale of Tales Review – Bawdy and Fantastical The adult fairytale is a freakish, hybrid, disturbing creature, mostly forgotten in these days of Disney sanitisation, but Tale of Tales resurrects the genre with surreal humour and gothic horror. There are fetid ogres and sweet-smelling princesses, sea monsters and slayers, old crones and kings, but each story has a distinct contemporary resonance. These three intertwining tales of faraway kingdoms long, long ago are peopled by a stellar cast: Salma Hayek, John C Reilly, Toby Jones and Vincent Cassel. The film is in English, but the director is an Italian, Matteo Garrone, who made the mafia movie Gomorrah. Garrone brings a robust bloodlust and erotic overtones to these classic 17th-century tales, which were originally collected by the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile. Italo Calvino described Basile’s book, Pentamerone, as “the dream of a deranged Neapolitan Shakespeare”. Review Link A few years ago, a film such as Tale of...

I’m Not with the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music by Sylvia Patterson Just as pop stars can and should be recognisable from space — a tiny flash of purple here, a distinctive conical bustier silhouette there — there’s no mistaking the writing of Sylvia Patterson, the author of this very funny, glowingly humane memoir about her 30 years as a music writer. Cut up her work William Burroughs-style and her voice would still come through, the journalist who induced paroxysms of disgust in Madonna by asking her whether she ate the placenta after giving birth or broached the subject of “ill-timed” erections with Prince. Whether overriding the glazed autopilot of the much-interviewed star with an unexpected question (to Beyoncé: “Have you ever been sick all down your cleavage?”), or describing Johnny Cash as having “the gait of a flung tombstone”, she’s the kind of writer who could make a piece about Westlife an essential read. Yet while I’m Not with the Band features a dream cas...