Catherine Foster; the trial

The morning the Lent Assizes opened in Bury St Edmunds on Saturday March 27th 1847, 17-year-old Catherine Foster, dressed in deep mourning and ‘evincing little alarm at the awful position she stood in’, replied in a firm voice “not guilty” to the charge of poisoning her husband. By ten past seven that evening, the prosecution… Continue reading Catherine Foster; the trial

Catherine Foster; the inquest

Just to recap (though it may assist you if you read this and the next couple of episodes by starting from the previous blog), the God-fearing young farm worker John Foster, a one-time neighbour o’mine, swallowed poison from his wife during dinner on Tuesday night November 17, 1846. Within minutes he was sick as a… Continue reading Catherine Foster; the inquest

5000 Spirits of a village, or the Layers of The Onion

Not a 100 yards from where I write this, in this sleepiest of sleepy Suffolk villages, a murder has been committed. The local paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, to which I am ever grateful for being a newspaper of the old school, wrote it up over Christmas. It would be churlish not to point… Continue reading 5000 Spirits of a village, or the Layers of The Onion

Spare the rod

You have to hope this gathering worldwide storm of populism is not a glissando towards Nazi-ism. Sure, there is a quickening in the political pulse. The disconnected nomenklatura and all-too-connected social welfarists demand that the people get to eat cake when there really is no cake. The dispossessed gather in tribal clans to do harm.… Continue reading Spare the rod

When bankers saw risk as well as reward

When he was a student at Harvard, Bank of England governor Mark Carney played back-up goalie in the teeth-threatening Canadian pastime of ice hockey. So Carney knows a bit about risk.. On Tuesday May 27 he gave a speech to a conference in London on Inclusive Capitalism. The gab-fest included most of the A-listers of… Continue reading When bankers saw risk as well as reward