Mar 10, 2025 | Stories
Arguments against the death penalty had been advanced in the 1950s, with a particular boost for abolition resulting from the case of Ruth Ellis, a young mother who had murdered her unfaithful lover in 1955. The Tories reduced the number of offences carrying the death...
Feb 24, 2025 | Stories
In the 2025 film Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy the much-loved lead character is still portrayed as a wine drinker, as she was in the original Bridget Jones’s Diary book of 1996 and the 2001 film. Back then her liking was for chardonnay, usually in a large glass....
Jan 19, 2025 | Stories
Recent US presidential elections have been extensively covered in the British press. What is interesting, though, is that in the past, British pollsters appear to have been more interested in attitudes to the election process and individual issues than in the...
Nov 27, 2024 | Stories
Sometimes a TV campaign can have a positive effect on an entire category as well as the brand in question. That’s what happened with the vermouth brand Cinzano in the 1970s and 1980s. Vermouth was considered a Christmas drink by many, and one of Cinzano’s strategy...
Oct 18, 2024 | Stories
The leading polling organisations have not so far published any poll covering what the public expect to be in the budget to be delivered on 30th October 2024. Perhaps they haven’t needed to, as plenty of commentators have prepared us for the worst. Indeed, the Prime...
Sep 22, 2024 | Stories
The 1980s in Britain was the decade of big privatisations. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, wanted to create a class of share-owning members of the public – her 1985 Conservative party conference speech imagined a society “where owning shares is as common as...
