Simon Skinner

Simon Skinner teaches modern British history at Balliol College, Oxford.

‘I wouldn’t pay it either’: World Cup Wallcharts

Simon Skinner, 25 June 2026

The World Cup​, launched in 1930, is the most popular sporting event on the planet: one of Fifa’s less implausible recent claims is that 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 final in Lusail. Football, as Jonathan Wilson has done as much as any football writer to demonstrate, matters in multiple dimensions, but the World Cup has a magnetism all its own, drawing in millions who...

Letter

Labour Complacency

22 May 2025

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, reviewing Kit Kowol’s book Blue Jerusalem, reflects on the Attlee government’s ‘caution and failure to effect truly radical change’ (LRB, 22 May). Elite institutions and authority, he writes, ‘like the enormously increased power of the state, had been fortified by the war’. I don’t think it was solely the inoculating effect of victory....
Letter

It’s Not Cricket

22 February 2024

Ben Walker’s reflections on VAR invite the observation that VAR’s problem is not the technology (which we love to doubt), or the people who operate it (whom we love to demonise), but the relationship between VAR and the on-pitch referee it is supposed to be helping (LRB, 22 February). VAR’s original sin is surely its insistence that the referee remains sovereign. As Walker says,...
Letter

The Bomb in the Head

5 April 2018

The note accompanying Thomas Jones’s reflections on generational attitudes to Armageddon says that he ‘edits the LRB blog from a secure bunker, in an undisclosed location’ (LRB, 5 April). I believe previous leaks have disclosed that his bunker is in Orvieto, and he will therefore almost certainly know about – and if not, would certainly relish a trip to – the former nuclear...
Letter

Trampled by an Elephant

10 September 2014

It was important to be reminded by R.W. Johnson that Clement Attlee – executive midwife of the National Health Service, Town and Country Planning, as well as the nationalisation of coal, the railways and canals, iron and steel, the Bank of England and civil aviation – should have regarded ‘Indian independence’ as his administration’s ‘greatest achievement’...
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