Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Oldie

    The Old Un’s Notes

    Sep 22, 2021 5 minutes

    ✻ Were you one of those schoolboys who in 1973 salivated about the new range of ‘pocket money’ model kits of tanks, warplanes and ships?

    The Matchbox kits were cheap and simple to make, with tremendous, nostalgic power for Second World War buffs.

    Fans will love The Golden Years of Matchbox Art, a new book by Roy Huxley, now in his eighties.

    Huxley painted the pictures for practically all the boxes over nearly 20 years.

    Here is his stirring picture of the Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX, Britain’s most famous short-range, high-performance Second World War aircraft, with its Merlin engine and its distinctive roar.

    More than 20,000 of them were built between 1938 and 1948. The Mk IX was the most-produced version after it entered

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Oldie

    The Oldie12 min read
    History
    Viking, 464pp, £20 In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book
    The Oldie14 min read
    Pursuits
    WELSH WONDERS On a recent cold and blowy afternoon, I spent a few hours in a series of greenhouses, sniffing exotic scents and marvelling at the sheer abundance of flowering bulbous plants. I was just a mile from the National Botanic Garden of Wales
    The Oldie3 min read
    Apocalypse Now?
    Are we all doomed? A lot of publishers seem to think so. The only question, it sometimes seems, is whether it's going to be climate change, another pandemic, or murderous Terminator-style Artificial Intelligence that finishes us off first. But a hand

    Related