Janet Cameron

Image Copyright Gareth Cameron John Walsh says that to disapprove of the depths to which adult humour sinks is to disapprove of humanity itself. Does he have a point? Any number of unpleasant situations have affected British comedy over the past few years, beginning, for example, with the nasty trick Russel Brand and  Jonathan Ross   played on Andrew Sachs in 2013 by dissing his granddaughter. Comedians today are dishing out yet more and more cringe-making, intrusive comments about the Royal Family and various forays into formerly taboo territory. Adjectives are flung around, vile, obscene, puerile, disgusting, etc.  John Walsh, in his article "Going 'too far'? It's the oldest joke of all" admits that "rudeness" reigns, and that we are simply stuck with the humour alluding to sex and bodily functions. It may be in poor taste, but it has a tradition going way back into our early history. Now we have a new fun-poking programme, Newzoids, caric...

What Price Individual Rights? "Hard Times" opposes the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Copyright Janet Cameron Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was incensed by the new moral philosophical movement of Utilitarianism.  The movement's founding father, reformer, Jeremy Bentham, a Philosophical Radical, believed that human beings behave in a certain way in order to maximise pleasure and minimise pain, therefore society's responsibility was to promote "the greatest happiness in the greatest number of people." While Charles Dickens agreed with many of Bentham's beliefs, for example, with regard to social reform, minimum wages and prison conditions, he objected to the general ethic of the movement, which he believed ignored the importance of individual rights. The central protagonist in his novel,   Hard Times , set in the fictional town of Coketown, is the headmaster Thomas Gradgrind, bent on treating his small charges as "little pitchers" w...

When they hear about my murder books, people sometimes say, ‘Why is it women love writing about murder?’ Well, it wasn’t really like that for me. I didn’t  choose  to delve into all that gut-wrenching material from England’s colourful and bloody past. I began, innocently enough, with a serious history book,  Canterbury Streets , having been introduced to the commissioning editor of Tempus Publishing through my good friend Sylvia Kent, herself a prolific history book author. My  Streets  book was followed and outsold by another book which practically wrote itself , Haunted Kent . (Never assume the writing at which you work your hardest is synonymous with the writing that sells the most copies.)  Local history publishers tend to plan their titles in series and these are then taken up by regional authors. The Murder and Crime books were simply part of a series currently underway, so I was invited to write for Kent. I started off with Murder & C...