Remembering Guy Fawkes nights back in simpler times ...

The Taliban in Afghanistan - oh that the oft-heard phrase referred merely to comical sounding inhabitants of a C. S. Lewis Narnian fantasy - continue to suppress, nay extinguish, basic human rights.

- with Joe Riley

While holding out the begging bowl for foreign aid in the wake of devastating famine, they forbid women to train as medics.

Indeed, in all aspects of education, women are relegated to the lowest social order.

I reiterate this well-known fact in view of an extraordinarily unknown truth about the treatment of women in Britain, unearthed in a local document.

Back in 1783, when that great storytelling chronicler of the human condition, Charles Dickens, had cast off his mortal coil by little more than a dozen years, a woman named Maria Johnson was cashed in as an asset in Formby, the coastal Lancashire town I have called home for half a century.

When marriages did not work out, divorce was a remedy available only to the rich through a private act of parliament.

Nevertheless, a type of poor man's divorce was available, would you believe it, through wife-selling.