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Jeremy Black brings up that, while after the fact counterfactuals like, "What if Hitler invaded Great Britain?" or "What if Spain entered the Second World War on the side of the Axis?" are far-fetched to us now because they didn't happen, for policy makers 1939-1945 these were very inportant...

Just to say, the picture labelled as Richard Scrope is the imagined portrait of Henry IV that can be found in the National Portrait Gallery. The NPG also has a (similarly imagined) portrait of Richard le Scrope, painted by D. J. Powell in 1819: The Bolton Hours (a fifteenth century book) also...

The United States as host in 1986 is interesting, though definitely not outside the realm of possibility, given they bid to replace Colombia in 1983 and the host selection will be happening before they upset FIFA with the stadium selection for the football tournament at the 1984 Olympics. You...

The cover follows @Thande's principle whereby (I paraphrase) alternate timeline flags should not actually be very good, because our timeline's flags are often a bit naff too.

There's a mistake on the Group F table: Algeria should be have 0 wins, 2 draws and 1 loss, and Canada 0 wins, 1 draw, 2 losses. The point totals are correct, as is the 3rd place ranking table. A really interesting update, for which I will try and give a more fulsome response tomorrow.

I hadn't read it until this comment, and then curiosity took over. But despite you putting the idea in my head, I couldn't find it stilted or wooden. If I were to propose any changes it would be a tweak of the last line, which I think is directed in the right way but the word 'puzzled' somehow...

I think Heisenberg called it the 'Uranbombe'. I'm not sure what Nishina called any potential project of the Japanese nuclear weapsons programme.

In the Frisch-Peierls memorandum they called the weapons 'super-bombs', which as a name might have been so cringe that disarmament actually caught on.

"The Second World War would continue until 1946, when tube alloys were dropped on Erfurt and Wiesbaden."

@Thande's 'carytic' for 'nuclear' is similar to German, where nuclear weapons are Kernwaffe and nuclear energy is Kernenergie. "Atomic bomb" has a heritage in fiction, having been coined by H.G. Wells in The World Set Free.

I imagine that this 1982 tournament will, similar to our timeline's, see FIFA seek to protect skilled players, and that it will again benefit Maradona and as a result Argentina.

A surprise to me that Italy were unable to win on home turf - presumably not having the second group stage ends up penalising them to some extent. I would have fancied a stifling England team to overcome Poland too, but a tight 1-0 seems right. I wonder who'll be manager come 1986. I noticed...

I've managed to answer this one for myself by finding the reference to Zimbabwe in the 1974 post.

Argentina were controversial winners in OTL, benefiting from home advantage, playing all their games after the other fixture in their group, biased refereeing, the match against Peru. I'm somewhat surprised that they triumphed here, even with an easier group in the first round. I probably would...

Oh crikey

Here he is meeting more crew members of another ship named Enterprise:

A Perfect Spy sees le Carré explore that somewhat, with the le Carré character acting as an intelligence asset for the Czechoslovakians. And Philby looms large over other le Carré novels, especially Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I don’t feel that le Carré’s intelligence career was destined for...

Something I found with le Carré's later books, which I don't think I brought up here, is that the pacing became atrocious with his later books: he would write a story that you felt was really building to be quite interesting and then everything gets wrapped up in two pages. I'd say that all of...

But what if the bad guys were not Muslim???

Pinochet's Chile? The Soviet Union?