It’s hard not to notice the semantic confusion arriving in the slipstream of the Scottish referendum. No one seems to be any longer sure of anything: nationhood, home rule for Scotland, England or possibly Merseyside, democracy, constitution, why the chicken crosses the road or whether or not it comes beforeRead More

It’s hard not to notice the semantic confusion arriving in the slipstream of the Scottish referendum. No one seems to be any longer sure of anything: nationhood, home rule for Scotland, England or possibly Merseyside, democracy, constitution, why the chicken crosses the road or whether or not it comes beforeRead More

The answer to this question, that is: Is there any limit to the stupid, subversive, demotic rubbish The Times will publish these days? Ben Macintyre’s article on Bob Dylan unwittingly plucks the answer out of the blowin’ wind and lays it before us. It’s an emphatic no. The article itselfRead More

One can observe two things about modern tyrants: first, they can’t resist divulging their plans; second, the world never listens. Marx, for example, laid down the blueprint for a modern totalitarian state, complete with genocide, democide, concentration camps, suppression of every liberty, dictatorship of a small elite, confiscation of allRead More

A financial consultant shouldn’t have fundamental misgivings about the morality of money. A geography teacher shouldn’t doubt that the Earth is round. A nuclear physicist shouldn’t wonder if the atom is really divisible. If these professionals are indeed beset by such doubts, any sensible person would be justified in thinkingRead More

It was the current American VP Joe Biden who set the precedent. During his 1988 presidential campaign Biden repeated word for word Neil Kinnock’s speech on being the first in his family to go to university. Sorry, it wasn’t quite word for word: Joe did replace ‘the first Kinnock’ withRead More

Most historians agree that the Second World War started on 1 September, 1939. Some will argue that the real date was 23 August, when Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the pact whose secret protocol divided Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some others will pick an even earlier date, suchRead More

Witness Prof. John J. Mearsheimer of Chicago University and specifically his Foreign Affairs article bearing the self-explanatory title Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault. Prof. Mearsheimer’s stock-in-trade is a foreign policy based on what he calls ‘neorealism’, and at first I thought it had something to do withRead More

Jeremy Warner asks this good question in today’s Telegraph. He can’t find a good answer because, as he correctly observes, all EU economies except Germany’s and ours are stagnating, and those of such key EU members as Italy and the Netherlands are actually shrinking. The assumption is that the EU isRead More

Nigel Farage is in trouble yet again, and one would think he ought to have learned by now. Mind you, Nigel would get in trouble with the media of any political hue even if he said that the sky is usually blue, except at night when it’s black, or onRead More