This section is about things that get in the newspapers, sometimes things that are in today's paper if I have something to say about it that I didn't see anybody else say.
Fred Perry won Wimbledon in 1936. It was a good year for Soviet economic policy too: half way through the Second Five Year Plan, output three times what it was before the Revolution. The All England Club does its best to keep this Golden Age alive. True, we have not seen another British men's ...
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One can’t fault the news media on getting things done. I was at Colombo airport last December with a team from Medair (a Swiss-based Christian aid agency I’ve worked with on and off for many years). But most of the other travellers, seemingly with three or four luggage trolleys a head, laden ...
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Today we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the day when the British army liberated prisoners held in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The bald fact, that the Nazis industrially murdered six million Jews, is one which we repeat often enough to risk its losing its power to shock. We ...
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Everyone loves France: food, wine, art, landscape, fashion; intelligent hedonism, ancient culture. I grant you, you get all this cheaper, classier and with more friendly service in Italy, but one can’t have too much of a good thing. The Entente Cordiale (or “Friendly Understanding” as we say in ...
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My mother, who in the Autumn of her years still goes by bicycle to do her shopping at Sainsbury’s in Cromwell Road, makes a modest proposal about road safety. Outlaw seatbelts. Instead, fit a large spike to every steering wheel, point toward the driver’s chest. Well, it may never catch on. ...
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Who but the most abandoned curmudgeon could long resist the ardent desire of young men and women to live out their birth right? Yet to my wrinkled hand and grating voice falls the solemn task of disillusionment. There is a harsh message for the whey-faced youth under the slogan "I can drive but not vote" in the Votes at 16 website, and though it leave his most ardent hopes stillborn, hear it he must: you are not a victim of discrimination....
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Roger Lyons, like many right thinking persons, does not want your insurance company to shut its call centre in Sutton Coldfield and open one in Cochin.
In other news, Roger Lyons and many other bien pensants are also against globalisation. For the most part what they mean by ...
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Much as I enjoyed the dramas on Radio 4 and the numerous references on 1Xtra, much as I am uplifted by the idea of schoolchildren taking rightful ownership of history, much as I approve of building the future on a good understanding of the past - still there's a thing I didn't like about Black ...
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This month J M Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature. For an Englishman like me, this was an occasion for reflection and a poignant kind of pride.
Coetzee, a South African, is a towering figure in English Literature. A fortiori though you have to go back to 1983 for the ...
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I'm no fan of taxes, but even the most demented libertarian would agree the State needs some revenue. Relative to most of the other ways to raise it, taxing capital gains on houses is a good wheeze. Like any other squalid moral protoplasm with a house in Cambridgeshire, part of me is ...
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How we pay to get around: a source of much rancour. Fairness, pollution, road safety, everyone has an opinion. At its heart, though, it's a problem of economics. The market economy is meant to let us make sensible choices by giving us information about how much things Cost. Not how much ...
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The current screen ad for Malibu rum begins, as others in the series, with the question "imagine if we Caribbeans took life as seriously as the rest of the world". We see half a dozen men gathered round a small beach bar built from corrugated iron and decorated with bead curtains. They wear ...
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There’s a thing going on in our heads this era, half risk-aversion, half mental laziness, half squeamishness. I want to lump these all together and call them sentimentality, a disease of our time.
Sentimentality for example is driving your kids to school because you fear a loony will ...
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A train driver who tries to make up for lost time sounds like a train driver doing a good job. I wasn’t on the 6.55 from King’s Lynn yesterday morning, so I don’t know - perhaps he really was driving like a crazy person, but on the face of it he sounds like a man with the right priorities. ...
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It doesn't matter whether Campbell lied or Gilligan lied. Or either or both. Governments never tell the truth all the time. Get used to it. It doesn’t matter too much why the government took the country to war. In people, the goodness of the act inheres in the goodness of the ...
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The longest epoch anyone can think of at present is forty five minutes. This can't be healthy, and I thought it might rectify the humours a bit to look at Iraq sub specie æternitatis - or at least, sub specie the last five hundred years or so. Consider, then, if you care to, ...
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The Hutton Inquiry is trivial. If a man dies, this is not trivial at all. That goes without saying (though you notice I am cowed enough by conventional piety that I do in fact say it). But if we are to respect the dead man to the extent of thinking him to have had a mind of his own, we should ...
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If you were down on your luck, would you want me to give you a sack of wheat? Or would you rather have money to buy what you need? Fine. Victims of humanitarian crises are like that too. In most cases people with money in their pockets can solve their own problems. Even many famines ...
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If you think deeply about the constitution, last Thursday's bit of knife work might make you wonder whether writing it down might be not such a bad idea after all. The trouble with an unwritten constitution is, you can never be quite sure if you're operating within it, or altering it. Was ...
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This time round, the doves seem very hawkish. My observation (correct me if your experience differs) is that when you talk about the war, people who don't want us to fight become much more rapidly heated than people who do. Peaceful people go red in the face, speak with higher pitched ...
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I sometimes do web design - shameful but a man has to eat
These are the cartoons I read every day
McSweeney's, a good and funny literary mag
Memepool, the essential sump of web stuff
Interesting and opinionated commentary by Stephen Pollard
Loobylu, a web log with ...
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The Lord Chief Justice says we're sending too many people to jail. Well I agree. I don't mind if jail is unpleasant, so long as the unpleasantness serves a purpose. But so far as I can make out jail does the opposite of rehabilitation, by putting young men cheek by jowl with more advanced ...
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Walking through Cambridge the other night I heard a young woman talking on her telephone - "so there's this occupation thing at the Senate House? About the war in Iraq, it's at one thirty on Thursday. But I've got this lecture on Thursday so I have to go to a lecture, so I can't go? Anyway ...
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There are a lot of ideas going round about what, if anything, to put up on the site of the World Trade Center. Some are beautiful (if derivative), some are timid, some are grandiose. But I haven't seen anybody proposing this (further research reveals this, though) which is in many respects ...
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