Monthly Archives: April 2016

I’ve been trying to think back to what I knew about Swedish history before I made my second home there twenty years ago. It turns out to be very little. There were the Vikings, of course. As schoolchildren we loved … Continue reading →

Why, considering that Britain and Sweden seemed to be travelling along the same political road up to the 1960s – towards ‘social democracy’ – did they come to diverge so widely thereafter? It can’t just be Thatcher. Or the Unions. Or the Swedes’ basic … Continue reading →

A couple of old (indeed, dead) imperialists have been in the news recently. The first is Cecil Rhodes, whose statue outside Oriel College Oxford I had never noticed, until the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ protest movement at Oxford University earlier this year … Continue reading →

This was a new one to me. A young drink-driver responsible for the deaths of four people in Texas in February has pleaded in his defence that he was suffering from ‘affluenza’ at the time. ‘Affluenza’ apparently refers to the … Continue reading →

I remember, in the course of one of my spats with the controversial historian Niall Ferguson, his maintaining in an email to me that he regarded most criticisms of his work as motivated by envy of his ‘fame and fortune’. … Continue reading →

Nobody much notices Canada. (Outside Canada, that is.) Its citizens look much like (US) Americans, and sound like them, if you’re not attuned to the subtle differences of dialect. Canadian cities are similar to US ones; a bit cleaner, perhaps, … Continue reading →

There. It’s out. Doesn’t that feel better, David? No more suspicion, no more innuendo; we can all see that you’re clean. Still filthy rich, of course, and so unlikely to be able to empathise with the rest of us; but … Continue reading →

What does it say about me as a person that almost the only pleasure I get from the News nowadays is reading or hearing about the discomfort of people I loathe? (Famous people, that is. I don’t think I loathe … Continue reading →

‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Or words to that effect. I’ve suddenly remembered that I have sinned too. In 1970 I taught at an American university for a couple of months, and of course received … Continue reading →

It beggars belief that David Cameron ‘holds no shares’, as he claimed the other day, only his official salary and ‘some savings on which I draw some interest’. Everybody of his class holds shares. If Cameron doesn’t now, it’s either because … Continue reading →