Monthly Archives: March 2025

Easy, isn’t it? – USA gets Greenland, Russia gets Ukraine, China gets Taiwan. All neat and tidy. Everyone agrees. No more wars. Back to the 1790s: https://bernardjporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/caricature_gillray_plumpudding.jpg. (See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/28/putins-endorsement-of-trumps-greenland-takeover-reflects-their-vision-of-a-new-world-order.)

For academics a crucial aspect of ‘Fascism’ is the way it plays out in universities. As a retired academic I’ve been shocked by some of the reports coming from America over the past month featuring censorship of free speech in … Continue reading →

Ages ago I considered the idea of researching and writing a history of the political ‘Right’ in Britain, following on from my works on ‘imperialism’ and its enemies. I’ve still got notes on this, in a file somewhere back in … Continue reading →

You must see this four-part British TV series, recently released on Netflix, and starring Stephen Graham, whose craggy face will be familiar to you; and a new boy actor, Owen Cooper. Both are transcendingly good, and the film a great … Continue reading →

A great piece by Meghan O’Rourke here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/university-defunding-trump-rufo.html. If you can get this up – I could only do it by subscribing to the New York Times – it paints an alarming picture, by a Yale professor, of what appears … Continue reading →

The ‘Mad Scientist’ has been a common trope in fiction – novels, movies, comic books – ever since Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, and possibly before. (There’s an incomplete list of them here: https://fearplanet.net/2024/07/17/top-20-mad-scientists-in-fiction-and-film). My favourite one as a kid was … Continue reading →

Is this what America and Russia want – to carve up the world between them? (A famous Gillray cartoon.) Replace Pitt and Napoleon by Trump and Putin, and of course slice the pudding differently; and it could serve for today.

I’m a little surprised at Trump’s recently expressed expansionist ambitions – Greenland, Canada, Panama, his Gaza seafront condos – as I had always had him marked down as an isolationist, following in that well-trodden American tradition. But the US has … Continue reading →

I was brought up a Christian, in a very liberal (English Methodist) church. I was happy there, and only left when it was demanded of me that I have ‘faith’: ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’, as it says in the Good … Continue reading →

I’ve just watched a recording of Trump’s address to Congress yesterday. It was billed as 90 minutes long; but about half of that was taken up with clapping, whistles and screaming from the Republican side of the House. (The House … Continue reading →