Author Archives: bernardporter2013

The Guardian this morning reports an ‘epidemic’ of sexual harassment cases in British universities. What defines an ‘epidemic’? More, surely, than the handful that are enumerated in its tables on page 7. To take the three British universities I have … Continue reading →

If the Devil has all the best tunes, it seems to be the losers who have all the best laughs. Trump’s victory has produced a treasure-house of wonderful anti-Trump jokes and mockery, on television, in the press and (especially) on … Continue reading →

‘A tunnel vision nationalism, which focuses only on independence at any cost, sells Scotland short.’ That was Theresa May at the Scottish Conservative Party Conference yesterday. I misheard it at first, assuming she was referring to Britain and Brexit. The … Continue reading →

There’s an interesting report in today’s Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/mi6-returns-to-tapping-up-recruit-black-asian-officers-alex-younger-interview – that MI6 are reverting to their old policy of ‘tapping up’ likely recruits, in order to achieve greater ethnic diversity. In this case it’s in order to net more black … Continue reading →

The LRB Blog has just posted another of my pieces on the Trump/Sweden affair: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/03/01/bernard-porter/sweden-who-would-believe-this-sweden/. Most of it has already appeared here, apart from the embedded links.

I visited Rinkeby today, a suburb of Stockholm 90% of whose inhabitants are of foreign origin, and where there was an incident the other night involving young men throwing stones at the police while they were in the process of arresting a … Continue reading →

Getting older, we forget things. I had either forgotten, or never knew, that Ged Martin, another British imperial historian (mainly of Canada), came from the same neck of the woods as I. In retirement, he has now turned to researching … Continue reading →

It’s a sign of the times, I imagine; but apparently classic dystopian novels are selling like hot cakes just now – 1984, Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve only just got round to reading. I … Continue reading →

Americans have long had a problem with Sweden. Trump’s invention of an Islamicist terror attack there a couple of days ago is just the latest example. It wasn’t just a question of news distortion, though it seems clear that the … Continue reading →

Some Brexiteers seem to want to resurrect the old British ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ as a free-trading area to replace the EU. Here, for some perspective, is an essay on it I contributed many years ago to an online (Oxford) Encyclopaedia of British … Continue reading →