Author Archives: bernardporter2013

OK, I’m back in Blighty, after six months. And what a contrast to the European countries we’ve driven through! Dirty streets, shuttered up shops, few public amenities working, a corrupt government, and a vile public political discourse; quite a shock, … Continue reading →

I’ve had a host of messages – well, three – regretting my decision to give up blogging, and pleading with me to come back. So here I am again; presently preparing for our journey back to Blighty – by car … Continue reading →

Last night Kajsa attended a meeting she had spent weeks arranging in a nearby suburb, for the ‘Left’ and ‘Green’ parties in Stockholm, to discuss the threat of ‘Fascism’ in Sweden; only to have it brutally attacked by neo-Nazis, dressed … Continue reading →

Incidentally – and following on from my last post – I used to think that writing novels must be far easier than writing history; not insisting, as history does, that you are bound by facts, but allowing you instead to … Continue reading →

What’s the point of blogging? Only a tiny handful of people read the posts of obscure academics like me. To be fair, a large audience was not what I expected, or even wanted, when I began this blog ten years … Continue reading →

Strictly speaking, democracy can be squared with dictatorship if the demos is choosing its dictators for itself. That – for those of us who wouldn’t welcome this outcome – is the great danger of the ‘populism’ which is gripping so … Continue reading →

I’ve just finished reading Tom Baldwin’s Keir Starmer, The Biography.  The author insists that it’s not ‘authorised’; but it could well be, relying as it does on sources very close to Starmer, including the man himself, and being overall pretty … Continue reading →

To a scholar, or I would have thought any educated person, the word ‘extremism’ doesn’t signify much. You can have an ‘extreme’ anything; even ‘extreme moderation’, if you’re willing to be pedantic about it (and a bit silly). Extremism is … Continue reading →

My doctors’ surgery in Stockholm. I suppose you could say that they shouldn’t be wasting their time with this sort of nonsense; but in Britain they wouldn’t have the time.