Category Archives: Uncategorized

Being an oldie, I’m often left far behind when it comes to contemporary popular culture. That’s a great disadvantage, I’ve found, when it comes to my weekly Pub Quiz, though luckily I have team-mates who seem to follow the pop … Continue reading →

There will be a piece on the Julian Assange affair in tomorrow’s Guardian.* (Remember him?) This follows a press conference given today in Gothenberg by his Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, against whom the Swedish press seems at last to be … Continue reading →

The British parliament has only rarely reflected opinion in the country, as it should do ideally, as a supposedly democratic body. Before 1928 this was mainly because the House of Commons deliberately excluded huge swathes of Britain’s population: most of … Continue reading →

I love early morning radio. ‘Thought for the Day’, the point at which most people turn off and get up to put the coffee on, is one of my favourites, with proper arguments – even if I disagree with them … Continue reading →

Clegg’s interview in today’s Guardian reveals a lot about the Tories. Osborne comes out of it worst. Apparently he didn’t care in the slightest about the effects of his cuts on the lives of ordinary people, as long he could pander to … Continue reading →

For anyone who missed the recent BBC dramatization of Joseph Conrad’s novel, I’d urge you to catch up on it. It’s on DVD. I’ve just finished watching a recording of it that I made when I was away. This is an … Continue reading →

I’m a ‘professor emeritus’. Gosh, that sounds good, doesn’t it? The word ‘merit’ embedded there, in the fancy Latin, must denote something special, more than a mere ‘professor’? (Those are two a penny nowadays.) Actually, no. All it means is … Continue reading →

My original hope for the EU, though it wasn’t an altogether confident one, was that it might act as a barrier to the relentless global spread of free market capitalism, which is, after all, the dominant trend in the world … Continue reading →

Has Ed Balls ever specified what it is about Jeremy Corbyn’s programme for government which makes it ‘a leftist utopian fantasy devoid of connection to the reality of people’s lives’? I’ve followed the debate pretty closely (even from Sweden) and … Continue reading →

While in Sweden my website let me down. It wouldn’t let me post or edit. But my son-in-law Richard has fixed it – it involved switching from Safari to a thing called Google Chrome – and so, if this post … Continue reading →