Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today he’s been knocked off his plinth by an entertainer called ‘Prince’ – an odd name – and our lovely nonagenarian Queen. But I don’t imagine that will last long. Most of the time just now it’s Shakespeare. He’ll be … Continue reading →

Sweden’s relationship with the EU is almost as problematical as Britain’s. She only joined in 1995 – 25 years after us – and on the basis of a pretty narrow popular vote. At the same time, her neighbour Norway voted … Continue reading →

Jeremy Corbyn is criticized because his support for continued British membership of the EU isn’t ‘enthusiastic’, ‘principled’ and ‘positive’ enough. But why should he pretend to be enthusiastic if he isn’t? For any socialist the European issue must be a … Continue reading →

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 →