Category Archives: Uncategorized

Last night we managed to catch the Channel 4 drama-documentary Brexit: an Uncivil War, which we missed when it was originally broadcast, through a link Kajsa found. There’s a good review of it in today’s Dagens Nyheter (by a friend of … Continue reading →

Historians don’t usually like to guess the future. They know how unreliable that sort of thing has been in the past. Where’s the ‘thousand-year Reich’ today? Or, come to that, the thousand-year British Empire? (Yes, in the early 1900s some imperialists … Continue reading →

The distinguished economist Simon Wren-Lewis asks why the 2016 referendum result is regarded so highly now, in view of the obvious deficiencies and deceptions which have come to light in the 30 months since: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-2016-referendum-was-badly-designed.html. The answer, of course, is that … Continue reading →

Why do people insist on classifying depression as an illness? That’s better, of course, than treating it as a personal weakness – ‘pull yourself together!’ – but it implies that something is wrong with your body or mind. Is this … Continue reading →

Sorry to be so silent, but my blogging time has been taken up with a long and (mainly) instructive conversation on the LRB Blog: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/12/31/bernard-porter/what-is-corbyn-thinking/. I had been hoping to get back to the UK in time to see Channel … Continue reading →

I am so lucky to have Sweden as my bolt-hole from Brexit Britain. The Swedish Minister for the EU, Ann Linde, has just reassured us expats that, whatever happens in the Brexit negotiations, we’re safe, so far as our new … Continue reading →

My posting of a version of my last blog here on the LRB blogsite ruffled some feathers. Immediately a couple of anti-Corbynists leapt in with comments which didn’t begin to address my argument, but simply bad-mouthed JC. He is a ‘coward’, … Continue reading →

Corbyn’s getting a lot of stick just now – certainly on the anti-Brexit Facebook pages I subscribe to – for not clearly coming out in favour of a second referendum, and for ‘Remain’. The relatively left-wing Guardian is especially critical: but … Continue reading →

It’s hard to credit that two millennia of proud British history are about to end like this. (‘Proud’ in the sense that Brits have usually taken pride in  it; unjustifiably in many instances, I’ll grant.) Almost everyone in the wider … Continue reading →

Here’s Kajsa’s and my contribution to the London Review of Books  feature on the ways the Continental press has reacted to Brexit. It’s one of about a dozen, to be published (slightly edited) in the first January issue of the … Continue reading →