Category Archives: Uncategorized

There were two major examples of cheating revealed yesterday: by the Brexit side in the EU Referendum (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/26/pressure-grows-on-pm-over-brexit-cambridge-analytica-scandal-theresa-may); and by the Australian cricket team during the last test match against South Africa (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/mar/26/australian-outrage-over-ball-tampering-born-out-of-teams-moralising-hypocrisy). Before you dismiss the latter as merely … Continue reading →

Theresa and Boris are really ratcheting up the anti-Russian rhetoric. This must mean – mustn’t it? – that they have solider proof of Putin’s responsibility for the Salisbury attack than they are letting on. Otherwise surely they’d hold their horses. … Continue reading →

The Right do seem to be more enmired in political skulduggery than the Left. In the past that wasn’t necessarily so – I’m not forgetting the ‘black arts’ practised by the Soviet Union in recent times, and clearly inherited by … Continue reading →

Yesterday I booked a flight from Manchester to Belfast on the internet. Half an hour later I received on Facebook an advert for a guidebook to Belfast, from another seller entirely and entirely unsolicited. Not very serious, you might think, … Continue reading →

A dilemma: Routledge want to publish a sixth (!) edition of the Lion’s Share, but in order to justify calling it an ‘edition’ rather than a ‘reprint’ they want me to revise it and bring it up to date. I’ve … Continue reading →

Catching up on BBC2’s latest documentary on Putin, The New Tsar, first shown last Friday, it struck me how alike he and Trump are. Neither has any principles beyond ‘making his country “great” again’, after recent humiliations – often at … Continue reading →

Is this Theresa May’s ‘Falklands moment’, several commentators have asked? This refers of course to the way Galtieri’s aggression against the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands in 1982 presented Thatcher with the opportunity to reverse her currently low domestic poll ratings by … Continue reading →

Finished my latest book – unlucky no. 13. It’s really just a collection of my old essays, reviews and even a blog or two, most of them previously published in other forms, with an attempt to fit them into a … Continue reading →

It looks pretty likely that the Russian government had a hand in the Salisbury atrocity. But why should Corbyn be excoriated for holding back from blaming Putin directly? In Parliament today the Tories seemed to be accusing him of treachery … Continue reading →

I was on the side of the hooligans, I’m afraid, when they invaded the pitch during West Ham’s defeat at home vs Burnley, and chased the owners out of the directors’ box. One of the protesters’ banners says it all: … Continue reading →