3,335 words
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
—Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.
The nature of reality has puzzled men since long before even the Greeks asked ti esti?; “What is it?” Reality has been explained in as many different ways as there have been thinkers to explain it. Even the supposed precision of the physical sciences can’t persuade scientists to agree on the ultimate nature of reality. (more…)
4,529 words
In 2009, Nigel Farage was ranked in a poll as the 41st most powerful right-winger in the UK. Farage might have disagreed with the “right-winger” label, he said at the time, “preferring to consider myself a Whig”, but few would contest now that he has risen from 41st to first in 15 years, and is currently the most important politician in the United Kingdom, let alone right-winger. (more…)
3,960 words
At school there was a weekly roll-call of bad boys, those who had broken the school rules at the highest level. They would be required to attend the headmaster’s office and, as the weeks of the term rolled by, a pattern began to emerge. Some boys rarely made the blacklist, some maybe once a term, some never (future prefects all). But a few names came up with some regularity, and one or two were permanent fixtures. And I should know. (more…)
3,657 words
Architecture as a profession seems a very abstract concept in these technocratic times. Remote, intellectual, and almost esoteric. But unless you happen to be standing in a desert, or some Arctic tundra (and I’m amazed you can get a signal if you are), then architecture is all around you. You can see it everywhere you look. (more…)
3,206
The Jury’s Out?
The British people are starting to understand something vitally important, albeit at glacial speed: the current Labour government is not incompetent, it is malevolent. Nigel Farage, widely tipped as the next British Prime Minister, put it rather well in an open letter to the British people the day after the budget (of which more later). (more…)
3,364 words
Just as the great pleasure of having a good bottle of wine is having another, so too one of the great pleasures of reading a book you enjoy is re-reading it. When you approach a book for a second time, you already know you like it, which takes the pressure off. If it’s Dostoevsky, for example, you don’t have to spend the first 20 pages memorizing 17 different characters who each have three different names. You already did all that. (more…)
4,146 words
Dominic Sandbrook
Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to The Beatles
Little, Brown Book Group, 2005
Harold MacMillan was Britain’s Prime Minister (PM) between 1957 and 1963, winning a Conservative Party leadership election after Sir Anthony Eden was forced to resign over the Suez Canal debacle, and thus becoming PM. Despite Britain’s humiliation by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, this was a time of relative prosperity and stability in Britain. (more…)
2,500 words
The word “technocracy” has recently become firmly established in Western political and media discourse. It’s tempting to define it as “rule by technology”, but that begs the question. The Ancient Greek word technē is the root of both modern words, “technology” and “technocracy”, and it means “to make or do, fashion or create.” (more…)
3,007 words
British people are not doing a great deal of laughing at the moment. Innocents are being butchered or raped in the streets or on trains, the economy is being frog-marched to the cliff’s edge, and there are more bad actors in the Houses of Parliament than there are on British television. And there isn’t even anything funny on telly to take a nation’s mind off its decline and fall. (more…)
3,535 words
It must be accepted that racism and discrimination are often at the heart of why Black people face… inequalities and there are growing calls for racism to be regarded as a determinant of health to better understand this.
—Black Mental Health Manifesto
We must be mad, literally mad…
—Enoch Powell (more…)
3,142 words
In the late 1980s I lived in Brixton, South London. The London in England, that is, not the one in Kentucky or the dozen or so other Londons that are dotted across North America. Occasionally, on a Saturday night after the pubs closed, my friends and I would pile over to the all-night movie show. The famous cinema there was called The Ritzy—formerly The Little Bit Ritzy—and it was a flea-bitten old pit, a relic from the pre-TV golden age of British cinemas. (more…)
3,368 words
Some texts are not as daunting as their reputation makes them seem. Many years ago, an English talk-radio host named Nick Ferrari was in conversation with an American lady caller about some political scandal in her home country. The subject of the American Constitution came up, and the lady said that she presumed Ferrari, as a journalist, had read that document. He exploded into laughter: “Of course not! It must be hundreds of pages long!” (more…)
