Jean-Jacques Rousseau, left, and David Hume.
3,901 words
“No good deed goes unpunished,” as the old saw goes. It puts a cynical, waggish twist on the perspicacious observation that acts of genuine generosity and kindness too often come to grief. Benefactors beware! Shades of Thomas Hobbes: “Man to man is a wolf.” (more…)
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Editor’s Note: This March 27, 2008, British National Party “stump speech” given in Tameside was transcribed by Hyacinth Bouquet. Sadly, the video is incomplete. If anyone has a complete version, or information about where it was filmed, please contact us at [email protected].
Every element that sustained prior forms of British English life is declining or has dipped down. Marriage and the family are in turmoil, and hardly anyone is marrying. (more…)
1,659 words
Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies.
With a Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999
Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. (more…)
J. K. Rowling, who earned praise for getting herself cancelled this year by refusing to back down from her normal views on genitalia and gender.
2,411 words
We can be heroes just for one day. — David Bowie
Hans, are we the baddies? — Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring Nazi soldiers
As European and Commonwealth countries act like faithful servants to the autocratic global coup currently taking place, my own home country of England has fallen into step like a good foot-soldier. The government, nominally Conservative but actually a sort of Green Socialist elite oligarchy, has gone full Bezmenov, contradicting itself on a daily basis about COVID and preventing its people from seeing dying loved ones while it parties maskless indoors. (more…)
Captain John Smith, one of the Jamestown colony’s early leaders.
4,356 words
The Pilgrims who funded Plymouth Colony receive a great deal of glory. This glory is well deserved, but other shiploads of colonists did valorous things as well. The same year the Mayflower[1] crossed the Atlantic, so too did the Bona Nova. The latter vessel’s destination was Virginia, but it was swept northwards by the tides and wind. The crew recovered the situation by beating against the wind back towards Virginia, arriving in January of 1621. (more…)
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When I was in college, the campus offered a film series called Twice-Told Tales. You would view a film followed by its remake three days later. Films like Dangerous Female (1931), starring the well-known actor Ricardo Cortez. Whatever happened to Ricardo Cortez? For that matter, Dangerous Female? The remake did rather better: The Maltese Falcon (1942), starring Humphrey Bogart. We sure know him. (more…)
2,285 words
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
the score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
a sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game. (more…)
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The singer Édith Piaf famously, and throatily, regretted nothing about anything. But the poet John Betjeman wished that he’d had more sex. And the economist John Maynard Keynes that he’d drunk more champagne. Me? I regret two things much more important than recreational sex or champagne. (more…)
Ollie Robinson bowling
1,418 words
Cricket. Not as homely as “mom and apple pie,” but, to the Englishman, just as evocative of home. If American readers don’t know the game, I won’t attempt to explain more than to say it’s the one that is played by what look like hospital interns using bookshelves as bats who attempt to swat a baseball-sized, rock-hard, red leather ball hurled by a bowler (more…)
10,882 words
Editor’s note: This is a transcript of Millennial Woes’ speech at the 2017 London Forum. We would like to thank Hyacinth Bouquet for this transcript. (more…)
1,787 words
When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everyone laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.
— Bob Monkhouse
If you and your friends were to have a séance, and you channeled the spirit of George Orwell, the greatest Englishman never to appear on a banknote would use the glass to tap out the following: stop quoting 1984. (more…)
George Barbier, “Eventails (Fans)”
7,971 words
Twentieth Century Studios is threatening to release a remake of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937). And if Kenneth Branaugh’s previous outing as the Hercule Poirot character in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express was anything to go by, best to avoid it. (more…)