F.R. Leavis said, “Show me what you value and I’ll tell you what you’re worth.” One glance at the most popular shows on TV, or at the sort of “music” most listen to, must make us conclude that the worth of the British public at large is not very much. Most of the productions of what is now called “arts” … [Read on]
The English of 1927 were more than 90 per cent the descendants of the English of AD 927. The story of the English people used to be straightforward. In the fifth and sixth centuries, following the departure of the Roman legions, successive waves of Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea to settle in Britain. I remember drawing three … [Read on]
Well, the #Me Too movement has made Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. It seems the land of the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy Hearings has done it again. And this time the inquisition is better than ever, for in Salem, there was that needling formality of a trial. How dull, when the good lynching spirit, so inextricable part … [Read on]
A recent TV drama described the long, bitter feud between Hollywood sirens Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. It showed in gory detail their creative struggle with each other and the heartless Hollywood studios who owned them. According to the story, Bette won because she had raw talent whilst Crawford only ever had looks. Bette was a plain, skinny little thing … [Read on]
In the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest a criminal (Jack Nicholson) gets himself admitted to an insane asylum in order to avoid the dangers of prison life. He ends up having his frontal lobes disconnected from the rest of his brain using an ice pick hammered through his skull just above the eyelid (the standard operation in those … [Read on]
Professor Nigel Biggar, Regius professor of theology at Christ Church, was branded a racist, and bigot by an anti-racist group in Oxford, for daring to question the cultural orthodoxy in academia, with regard to colonialism and the British empire. All he said was that society should take a more nuanced view of the empire, and consider its pros and cons. … [Read on]
Egalitarianism was on full display on New Year’s Eve when in a premeditated attack a middle aged female police officer was stomped and kicked around by scores of “French youths” in Paris. If you read that sentence, and immediately have some imagery in your mind, be assured that you are correct in every guess that you have just made. The video … [Read on]
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