August 2014

It is said that after the age of about forty the great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, read nothing except the Bible and newspapers. These days, alas, newspapers play an ever smaller role in the cultural role of any country. I don’t know a single young person who reads, let alone takes, a newspaper regularly. I say alas not because I … [Read on]

The French newspapers of late have reported clashes in Calais between different nationalities of ‘refugees’ camping there, preparatory to illegal entry into Britain. The French offer them advice as to how to claim asylum in France, but they are not interested in doing so. They want to get to England, their ‘promised land,’ according to the newspapers. According to my … [Read on]

What are British values, recently so beloved of Mr Gove? The question could quickly drive you mad. Apart from anything else, if the referendum in Scotland goes the wrong way, there will soon be no Britain for values to be British about. Are British values to be inferred from the conduct of present-day Britons (how I hate the abbreviation, Brits), … [Read on]

Success in indirection lies, wrote Emily Dickinson, but I think our age responds more to the explicit than to the implicit, at least in literature. Recently, for example, I read of the discovery and sale of the manuscript of Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-war poem Atrocities, published in 1919, in which Sassoon denounced the atrocities committed on the British side during the … [Read on]