June 2015

Casting my eye idly over my bookshelves the other day, I picked out The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, his internationally best-selling attack on the Treaty of Versailles, published immediately after his resignation from the British delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919. He predicted it would lead to disaster, and certainly disaster was not long … [Read on]

Every few days when I am in my house in France I receive a telephone call from India claiming to be from the technical department of Microsoft. The first time I received such a call a young woman informed me that my computer was on the verge of implosion and that if I did not follow her instructions, give her … [Read on]

It is surely not enough that Professor Sir Timothy Hunt, should have been forced to resign from that great centre of disinterested enquiry, University College, London, for having drawn attention to the fact that women tend to cry more than men; he should be expelled forthwith from the Royal Society, stripped of his knighthood and his British citizenship, deprived of … [Read on]

It is too much to hope, I suppose, that FIFA’s present difficulties will put an end once and for all to the horrible four-yearly fortnight of football to the exclusion of everything else. What I particularly dislike about it is to see those silly little English flags flying from cars as they drive past. Luckily, the patriotic phase of the … [Read on]