August 2015

By the waters of human depravity I sat down and took it’s pressure – in lbs per square inch. We often forget – or at least, I often forget – on just how many ordinary, decent people the comfort of our lives depends. I was reminded of this the other day when a man from the water company called to check the quality … [Read on]

A friend of mine, David Fraser, who is writing a book about our criminal justice system soon to be published, recently pointed out to me a startling, but by no means unusual, discrepancy in the statistics provided by the Orwellianly-renamed Ministry of Justice. In the Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly for March 2014, one table tells us that in the year … [Read on]

In the introduction to his magisterial anthology, the late John Gross declined to offer a definition of good prose. His taste was as catholic as his knowledge was deep and wide, but it was also sure. Gross included examples of the flowery and the spare, the tragic and the comic, the poetical and the matter-of-fact in his book, but every … [Read on]

If one used only the Guardian as a guide to reality, one would imagine that, where property rental was concerned, only landlords were dishonest and exploitative, never tenants. There are a score articles easily available on its website about the evils of landlords, but not one about the evils of tenants. Indeed, in a certain worldview, the very word landlord is synonymous with evil. As … [Read on]