July 2019
The hills are alive with the sound of PC
Every year the BBC extravagantly boasts that its Promenade Concerts are “the world’s greatest series of concerts of classical music.” Well, let’s see… This is how they bill tonight’s offering: “The BBC Proms takes over the newly refurbished Battersea Arts Centre for a showcase of provocative, witty and boundary-crossing composer-performers, who have been driving new music in previously unimagined directions.” … [Read on]
Rentasecret
The last thing I thought would result from my cancer diagnosis was a begging letter from the Institute of Cancer Research. It informed me that my details were obtained from a business called The Museums Collection, from which I had over the years made various small purchases. That was the second such link to the Museums Collection within a week. … [Read on]
The word liberal. Is its modern meaning the freedom to oppress?
If you vote Liberal in Australia, you’re choosing the conservative option: liberal in economics and on freedom from state control, tougher on immigration and crime. In the USA, by contrast, ‘liberal’ is the Republicans’ term of abuse for leftist Democrats and their angry identity politics. In Great Britain, our political establishment and institutions are said to be immersed in ‘liberal-left’ … [Read on]
Boris’s Granny
I knew Boris’s maternal Granny in the nineties. She lived in the same block of flats as my mother in Oxford. They were both widows but Beechy (Beatrice )Lady Fawcett’s husband was Sir James Fawcett (who came from a family of distinguished liberals including the suffragette Millicent Fawcett) and a Fellow of All Souls and President of the European Commission on … [Read on]
Leavers eat with their hands, Remainers with knives and forks.
If Boris Johnson fails to get us out of the European Union by October there will be a general election. Brussels has long planned on it; they expect us, like the French, the Dutch and the Irish, to keep voting until we get it right and surrender our sovereignty. Everybody else has, why should the Rosbifs be different ? Which … [Read on]
Trump’s Tic: Saying it outloud.
The chorus of outrage grows surrounding Trump’s latest tweets, which suggested that four of his most outspoken critics – all Democratic congresswomen, all women ‘of colour’, and all excepting one born in America – hate America and should ‘go back home’. The four are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent; Rashida Tlaib, whose parents are Palestinian immigrants; Ilhan … [Read on]
A Christian in the illiberal Lion’s Den
Felix Ngole, a Christian who believes homosexuality to be wrong, was expelled from his social work course at the University of Sheffield for quoting on the net, in his private capacity as a Christian youth leader, the Bible’s teaching on the subject. Over the course of three stressful years, he lost his first appeal to the courts, but was successful … [Read on]