It takes a certain gift to combine cliché with error, but Mrs May – to judge by her recent big speech to the Conservative Party Conference – appears to have it in full. In so far as the speech did not consist of the most hackneyed and empty phrases, it could have been delivered by any Labour leader before Mr … [Read on]
What’s in a word, and how much can it express? Sometimes quite a lot, if it’s just the right one. The other day I had an example of how much a single well-chosen word can convey. I was at a conference to give a talk; it was held in a hotel in the country, not an old inn or country … [Read on]
There was a time when taking the pledge meant abjuring strong drink, but members of the Labour Party will soon have to take a different pledge: to abjure strong language online. Apparently Labour MPs have been inundated, or whatever the correct term for it is, by abusive electronic messages. One MP alone, Ruth Smeeth, has received 25,000 abusive messages, including … [Read on]
Arriving in England for the first time after the referendum, I half-expected to find scenes of xenophobia all around me. But there were none, partly, I suppose, because the natives are so heavily out-numbered in the area around St Pancras. In fact nothing much seemed to have changed except the Prime Minister and the cabinet. As I passed Euston Square … [Read on]
If I were a novelist, I should take José Manuel Barroso as the model for my hero, or perhaps I should say my anti-hero. Only Stendhal, or perhaps Balzac, could do justice to his trajectory in life: from revolutionary Maoist student to Prime Minister of Portugal to chief apparatchik of the European Union to vice-president of Goldman-Sachs with special responsibility … [Read on]
Mr Blair’s initial response to the Chilcot Enquiry’s report on the Iraq war was entirely predictable. He said that it had not claimed that he acted in bad faith, with the implication that this in some way justified his actions. The Iraq was but the backdrop to his psychodrama. In a sense, Mr Blair was right that bad faith had … [Read on]
The Canadian government, I see, is thinking of issuing sex-neutral identity cards, presumably on the grounds that some people have not yet chosen the sex they want to be. This, of course, is not going nearly far enough. Has the reactionary and highly oppressive Canadian government never heard of Multiple Personality Disorder, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder in the fifth … [Read on]
The headline of a story written in the Guardian newspaper by an American doctor caught my attention recently. It went as follows: ‘Heroin killed my brother 38 years ago. Too many still suffer in its clutches.’ The author stated, movingly, that the death of his brother more than thirty years ago affected him still and indeed that, in a sense, … [Read on]
Copyright © The Salisbury Review 2019. All rights reserved.