CARTER GODWIN WOODSON’S THE MIS-EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO I am fascinated by chance finds in second-hand bookshops. Favorite books that have shaped my life have often been objets trouvés, washed up by the tide, the same way Nietzsche found Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig in 1865, when […]
“What do they know of England who only England know?” Rudyard Kipling’s famous question, a line from his poem The English Flag, was actually written in defense of Empire, but is still worth asking by Englishmen in these post-imperial times. Enoch Powell, however, found the phrase sadly outdated. In a speech given on St. George’s […]
August is traditionally a quiet month in the United Kingdom. The British go on their summer holidays, perversely leaving the country during the hottest month of the year to seek sunshine in foreign climes. Parliament goes into recess, and so no new laws are passed. Even the media take a break, the lack of newsworthy […]
The Triumph of the Political Class Peter Oborne Simon & Schuster, 2007; paperback: Pocket Books, 2008 Words and phrases often enter the political lexicon via the US media before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the UK, and one such recent migrant is the “uniparty”. The Americans have been using it for some time, and the […]
Pre-election Britain is currently going through a self-evaluation in such a way that, were it retail goods brought over a shop counter, there could be an action brought under the UK’s Trade Descriptions Act of 1968. This piece of legislation replaced the Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 with “fresh provisions prohibiting misdescriptions of goods, services, […]
Economics is tailor-made for technocrats. It revolves around systems, and systems are everything for our current hyper-managerial class of social engineers. Once a system is in place, whether it works or not takes second place to its complicated maintenance. The subsequent problem for the technocrat task force is how that system is presented to non-specialists, […]
When the Roman poet Juvenal first used the phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodes in the sixth of his second-century Satires, he was referring playfully to critics of his relationship with his wife. The phrase’s passage to its current status as a political lock-and-guard mechanism came via its misattribution to Plato’s Republic. But the observation of […]
