Bullets are harmless. So are microbes. And innocent Israel is the helpless puppet of amoral America. How can we know all that? It’s thanks to a falsehood-smashing truth-technique recently deployed at Spiked Online. That’s the headquarters of the Trotskyist libertarians who fight for a better world under the guidance of the Jewish sociologist Frank Furedi. […]
The book I remembered; the author I forgot. Not that I ever read the book. I just read about it in Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984). One of the choices was called Riddley Walker and Burgess lavished praise on it. He described how it used […]
Yuck! Stale pale males. They’re the worst of the wickedest, the vilest of the villainous. That’s what all decent and caring progressive folk are agreed upon. But this raises what you might call a prosoponic paradox (prosōpon is ancient Greek for “face”). In Britain, the proudly progressive Labour Party has traditionally been the home of […]
Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen! That’s one of the most plaintive and poignant things I’ve ever read. Ironically enough, it’s also one of the most penetrating. In English it goes: “I’ve seen my death!” That’s what Anna Bertha Röntgen, wife of the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, reportedly said in 1895 after she saw an X-ray […]
Dying young. It turns performers into legends and politicians into footnotes. For proof of that, just compare James Dean (1931-55) with John Smith (1938-94). Seventy-one years after he died in a car-crash, the actor James Dean is still famous, still at the heart of a devoted cult. Thirty-two years after he died of a heart-attack, […]
