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Hello. Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time. An enduring series of digestible academia for the aspiring polymath too busy with career and kids to spend time in the Varsity. Alexei Sayle has scoffed at the middle class chatterboxes religiously tuning in to the programme each week, and claiming sudden specialist expertise only for it to evaporate Read more
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O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis. There is an enveloping mist on this Winter Solstice. This morning I heard Leslie Griffiths describe how 21 December marks the fulcrum of Advent. The descent into darkest winter is complete, coldness and silence. We pivot imperceptible from Read more
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On Wednesday probably around one hundred human lives (they still haven’t said how many) were sacrificed on the altar of English extreme inequality. The religious analogy is appropriate: the idea that there is nonatural or moral limit to the potential disparity between decadent wealth and grim poverty is tantamount to a tenet of a faith Read more
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LEAR: Who stock’d my servant? … O sides, you are too tough; Will you yet hold? How came my man i’ the stocks? CORNWALL: I set him there, sir: but his own disorders Deserved much less advancement. KING LEAR You! did you? REGAN I pray you, father, being weak, seem so. If, till the expiration Read more
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Barry Gardiner MP got grumpy with Nick Robinson last week because the BBC Today Programme had read out the Sun’s stupid headline ‘Crash bang wally’ insulting Corbyn on a day of mishaps on the election trail. Rather pleasingly, Gardiner kept misquoting the title, not sure if intentionally, as ‘crash bang wallop’, so the cheap pun Read more
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I was late getting home. Our eldest was under a blanket, glowering and saturnine, watching My Little Pony. Her mother had just tried unsuccessfully to interest her in a late supper. The little girl was in the danger zone, past bedtime on a school night. She could no longer tolerate contradiction of her whimsies, growing Read more
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In my waking life I do not hold David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn or Donald Trump in very high regard. But in my unconscious on sundry occasions in the last year or so, our relations have been quite sympathetic, even cordial. I am persuaded that, just as implied in the Acts of the Apostles and the Read more
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‘Good morrow, Benedick: Why, what’s the matter, That you have such a February face, So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?’ Much Ado about Nothing, Act V. Scene IV A few days ago I watched Alan Bennett’s Diaries, a film about Alan Bennett writing and reading his diaries. In the final scene we see Read more
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Council meeting Member states: We have a problem. Commission: Let’s do something. We will propose a solution in the European interest. France: I agree we must do something in the European interest but national governments should be in the lead. [i.e. France.] Germany: I welcome the Commission proposal but we will need to study details Read more
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When Trump was sworn in as President yesterday it started to rain on Capitol Hill, raining on the modest throng of snowflakes and deplorables clustered on the first five segments of white tarpaulin along the National Mall, barely reaching the Smithsonian Information Centre, so far as I could tell. The rain was a sign of Read more
rooting around for grubs in diverse soils
ofthewedge 