A Political Refugee From The Global Village

Is there anything more fun than a bad-tempered academic debate? It looks more and more that climate change fears are a lot of hot air but i...

Universities should only exist online (with a small number of exceptions like Oxford and Cambridge, which are needed to create an elite and...

Today's Daily Telegraph bears this baleful news : "Academics say that traditional teachers' titles such as 'Sir' ...

I was so saddened to be told last night that there are now budget flights from England to Georgia. I want Georgia to remain my secret cou...

What great books should we leave unread? An article in the Guardian asking this question prompted me to answer it. I would start with all...

I realised only now that Romania's intense religiosity is not an Orthodox or Balkan thing. Serbia, Bulgaria and Russia are much less re...

I decided to get to Kosovo after many years of thinking about it. I took a plane from Bucharest to Belgrade as the night train has been di...

This is a fascinating article by one of my favourite historians, Lord Skidelsky, about the Cold War and whether it will start all over aga...

In the end, from all my options for Easter, including Mount Athos,  Meterora, Kiev, Transylvania, Rome and Clacton-on-Sea, I chose to retur...

The Brighton Argus had misattributed the comments about a future "war between mankind and goats" to the director of the Bri...

Lenin spoke English with an Irish accent, say Russians. Is there any footage of Lenin speaking?  Here is Trotsky speaking Englis h, cou...

How much more free England was in the 1930s is illustrated by this quotation from George Orwell, who turns out to be no friend to gun cont...

Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Odessa - not from the Nazis but from the Romanians. The Romanians are remembered by elde...

Charles Moore writes  in the Daily Telegraph about the philosophical underpinnings of the global warming fears - what he calls warmism. ...

At dinner last night a Romanian friend told me that Bulgarians, visiting their monasteries, behave like holidaymakers, unlike Romanians who...

I hate whiskey but it is not true, as Belloc says, that it is a Protestant drink. It is an Catholic, Irish drink and when the Scotch copied...

I suddenly see why people who studied mathematics or science are not usually interesting when they talk politics - Margaret Thatcher being ...

Clarissa Dickson Wright was after my time, which is to say her television programmes were, my time being when I started work and stopped wa...

'O, help me heaven,' she prayed, `to be decorative and to do right'. 'I know of no joy,' she airily began, 'greate...

Harriet Wilson had one of the best opening lines in literature:  I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistres...