A Political Refugee From The Global Village

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...

Jesus' subsequent followers have been less careful. They have sent him on Crusades, made him a freedom-fighter, involved him in civil ...

Tony Benn, whose death was just announced, was a foolish, foolish man and much worse. But he was right on this:  "Britain's cont...

The Malaysian airplane that has disappeared reminds me of  'the cutter Alicia, which sailed one spring morning into a small patch o...

Is Ukraine a real country, even by the standards of Eastern Europe? We shall see. Nation-building is what the Ukrainian revolution is abou...

This interesting article by Simon Jenkins in today's Guardian  is a refreshing diatribe against mathematics.  I wonder what subjects ...

"The UN watchdog for children’s rights denounced the Holy See for adopting policies allowing priests to sexually abuse thousands of c...

The Belgians are “surprised” that much – not enough, but still much – of the world is repulsed by the  country legalising child euthanasia ...

For a sixth week storms continue to batter Great Britain.  It is a lie that the floods  have anything to do with climate change. My friend ...