A Political Refugee From The Global Village

Davin Ellicson a brilliant young American photographer wrote this to me today, which is worth sharing. I went to the night of the galleri...

Freedom of speech means the right to offend. The freedom to say inoffensive things isn't freedom at all. Far too few people are being ...

Why does Africa look away when Africans are drowned in the Mediterranean? Why do the Arab states look away when ISIS are killing Muslims Ch...

Hillary Clinton won't win the US presidential election, simply because the dynamics of journalism require her to lose. Her winning woul...

I was in the beautiful Assyrian monastery of Saint Matthew's (Mar Mattai in Syriac) in 2010, overlooking the plain of Nineveh. In tho...

Jesus was an itinerant exorcist. If you don't believe in exorcism, you don't believe in Christianity.  Modern man prefers, understa...

"Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits." Robert Louis Stevenson "Until one is commi...

A New York yellow cabbie is facing $15,000 in fines for ordering two female passengers to stop kissing. It used to be the law not so long a...

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the...

If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconsc...

A friend of mine and I have just exchanged these mails. He wrote first. Sat at home, sombre, listening to St Matthew's Passion. Thought...

Young fogeys never grow old. As I strode on my way home through a decrepit part of town a gypsy woman in peacock-colourful dress just sto...

An article by Professor Conor Gearty from today's Independent makes a plea for an internationalist United Kingdom, a sibling in Europe...

Ernest Hemingway’s friends bet him that he couldn’t write a complete story in just six words. He wrote: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn...

I keep coming back to this quotation, which seems to have more meaning and a different meaning from what it had years ago when I first came...

Yesterday King Richard III  was given, as he would have wanted, a Catholic Requiem Mass , his body having been discovered under a car park ...

There's another story about gang killings in Sweden  today in the Guardian . Sweden used to be a country with extremely low levels of...

An interesting article in today's Independent by Patrick Cockburn compares Tony Blair with three previous British leaders whose careers...

What would the great writers have made of the internet? It's impossible to know, except in the case of E.M. Forster, who wrote about th...

This analysis by General Petraeus , who  took charge of the US 'surge' in Iraq, is worth taking the time to read. He says, inter al...