Welcome to BBRU 226. First things first Can you bake a good cake? Misssy M is struggling. Does the Objectification of Women via the explosion of pornography really lead to bad outcomes for women? Not at the Himmelgarten Café. Update: And, to get us into the swing of what follows, a magnificent example from Liberal England of European […]
Is the British National Party primitive and racist? Or (worse) sophisticated and racist? There are quite a few websites out there which in one way or the other give cover/sympathy to the BNP or at least its arguments against ‘elites’, yet which are evidently written by educated people. See eg […]
For my birthday I received the DVD set of the BBC’s Little Dorrit adaptation. At first sight this falls some way short of the utterly wonderful BBC Bleak House. Little Dorrit is too feisty and (perhaps because the convolutions of the original plot were just too convoluted?) there are some clunky […]
Obama fan Camille Paglia looks at that Cairo speech, and is less impressed than she had hoped to be. Thus: Obama’s speech (which I read rather than heard) seemed to my teacher’s eye like a strong first draft rather than a polished final product… The Cairo speech is well-organized, ticking […]
Orwell Prize-winner Johann Hari is the new generation’s answer to Polly Toynbee, a turbo-charged Progressive who pops up all over the place. It was he, you recall, who wrote a wildly wrong account of the railcrash episode in Atlas Shrugged: Indeed, her contempt for ordinary people extends so far that […]
Back in 1973 I was at Oxford University with the likes of notorious toxophilist Tony Blair and Benazir Bhutto. It was a time of student so-called unrest, with a mass sit-in at the Schools Building in autumn 1973 to demand a Central Students Union. Basically, see, the point was that the […]
The symbol of Warsaw is a mermaid, even though Warsaw lies some way from the sea. Here is my successor HM Ambassador to Warsaw Ric Todd in a sandpit showing a playful mermaidish mode. Separately, the Embassy has been hosting a reception for gay rights activists as a gesture of support […]
Is here, hosted by Slugger O’Toole, although to keep us on our toes he labels it BBRU 213. With the Archbishop analysing the Caroline Flint fiasco. A defining moment for New Labour-style ‘feminism’?
Brown was not discomforted alone. Parties of the centre left fell back across Europe despite the crisis of global capitalism. Michael White in the Guardian glumly picks through the wreckage of the Labour Party’s crashing failure last night in the European elections. Maybe parties of the centre left fell back […]
My region’s re-elected MEP Dan Hannan has a way with words. First he depicts Labour as the Terminator: It doesn’t matter how often you blow it up, it just keeps crawling towards you. And then he gets on to Dr Seuss.
