A reader sends me this striking quote from Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli, spoken in the novel by Sindonia, the brilliant Sephardic Jew: I always look upon Diplomatists as the Hebrews of politics; without country, political creeds, popular convictions, that strong reality of existence which pervades the career of an eminent citizen […]
In the second half of 2011 Poland holds the EU Presidency for the first time. To get you in the swing of Poland and the EU, here is a new blog by my friend the excellent Polish Gazeta journalist Dominika Pszczólkowska: Poland in the EU. The point about reading Blogs […]
Here is Britblog Roundup 213. Which leads us to Chris Dillow (Stumbling and Mumbling: An extremist, not a fanatic): A key part of the task for the post-New Labour party must be to reshape the electorate, creating client groups loyal to it. In this context, redistribution becomes more important – […]
This story of the ghastly township violence in South Africa against real or suspected lesbians – ‘corrective rape’ – has drawn a lot of attention. The ferocity and brutality of Simelane’s murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the […]
Yesterday while prowling through the fields near where we live I saw two dogs far from their owners chase and bring down a small deer. What I learned from this episode is that the gruesome wildlife programmes which we sometimes see on TV are dumbed down for our entertainment. It […]
As I have previously noted, Diplomatic Blogging by serving diplomats is fraught with complications: The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can’t work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government […]
The point about Political Correctness is that it is an attempt to define an ideological and then physical control agenda solely on progressive/leftist terms. It matters less what those terms are than that no-one else other than in-crowd progressives/leftists gets to have a say in defining them. Often the issue is […]
Soaring sales of Ayn Rand’s books in the USA (Atlas Shrugged is high at number 30 in the Amazon bestsellers list) are rattling supposedly progressive thinkers over here. See eg the Guardian desperately falling back on those two honest thinkers Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek to try to put people […]
Here (hat-tip Instapundit) is a superb analysis by Clay Sharky of why newspapers are dying – fast. Clay looks back to the turbulent times of the invention of printing itself, to explain why newspapers arose to deal with a technical problem which no longer exists – how to print and distribute […]
Some rather disobliging words have been written by former Foreign Office Minister Chris Mullins in his memoirs about an allegedly garrulous senior British diplomat : ‘a fifty-something, chain-smoking (what is it about ambassadors in this part of the world) woman’ who is ‘oh, so noisy’. So, of course, the media have been busy tracking […]
