Via Arts and Letters Daily this compare and contrast clash between two modern women and their attitudes. In one corner: writer Rebecca Solnit on how men patronise women. In the other: anatomically all-present-and-correct(!) Amy Alkon, Advice Goddess, on how Rebecca Solnit is "subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest" (not to mention sniveling, meek, mewling and many […]
More hi-octane prose from (of course) Camille Paglia bearing down on Hillary Clinton and her prospects. Questions. Camille says this : Furthermore, Hillary’s mythomania and her chameleon-like daily alterations of persona and voice are unsettling. (Even Hillary’s eye colour is fake: she wears blue contact lenses.) No male candidate enjoys […]
On my Foreign Office travels I have picked up a goodly selection of ‘European’ languages to add to my distant A-Level French and Latin and O-Level German and Spanish. First, back in 1981 I learned lot of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian (then called ‘Serbo-Croat’). After that I reached a reasonable standard in Afrikaans – […]
Just say that you work for a major media outlet. But you are not a nice person. So you send send a website you do not like a message via the site’s Contact facility: I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut…. But you do not […]
The BBC reports firm action by Iraqi security forces against ‘militants’ in and around Basra as well as various ‘fighters’ in Baghdad. Not long ago these various violent factions were known as ‘insurgents’. Has General Petraeus done so well with his Surge in killing or neutralising a sufficiently large number of ‘insurgents’ […]
What is unfolding now in Zimbabwe is what we would have seen in Serbia in 2000 if Milosevic had had his way in the elections which brought him down. An extended attempt to avoid declaring a result through trite, pompous bureaucratic and legal manoeuvres. This is aimed at taking the psychological […]
Mugabe is worse than the white supremacist leader, Ian Smith, who he overthrew. He has murdered more black Africans than the apartheid villains Hendrik Verwoerd, John Forster and P W Botha. Reading this I come away with a clear view that Peter Tatchell disapproves of Presidents Mugabe and Mbeki. Is […]
My observations on Power and Purpose attracted this interesting thought from someone in the Mini containing my ever-growing army of readers, himself once closely involved in British government sharp-end business: It always struck me that the FCO was truly excellent when faced with a bad situation. They could be relied […]
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian shrieks today that pink ‘Girlification’ is destroying the ‘hopes of 1968’. She cites National Statistics Office numbers as showing that "women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. This is the motherhood penalty – and the more children a woman has, […]
Back in April 1986 Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe made a powerful speech at the Lord Mayor’s Diplomatic Banquet in London in which he called for an an end to the global agriculture subsidy race. I remember it well, as I helped him draft it. Some changes have happened since […]
