Hong Kong election latest

The People: 30%Reactionary bourgeois foreign anarcho-terrorist student black-hand hooligan elements: 70%Uighurs: Who? Long live Chinese National Socialism! Long live the Füh-, the Füh-, the People. When will we start calling the CCP what it is? "There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big …

Coup d’état, ou L’état c’est moi?

Donnie! Bibi! Evo! Irony alert. They're all corrupt and they are all prepared to cling to power through lies and force even when their corruption is no longer in serious question. Right now, all three are employing the time-worn tactic of shrieking that the very attempts to get rid of them are corrupt! - but …

Italo Calvino on how to be an efficient writer

"Every morning I tell myself, Today has to be productive—and then something happens that prevents me from writing. Today . . . what is there that I have to do today? Oh yes, they are supposed to come interview me. I am afraid my novel will not move one single step forward. "Something always happens. …

Happy birthday George Eliot!

One of the most luminous, most humane intelligences in history was born two hundred years ago today: But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might …

Al-chemie

Reading all the depressing news about plastic, which has now found its way to the bottom of the Marianas Trench - I'm reminded again of a gorgeous paragraph from that great Italian word-magus (and chemist, and survivor by the skin of his teeth of Auschwitz) Primo Levi: [T]he great problem of packaging, which every experienced …

English and its Historie

Why is English so much simpler in grammar and richer in vocabulary than so many other languages? (Why does the OED need twenty volumes?) I’ve been reading Robert Tombs’ vast and excellent The English and Their History. We reach the year 1399 - in which Henry Bolingbroke sneaks back into England while Richard II is …

Oh, and lock him up too.

Criminals, criminals, everywhereAnd none that stopped to thinkSamuel Taylor ColeridgeThe Crime of the Ancient Panderer A friend, out jogging this morning, stopped me in the park and ripped out his ear buds, grinning. "I just heard, and I want you to be the first to know. Guilty on all seven counts!" High fives, and on …

A total lack of common sense

A spokesperson for survivors of the Grenfell tragedy have apologized for saying that Jacob Rees-Mogg "showed a total lack of common sense" in failing to leave a recent interview in a timely manner, i.e. before saying things that "anyone who wasn't a half-wit would have understood to be insensitive, inappropriate, and in short plain stupid." …

Borne back into the past

Apparently the new season of The Crown will take us into the 1960s and actor David Wilmott will play union leader Arthur Scargill. This is disturbing. As a student I was involved with my university's debating union and in that capacity once found myself, in my ancient rusted Mini, playing chauffeur to the great provocateur …

Macboris: a fragment from a lost play about power and nihilism

Discovered recently among the manuscripts of that great English dramatist Willie A. Shamspeaker: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrowCreeps in this Brexit pace from year to yearTo the last Parliament of recorded time;And all our Tory pols have misled BritsThe way to paupers' deaths. Out, out, brief Johnson!You're but an Eton Con-man - a creeping bad-BoWho …