Society

It was surely a stroke of spectacular good fortune that no sooner had the Biden administration altered the internationally accepted definition of a recession (as two quarters of negative GDP) than data was released which – under the old definition – meant that the US economy would have been in …

Tory leadership debates are, apparently, so mind-numbingly banal that getting too close to one can render you unconscious.  It is even worse for those of us who actually lived through the 1980s and remember Thatcher as a divisive figure who permanently vandalised Britain’s economic base to the point where we …

Two protests took place in Britain yesterday.  One involved a piece of petty bourgeois performance art in which “Just Stop Oil” protestors glued themselves to an artwork at the National Gallery in order – via some unknown mechanism – to bring an end to the oil age.  The second involved …

For as long as climate change was off in the distant future, governments have been able to trade warm words for concrete action.  In a similar vein, a certain kind of green politician has been able to trade on the pretence that ending fossil fuel use would come at no …

The myth of Nero fiddling as Rome burned was largely concocted by political opponents to portray him as both uncaring and incompetent.  But one reason why the myth has persisted down the ages is that it speaks to something profound in the human psyche.  When faced with an irresolvable predicament, …

It is a measure of the complete degeneracy of the fake left these days, that at a time when Pentagon insiders are saying that there is a one-in-three chance that the majority of us will be annihilated in a nuclear war within days, that in the UK at least, the …

It is impossible for almost all modern humans to understand the psychological shock of the fourteenth century Black Death.  Surrounded as we are by a plethora of media outlets, perhaps our biggest problem is distinguishing between myriad impossible narratives about our future and the handful which actually conform to the …

For a state like the UK, which has been in relative decline since the late nineteenth century, and absolute decline since the 1970s, one can even envisage a return to something akin to the much earlier political divisions with, perhaps, a new Wessex emerging in the south, and a new Northumbria in the north.

Something strange is happening to the starlings in Wales.  On the afternoon of 10 December 2019, Bodedern, Anglesey resident, Hannah Stevens, had observed a murmuration of some 250-500 of the birds while on her way to an appointment.  On her return later that evening, Ms Stevens was shocked to find …

The image of Marie Antoinette dressing up and playing shepherdess in the grounds of her Hameau de la Reine folly at Versailles while Paris burned in the distance may owe more to the mythology of the subsequent revolution, but it speaks to an aristocratic elite which had severed all ties …