Category Archives: War

It’s true as well as inspiring to say that London is a great, multicultural city and will recover from this. It has the traditions of resilience, tolerance, and diversity. But that’s not so true of England as a whole, and … Continue reading → Continue reading →

If there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t read the NYRB, get over there at once. I have always admired Tony Judt a great deal for his careful and dispassionate analysis. This is the week dispassion hits the buffers: Historians and … Continue reading → Continue reading →

“Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied” is not always a good motto, but for Rumsfeld it works well enough. What happens afterwards is really very frightening to contemplate. Continue reading →

You’d think that handwriting was easier to identify than typewriting. But when the latest Government memorandum on the war was leaked, it came hand-written, copied from a computerised original to make the leak harder to trace. Evidence that this was … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The FT is running a poll on its site; to which, I believe, only subscribers have access. And among the people prepared to pay Continue reading →

This is still worth thinking about. It’s the paragraph that follows my previous entry. In those early days, people didn’t write UN, but U.N.O.: In order to have any efficacy whatever, a world organization must be able to override big … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I try not to do agitprop too much. It almost all comes back to “I told you so” and the only people who listen are those who were also telling them so. But this is Rafe Coburn, whom I have … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Positively the last comment on the election result comes from the sun God, who heard the news on Thursday evening: It is possibly also the same deity or one of his hot-tempered demigod children who put this on Craigslist. Continue reading →

When I went to bed this morning, at about three, I was so sure we had won; and so, I think, were the people on the BBC. It seemed just, fitting, divinely ordained, almost. When I woke up at seven … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I see that John Kerry has drifted out again to 5/4 on Victor Chandler; although I haven’t bet on anything since the 2001 Grand National, I bunged on Continue reading →