Why my Uncle Bill was Contemptible
When Germany invaded Belgium and France in August 1914, many people on both sides thought it was going to be something of a walk over. The Germans put two and a half million armed…
Who is the worst villain in fiction?
Who is the worst villain in fiction? There is no shortage of candidates from which to choose in this game that anyone can play. There are the most–wanted criminals, Professor…
Should Eliza Doolittle marry Professor Higgins?
George Bernard Shaw wrote his celebrated play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, in 1912. It opened in New York in March 1914 and London in April 1914, with Mrs Patrick…
The Wisdom of Crowds
Since the beginning of the “age of the common man” in the nineteenth century, there has been a widely held belief that, as Henry Thoreau put it, ‘The mass never comes up to…
What makes a novel good?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Elizabeth Bennett might have put it, that the novel is a story about people. No-one could disagree with this definition, but it is…
Why SOE gave away Britain’s top war secret to the Nazis
At a crucial stage of World War II, the Special Operations Executive deliberately allowed one of its most closely guarded top secrets to fall into Nazi hands – as part of a…
Remain v Leave: two awkward truths
My first awkward truth is one that both Remainers and Leavers can agree on, if they are honest with each other. It is that no-one really knows what will happen when the UK leaves…
How to tell bad companies
Some years back, I published a book titled Bad Company: Behind the corporate mask, which the Sunday Times was generous enough to nominate as its Business Book of the Week. The…
The myth of the Brexit “Cliff Edge”
Before the Brexit referendum we had Project Fear. We now have the myth of the Cliff Edge that British businesses are going to stumble over in March 2019 – causing us to beg the…
Why Freud is important to the future of science
Most of Freud’s ideas are considered rather old-fashioned today, but I suspect that, before we exiled the old boy so completely, we should have checked his luggage more…
Can the UK afford standards after Brexit?
Writing on the effects of Brexit, tax expert Richard Murphy asks whether the UK is capable of meeting international standards once we leave the EU. He writes, “Saying we will…
Book Review: “How I lost by Hillary Clinton”
How on earth could an experienced politician like Hillary Clinton, anointed by Barack Obama as his successor, backed by the Democratic Party elite, and by the bankers of Wall…
Wonder Woman’s kinky secret
Wonder Woman has been a long time in coming to the big screen, but the wait has been more than worth the while and the Amazonian princess has already established a proud place in…
Lies, damned lies, and immigration figures
University College London (UCL) prides itself – rightly – on being “London’s leading multidisciplinary university, with 11000 staff, 35000 students and an annual…
Cloud Atlas (2012)
The Wachowskis crave complexity. David Mitchell gave them the fix they needed with his novel Cloud Atlas. After the Matrix franchise had revolutionised cinema in terms of…
The limits of reason?
Everyone educated at a European or American university in the past 50 years has emerged with the tenets of Western Scientific rationalism as the foundation of that education and…
The value of the £ and playing for safety
The value of the pound is determined by just one thing – buying and selling by foreign exchange dealers. When dealers sell the pound, it falls in value compared to other major…
What political course corrections can teach us
All my adult life, I’ve been conscious of the often-repeated political axiom about the UK electorate: the British people are allergic to political extremism. At just about…
Do they need us more than we need them?
In 2015, the UK had a trade deficit of about £70 Billion with the EU. This is the amount more that EU countries get by exporting their goods to us, than we get by exporting to…
Free speech has gone from most UK universities
This is a blog I never thought I’d have to write and one that fills me with foreboding for the future. Out of Britain’s 115 universities, only seven have a hands-off approach…
Is Trump another Hitler?
Facebook currently carries a large number of memes comparing Trump to Hitler. The trouble with this kind of unclear thinking is that it makes it more difficult to see what Trump…
“Science is not a liberal conspiracy”
The title of this blog is an aphorism coined by Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson, the American astrophysicist and populariser of science. Tyson has taken on the mantle previously worn…
Perpetual Emotion?
Perpetual motion is scientifically impossible, right? The impossibility of energy for nothing is not merely a matter of habit of thought with science. It is enshrined in one of…
I never thought I’d apologize to the CIA but . . .
I never in my wildest nightmare thought I’d ever feel the need to apologize to the CIA – but here we are. This sorry tale begins last Monday when The Washington Post – once…
Man Of Steel
After an unconscionably long wait, I finally get round to watching Man Of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013). As this is a review, let me disclose my prejudices up front. Zack Snyder is…
Afghanistan – 4, Britain – 0
When British troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001 together with the U.S., it wasn’t the first time, or even the second or third. It was Britain’s fourth Afghan war and one which…
Facts make weird shit less strange
In more than 40 years of investigating stories too weird for most journos to bother with, I’ve heard and seen more than my fair share of strange shit. I’ve had my spoon bent…
ESP and the CIA
Most people know that the U.S. military and the CIA conducted experiments in psychic phenomena in the 1970s to see if there was any scope to weaponise telepathy, psychokinesis or…
Conspiracy theorists go ape-shit
In October 2016, shortly before the US Presidential election, Wikileaks released a batch of emails that had been hacked from the Democratic Party’s campaign to elect Hillary…
The new emancipation
In 1865, at the end of one of the most brutal wars in history, the United States Congress voted to free slaves. In theory emancipation brought freedom to more than 3 million…
Glastonbury Abbey – a dead secret
Before its destruction by Henry VIII in the dissolution of the monasteries, GLastonbury Abbey was the largest and most influential church in Britain — bigger than…
When the truth lies
Perhaps the most interesting and least discussed aspect of the EU referendum result is that it was a total failure of government public relations or propaganda. Those who voted to…
Is the Media corrupt?
One of the commonest complaints from Remain supporters following the Brexit referendum, and from Democratic supporters following the US Presidential Election, was that voters have…
Marxism versus Spencerism
The fierce social media ding-dong over Brexit did have one entirely unexpected result for me – I gained a new insight into the perennial debate about Marxism versus Capitalism.…
Down with freedom
It’s a curious aspect of freedom in a civilized society that almost everyone complains that the press has too much freedom, but very few complain that we have too much of any…
Do we really need the EU single market?
Twenty years ago, the single market benefited British companies in their overseas trade. The Common Market, as the EU then was, had no internal tariffs but a common external…
Who should we fear most – Trump or Clinton?
Ever since the US Primaries, I’ve made the assumption that Donald Trump, if elected, would be an unimaginably catastrophic president and that Hilary Clinton, though badly…
Facebook? Unscientific? Whatever next?
The Facebook meme shown below is designed to poke a little fun at the silly stuff that passes for informed comment on FB and it’s welcome to the extent that we can all do with a…
Why immigration is a red herring
According to recent headlines both in the print media and on the well-informed and impartial BBC TV (not) the UK is heading for Brexit disaster on two fronts. First, Teresa…
Explaining coincidences (away)
There’s nothing the Provisional Wing of parapsychology enjoys more than debunking so-called anomalous events by citing the gullibility and scientific illiteracy of we…
A Crisis of Identity
One night in December 1950, Harry Willcock, the 54-year-old manager of a dry cleaning firm and prospective parliamentary Liberal candidate, was stopped by two police officers as…
Britain muddles through – on propaganda
Ministry of Muddle One of the British government’s first acts of war in 1939 was to form the Ministry of Information to combat Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and…
The telegram that lost Germany the war
In early 1917, the First World War had reached a crisis. Both sides were exhausted. Millions of men had been killed without any decisive results. The efforts of the Allies to…
A pain in the ads
How much are we influenced by advertising and publicity? It’s tempting to think that while the feeble-minded “masses” may be swayed or manipulated by the hidden persuaders,…
Why it’s not always smart to listen to experts
Throughout the referendum campaign and still afterwards, many who supported the Remain view alleged loudly and repeatedly that the Leave side were lying about their figures.…
The secret Edward Heath kept from the British people
When he spoke on Television in January 1973 about joining the Common Market, Prime Minister Edward Heath told the nation, “There are some in this country who fear that in going…
EU’s plan to tax internet
When you search on Google– say on the latest news– and you click one or two links that Google lists in response to your search, do you feel that Google should be made to pay…
In politics, beware the “Lord Jim” moment
Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim contains an important warning for those aspiring to political greatness. Jim is the young man who has everything – good looks, athleticism,…
ACTA – EU “Democracy” in action
The European Union is often accused of acting undemocratically, but this complaint is not always backed up with concrete examples. This is probably the EUs’ most flagrant…
Co-operation Versus Competition
In almost all walks of life, co-operation trumps competition. Cooperating, even with rivals has been shown time and again to have a better outcome in the long run than trying to…