Category: Access

I often think that when the devil was designing his snares, he fretted about the most basic things like increased efficiency, ease of operation, and mass appeal.

Now to Agrigento, nay, to the selfsame hallowed spot where our Foundation’s eponymous helmsman passed the better part of last winter.  The annual weekend of mulberry picking was upon us, with tubs of pure grain spirit wherever you looked – the better to preserve the foragers’ prize in the cold months to come – and white shirts splattered with the fruit’s arterial blood, crimson as the famous Kensington Gore stage prop. As the day’s harvest was jarred and dinner drew near, a remarkable spectacle unfolded.  The people in a house next door harbor a multitude of cats – perhaps as...

I hate to sound like the sort of monomaniacal bore at a cocktail party who will only talk to you about the regrettable slump in hedgehog hospital funding, but really, this is important.  The other week, in a post entitled “Anti-Homestead Acts,” I touched on the news that the ogres in the Kremlin are using tax law to alienate an already starving populace from the tiny kitchen garden plots of land on which the subsistence of millions of Russians, particularly the elderly, had been depending since the 1990’s.  Now, as if such a thing were possible, there comes yet more...

A hundred years from now historians will doubtless scratch their heads over the news that the West’s only audible rebuttal to Moscow’s mendacity in Osaka has come from a notorious invert.  Sir Elton John has found Vladimir Putin’s argument against Western “liberalism” unconvincing, because to him the word means, above all, open practice of homosexuality. Most other people, however – those, as it were, without an axe to grind – cheered the father of Slavic nations from Oslo to Timbuktu, which was understandable in that it was them, rather than Sir Elton and his niche audience of degenerates, that his...