Winter has been even milder than usual here, and I would be happy to hail global warming were it not for the inconvenient fact that over the last 40 years average world surface temperatures have not changed, while during the 40 years before that, from 1946 to 1975, they actually fell, by one-tenth of one degree Centigrade to be precise.
The plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, or the Peer and the Peri turns on a clause in the fairy constitution which states that “any fairy shall die who doth marry a mortal.” At the end of the second and final act of this masterpiece of English sarcasm, however, the Lord Chancellor, who has declared himself an old hand at all matters legislatorial, proposes a small change that will allow members of the House of Lords to intermarry with fairies. This the constitutional guardian achieves by changing the word “doth” to the word “don’t,” so the problematic clause now says...
I recalled the episode, and the man, while perusing the British papers overflowing with the Royal Family scandal of the moment. Briefly, this centers on the person of the American mulatta C-list actress who has married the younger son of Prince Charles and is now blackmailing the Queen into releasing her and her husband from Royal duties
As it is now Russian Christmas, let us be jolly. Besides, I have so fatigued the gentle reader of late with my special brand of gloom and doom, even a single ray of sunshine may restore him to the belief that Wednesday’s Child is not congenitally insensible to the lighter side of life.
If I’m sober enough to write this on New Year’s Eve, my gentle reader will surely have sobered up by New Year’s Day, and will consequently pardon me for staying on the Kremlinology hobbyhorse all through the holidays.
The church bells of Italy, l’Italia dei campanili, are ringing in Christmas, and though my own Christmas is two weeks on and the Orthodox bells ring so differently, I heartily wish that the melodious concatenation reaches the gentle reader.
No, it isn’t a mistake, my title. It’s not like I don’t read the papers, you know. But in the stuffy atmosphere of Tory triumphalism, I think, the gentle reader may well be wishing for a window on the world to be opened. So what really happened in Britain last week? Well, basically, the two main political parties have exchanged roles, which is not, moreover, entirely a bad thing. It’s both good news and bad. Let me start with the good news. A number of pollsters analyzing the general election have spoken of a new divide in British society, as...
Put simply, over the last twenty years the story of civil liberties in Russia has run in parallel with Solomon Grundy’s. That arrest there has now become virtually synonymous with prosecution, and prosecution with conviction, is evidence stark enough for any man of good will, but periodically a legal case comes to light for which the starkness is merely a charming background. This week it is the case of one Egor Zhukov, a 21-year-old university student who was arrested in July during the street demonstrations in Moscow. As evidence the judge was shown a police videotape of a young man...
Apart from mudslinging at Prince Andrew for his alleged peccadillos, first sexual and now financial, British newspapers are occupied with exposing the “anti-Semitism” of Jeremy Corbyn. “What will become of Jews and Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next government?” asked Britain’s Chief Rabbi in what the Times of Israel has described as “an unprecedented intervention into partisan politics.” As in the case of Prince Andrew, discussed in this space last week, I’m not an admirer of Corbyn. In fact, I would go as far as to say that should Labour win the general election next Thursday...
The private plane used for delivering women to Epstein was known as the Lolita Express, with reference to Nabokov’s third-rate novel. The same bien pensants who admire the book are among the first to sling mud at Epstein’s shadow, but it is the still wider landscape of morality that makes a nonsense of their hypocritical censoriousness.
