The Joy of Curmudgeonry

No professional doom-foreteller has yet been so bold or so brave as to utter what is perhaps the worst of his forebodings: that he will awak...

Homo-sectual . – n. A person whose “gayness (or homosexuality) is deeply interwoven with personal experiences and understandings of relig...

Let us hope that the goodness of a man proves an effective resistance even to his most sacred ideals.

The trouble with defending that which one suspects to be a fact is that one can very soon come to believe that it is an established one, for...

Guilt and shame are important constraints on human behaviour, but the soft-humane wish that no one suffers has extended even to the sufferin...

If the Bumper Book of Pretentious Drivel ever comes to be compiled, surely the following example ought to be included: “At numerous gigs ar...

An ideology can work largely unseen – the suspicion of which drives many a fool to see it everywhere.

Just occasionally I like to read the pages of the Weekly Worker , that irritable organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain. For sure, it...

Sometimes I think it would be more beneficial to society if our modern-day self-loathers publicly scourged themselves in the medieval fashio...

Throughout the ages, the common man has been satisfied with his ignorance, but in our age he is angered when it is not recognised as knowled...

An untruthful relationship based on reciprocal faintheartedness may exist between the people and their political representatives; for when t...

“[T]he ghoulish stereotypes that spread fear through Daily Mail-land: benefit scroungers, feral youths, problem families.” (John Harris, “ B...

It is often a great mistake to assume that a shallow and callous man is not fully committed to the moral principles he espouses. On the cont...

There has been a curious development in ethics recently, namely, that of making non-discrimination the sine non qua of one’s moral facultie...

It may well describe an advantage over our forebears that we moderns can include under the name of culture a canvas daubed with the excremen...

Our politicians are like thief-beguilers with the simple knack of misdirection. “Keep your eyes on the future”, they say, and whilst we awai...