The Joy of Curmudgeonry

Readers will have noticed the decline of activity in this backwater of Blogland. I have been a little lazy and largely diffident in posting....

“Given that Homo sapiens originated in Africa it would be true to say that 100% of Britons have immigrant ancestors.” [1] Not only would it...

Knowledge is the means by which we deepen mystery. There is, I suppose, an end to it, but that would require either omniscience or shallowne...

Falsification can begin anywhere, but it must begin if “explanation” continues where a fundament is reached.

“If I concentrate hard enough on why I believe there is a tree in the Quad, I cease to assume that there is a tree in the Quad, and treat th...

“Young people only appear in the media to receive the blame for breaking Britain, and as the subject of longwinded tracts that label us apat...

“We wrongly adduce the honour and beauty of an activity from its usefulness, and our conclusion is wrong if we reckon that all are bound to ...

“A Government-office is like an inverted filter: you send in accounts clear and they come out muddy.” Sir Charles Fox, as reported by Herber...

“The French Revolution was a vast act of political destruction at the heart of previous society: let us fear lest it creates a more fatal ac...

It is said that a Roman dux was accompanied in his triumphal procession by a slave whose task was to remind him by a constant whispering in...

It is true that popular election is in principle a competition open to all. No shyster or mountebank is precluded even on the grounds of de...

“Every school in England will get a specialist Holocaust teacher to promote tolerance and combat racism”, reports The Telegraph . [1] “[T]h...

“A party apparatchik . . . says the election means, ‘All of us have to give up our cynicism,’ and I think I might punch him in the face.” Ca...

“My vote mattered ,” says some poor fellow [1] , who seems to be giving delighted and succinct expression to the quite remarkably dim belief...

Against the odds I have striven to ignore the American presidential election, yet I have been lured from my mental cave by all those “eloque...

It is of great importance for the utopian to persuade himself and others that he is no utopian, that is to say, that his political and socia...