“You have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” That was only part of the recent verbal attack mounted by Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party on the new EU President, Herman von Rumpoy. Some were aghast at the rudeness, others overjoyed. ...
"Is Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead simply glib and superficial?" Some thirty years ago now, it was one of the English essay questions put to me in my final year at high school. My written answer""Yes""was perhaps itself a little glib and ...
"Live for the here..." That was the unsolicited advice proffered by an aged Beat poet to a restaurant diner at a nearby table who would not leave his cell phone alone. A cigar for the poet. Because far from being liberated by mobile communications, we have become enslaved and tyrannized by ...
"This is our country, our land, and our lifestyle. If you are not happy"then Leave." At last a politician in possession of testicles and a backbone. By definition then, not possibly a British parliamentarian. The words were recently uttered by Australian PM Kevin Rudd, a Labour leader ...
"Make a child smile"kill a counselor." A passable joke and an admirable sentiment. Face it, a kid cannot even fart these days without being offered counseling or Ritalin. We are enfeebled by prevailing victim culture, brought low by its burgeoning support industry of hand-holders and ...
"He is plainly some crazed moral retard". That stuck it to him. Or not. Yet on the night of 9/11, as I sat in a BBC Radio studio helping to dissect the bleak events of that day, it was the only response I could summon to the Al-Qa"eda "representative" the Corporation had ...
As a boy I once climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza in Egypt, sitting on its summit to watch the dawn break across the desert. That experience"and the visceral draw of climbing or walking into the past"has remained with me ever since. It has given me a respect for what has come ...
I do not much care for the obese. Worse, they make me feel nauseous. I dislike their shuffling and snuffling ways and believe them to be slothful, gluttonous, self-indulgent, undisciplined, manifestly unattractive and malodorous. You like them, you keep them, cherish them, embrace them as they ...
Enter a London coffee house or restaurant, check into a hotel, or wander by a building-site, and you will find the workforce almost exclusively foreign. Yet British unemployment continues to surge towards 2.5 million. Something is rotten in the heart of modern Britain, for that heart is the ...
White Zimbabweans used to tell a joke"what is the difference between a tourist and a racist? The answer"about a week. Few seem to joke any more. Indeed, the last time anyone laughed out there was over the memorable headline "BANANA CHARGED WITH SODOMY" (relating to the Reverend ...
