Every trip to the small grocery store near my home is an adventure. I don’t know who is in charge of their supply chain, but it is patchy and odd: some weeks there is a glut of strawberries, other weeks you can’t get a berry for love or money. The same inconsistency applies to most […]

Parliament is due to break up next week for summer recess. As Matthew Parris tells us, this imminent holiday has caused the government to go into overdrive with a slew of “initiatives” intended to make us forget that they have wrecked the public finances, turned environmental policy into a swindle, and destroyed civil liberties. However, […]

I have had a half and half life: my formative years were in the United States, my later years have been spent in Britain. Because of this mixture, I sometimes am struck by the comparisons and contrasts that can be drawn between the two countries. Contrary to what some French thinkers may believe, there is […]

Yesterday, I emerged from my house into a sleepy, sultry and somewhat grey July morning, and discovered that my town centre had been turned into a rubbish tip. I live a stone’s throw away from a pub, so I’m not unused to tomfoolery emerging late at night; the previous evening, I had heard the usual […]

This has been a tense weekend in a number of ways; if the news is to be believed, the folks down at the U.S. Treasury Department have been burning the midnight oil, trying to ensure the biggest dominos of the American financial system – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – don’t fall over. If they […]

…President Bush couldn’t shock you with yet another gaffe, he goes and does it again. As yesterday’s newspaper said: George Bush surprised world leaders with a joke about his poor record on the environment as he left the G8 summit in Japan. The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to […]

It was reported in the papers today that Gordon Brown sees himself as a latter day “Heathcliff” from Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights”. However, as one newspaper reported: Andrew McCarthy, the acting director of the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, told The Daily Telegraph: “Heathcliff is a man prone to domestic violence, kidnapping, possibly murder, and […]

The other day, I was wandering around the British Museum, and I happened across the Islamic Art exhibition, which is tucked into one of the building’s many discreet corners. I happen to have a fondness for Islamic art; as a rule, it tends to stay away from visual representations of individuals, and rather, goes towards […]

Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher, supposedly said that visiting the cinema was rather like watching a toilet bowl in anticipation of it exploding excrement at the viewer. When I first heard this, I took this as just another provocative statement from him, one of his little ways to shock anyone listening into thinking about the world […]

In addition to studying towards my Phd, I work in the technology industry as a medium-level manager. My speciality is in managing teams that develop websites. It’s a reasonable job, it pays the bills, and allows me sufficient space for me to do my academic work: however as Legion said in Stephen King’s “Storm of […]