One of the projects I dream of but never shall produce( Read more... )

Many of us have seen an excellent movie called GLORY, telling the story of the doomed but heroic assault by the black troops of the 54th Massachusetts against the formidable coastal confederate Fort Wagner. With due respect for those brave men, that movie had the wrong subject. If they wanted to tell the story of black victims of oppression and ( Read more... )

How can you possibly have failed to notice that the indoctrination of teen-agers with the mantra of "question authority" has produced nothing but the most appalling conformity? It would be Umbridge who would encourage everyone to "question authority" - since the person who does so automatically places herself in a position of unrecognized authority ( Read more... )

On the early morning of Sunday 25 July, I saw a long (half-hour) BBC interview with Eileen Gittins, the founder of the print-to-order company Blurb. (Print-to-order companies are internet-based businesses that allow anyone to publish a book and make as many or as few copies as they can sell or pay for. The best-known is Lulu.) The interviewer was ( Read more... )

One point about the fall of the Berlin Wall is not made often enough. It used to be a historiographical commonplace that Germany was the European country where liberal revolutions had always failed. That is no longer the case. There has been a successful democratic revolution at the very core of the old Prussian authoritarian state, in a part of ( Read more... )

Among my favourites in my movie collection( Read more... )

Yes, we are fortunate. Like the great men of a time we thought we might never see again, we have our chance to defend freedom.( Read more... )

When I posted about the Muhammad cartoon controversy, I did not realize that it was becoming a worldwide affair. ( Read more... )

It is not often that you will find me on the same side as the Reverend Ian Paisley (who once screamed "Antichrist!" at the Pope across the European Parliament) or as atheist brutes such as Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee; in fact, I do not recall it ever happening before. But every one of us, and many other shades of opinion besides, have been ( Read more... )

There used to be a nasty little joke going around about the more prejudiced sections of the English public: "Heard the last about (whatever war was going on at the time)? Italy has surrendered just in case." I do not seem to hear it any more; probably because people have learned better than to say it in my presence ( Read more... )