What has made sport so uniquely effective a medium for inculcating national feelings…is the ease with which even the least political or public individuals can identify with the nation as symbolised by young persons excelling at what practically every man… Continue Reading
On 6 October 1960, the film Spartacus opened in New York City’s DeMille Theatre.1Time Magazine celebrated “a new kind of Hollywood movie: a superspectacle with spiritual vitality and moral force”.2 Long-standing New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was less… Continue Reading
When the manuscript of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four landed on his desk in late 1948, writes a biographer, his publisher fired off an internal memorandum stating that it “represented ‘a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist parties generally’.… Continue Reading
Multiculturalism is once more under attack. David Cameron’s speech, delivered in Germany on 5 February 2011 at a European governmental conference on security, repeated many familiar criticisms of multiculturalism. It was delivered on the same day as the viciously anti-Muslim… Continue Reading
All human beings are prematurely born, helpless and dependent, unable to look after themselves. This applies not just to Oxbridge dons but to the whole of the human species. Later on, if all goes well, we will achieve a degree… Continue Reading