The big news story at the moment is the rather spectacular failure of David Cameron’s attempt to oppose the election of Jean-Claude Junker as the next EU Commission President. He forced a vote in which he was only supported by Hungary. It is easy to criticise politicians for all sorts of things for which they
My extended review of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire continues, and we have now reached part 5 of Chapter 31 where we see Gaul and Spain fall to the barbarians in the aftermath of the sack of Rome. The sack of Rome by Alaric was dramatic and important, but what happened in
Conservative MP Michael Fabricant has got himself into a bit of trouble over the last couple of days by saying on Twitter that he didn’t dare appear in an interview with a female human rights campaigner for fear of being unable to prevent himself from punching her ‘in the throat’. It was a vulgar thing
I stumbled upon a video on Youtube which gives you a virtual tour of the famous caves in France where the Lascaux Cave Paintings were discovered. Anyone interested in history will be familiar with the images themselves, but seeing them in their context adds a whole new dimension. In particular I had realised just how deep
I am shocked that anyone should find a story about pop stars using drugs shocking. It turns out that the handsome and wholesome One Direction have been caught on film smoking marijuana. Compared to the behaviour of rock stars in the seventies only smoking marijuana would probably have been enough to count as wholesome, or