Observations on the world and its inhabitants
On 13 May 1997, just two weeks after the general election that swept Tony Blair into power, Jeremy Paxman interviewed the former Home Secretary Michael Howard on BBC Newsnight. The subject was the dismissal of Derek Lewis, the Director General of the Prison Service, following a security breach at Parkhurst prison. The central allegation: that ...
In December 2008, a minor archaeological excavation in Shangsi County, Guangxi, southern China, produced a mystery that should have been forgotten within a fortnight. Instead, it has lingered for nearly two decades—not because the mystery was solved, but because it was never properly resolved. In that unresolved space, something interesting happened to the human mind. ...
We live in an age of information overload, where one crisis instantly buries the last. History doesn’t so much vanish as it gets drowned out—washed away in the relentless noise of breaking news, hot takes, and algorithmically churned outrage. It takes deliberate effort to dig up a story, hold it to the light, and say: ...
Let’s be honest from the start: by today’s standards, the phrase “you couldn’t swing a cat in there” (or “there’s no room to swing a cat”) sounds pretty grim. It evokes an image of animal cruelty that most of us would rightly find shocking and unacceptable. Yet many people in the UK still trot it ...
