I have come to the conclusion that like Judas it would be better if certain subjects had never been born. At least Judas played a necessary part in the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But it is hard to see what benefit arises from the existence of …

There is something dispiritingly similar about Irish nationalism and Scottish nationalism. This is no doubt because the one frequently supports the other. Most Scottish nationalists would cheer if Irish nationalism achieved its goal of uniting Ireland, while I strongly suspect quite a lot of Irish people would delight in seeing …

We are fortunate indeed that yesterday there wasn’t a meeting between North Japan and South Japan, declaring peace and looking forward perhaps to eventual reunification. There is one reason and one reason alone why this didn’t happen. The planned invasion of Japan “Operation Downfall” which was to have taken place …

In the modern world we are all supposed to be empiricists. We determine truth by means of the scientific method and reject as superstition something that is believed despite the evidence.  But we apply this rule selectively. The claims of Christianity may have been rejected because they depended on belief in …

Until relatively recently I thought that antisemitism was more or less dead in Britain. Popular fiction from before 1939 regularly contains the sort of casual unpleasant remarks about Jewish people that are rarely heard in public nowadays. Oswald Mosley and his Fascist thugs lost the Battle of Cable Street because …

There is a contradiction in feminism. Perhaps this extends to modern women in general. Feminism demands equality with men and wishes to minimise the difference between men and women to the greatest extent possible, but it also and at the same time demands special treatment for women. This is fundamentally …

A St Andrews academic Clara Ponsati is facing extradition to Spain. The Vice Chancellor of the university has come to her defence, as have many other people in Scotland, on the grounds that Ponsati is being “targeted for her political beliefs” by the Spanish government. Ponsati is not alone in …

I have been finding contemporary politics dull and uninspiring. It is above all for this reason that I’ve been struggling to write about recent events. We know that at some point there will be another election struggle between a rather daft, but reinvigorated Labour Party and a worn out Tory …

There isn’t that much in Russia that works, they have practically no exports except oil, gas and commodities, which in part is the reason their economy has been in steep decline lately, but there are still some things they do well. The FSB, or KGB mark II is still very …

The stats for my blog have fallen off a cliff. No doubt this is because I have ceased running on the treadmill that kept them going. It had become something like an addiction watching the number of readers increase and fall each week. I would scramble to get next week’s …

Apparently there is a plan in Scotland to pay students £8000 per year to study. Scottish students already have their fees paid by the taxpayer. The idea now is that they should be paid the equivalent of the “living wage” to study. This all begins to get rather expensive for …

Does it matter very much that Alex Salmond has chosen to appear on Russia Today (RT)? No. I sometimes glance at this site. It has a perspective, but then again so does the BBC, CNN and the New York Times. RT has a Russian perspective. It’s not a perspective we …

Many people think the greatest composer who ever lived was Johann Sebastian Bach.  There might be some debate about this. Some think Mozart was greater, others Beethoven. It doesn’t much matter. If you look at a list of the greatest composers these nearly always make up the top three. But who …

Imagine if thirty years ago someone had been murdered in Cambridge. Suddenly the police arrive and knock on my door and accuse me of being the murderer. They take me into custody, question me and eventually charge that on the night of November 4th 1987 I did willfully and with …

Spain isn’t greatly liked in Britain. This has been particularly noticeable in the past few weeks as the crisis in Catalonia has developed. Quite a few writers have indulged in the pleasures of Spain bashing and for a variety of reasons. Some Eurosceptic Brexiteers have sympathised with the Catalans and …

How many fat, ugly sixty five year old men do you know who have an addiction to sex? How many have beautiful wives or girlfriends in their twenties? I don’t know very many. Aging academics may chase after girls who could be their daughters and sometimes even their granddaughters and …

The great moment in modern British politics upon which all else turns was the election in 1979. The decade that followed brought in fundamental change, not because the Conservative Party sought consensus and the centre ground, but rather because it decided to take a different direction. There was disagreement, there …

There are two forces going on in human nature, the desire to unify and the desire to separate. The reason that we have nation states at all is because people have felt the need to unify with others who are similar to them.  In antiquity each small village had its …

There must be something in human nature that means we always need to take a good thing too far. In this way far from turning it into a very good thing we instead turn it into a very bad thing. The fault, for instance, with Christianity is not what Jesus …

As many of us have noticed this week, Spain is trying to prevent one of its parts from holding a referendum on independence. I normally don’t pay much attention to the internal politics of European countries. I can’t even routinely name the leaders of more than a few EU countries. …