Latest travel articles
In the summer of 1968 I was holed up with my cousin in my parents’ house on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. We were both in our early twenties, low on funds and single. I might have said that we were “house-sitting”, but I never heard that expression until several years later. We spent the time fell-walking […]
That would be me and, of course, it raises the question of what constitutes a holiday. The Office for National Statistics uses the criteria of four or more nights away from one’s main domicile taken primarily for recreational purposes. I can get to about five hundred provided I am allowed everything including courses, conferences, sports […]
(This is a pretty contemporary topic, almost a news story and the sort of thing I usually avoid: overcrowded tourist destinations, the havoc wrought by cruise ships and how to avoid all that.) In Venice, published in 1960, James (later Jan) Morris described being on a vaporetto on the Grand Canal on a misty winter’s […]
July 2023: war raged in the Ukraine. Fire raged in a dozen Mediterranean countries. There were unprecedented heatwaves all over the Northern hemisphere. In all the big and historic cities of Europe crowds jostled and congregated in front of any famous painting or building. So we went to Lincolnshire. I had more or less the […]
The most jaw-dropping thing I have read in a twenty-first century newspaper was a culinary item. The writer was recommending what most Southern English people would call blackberries but I would call brambles. There was a time, they said, when you could just go out to the countryside and pick them, but urbanisation and modern […]
Latest ideas articles
On the twenty seventh of March this year I attended the funeral of Jack Scarisbrick who had died at the age of ninety seven. It was very grand and very catholic: a full church, a requiem mass, a dozen priests, a cardinal (Vincent Nicholls), some Latin and some incense. There were many family members – […]
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 is being awarded to the Venezuelan politician Maria Cosina Machado. The Norwegian Nobel Committee gives reasons for its decisions and their justification of the award says that she is “ . . . one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times”. She […]
In 1992 the university system in the United Kingdom was on the brink of a massive expansion which over the next two decades turned out to be even greater than anticipated. I was opposed to this expansion believing it to be bad for the universities and for society in general. I kept bumping into the […]
(John Locke’s 1689 “Letter Concerning Toleration” considered from the perspective of 2025.) The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which ended the Thirty Years’ War is generally to be considered by many political scientists in our own times to be an important step in the creation of the modern state because it allowed for the abandonment […]
A distinguished academic leader remarked to me that there was more rubbish talked about leadership than any other subject. I can’t agree completely, bearing in mind the kinds of nonsense talked about wine and art, for example, but there is an important point. The answers to the question of what makes a good leader are […]
Latest sport articles
In most human activity we accept what is often called “the performance principle): the better, the better so to speak. It’s better to run a hundred metres in nine seconds than in ten. There is no good reason to exclude drugs which enhance performance from this principle and for the most part we don’t exclude […]
“English games dressed in Greek clothes by a Frenchman.” Discuss this comment on the Modern Olympic Games. Thus the lofty voice of whoever it is that says those things that students have to discuss – in this case, me as part of the historical background to a course on the politics of sport. The trick, […]
Monday May 8th, 2023: to Burnley, for a meaningless football match between the home team and Cardiff City. Meaningless, that is, in a really nice way because the home team, which I support, were already promoted to the Premier League and confirmed as champions of the English Football League and, for that matter, the opposition […]
The Boy’s Own Paper has entered the English language as a name for a kind of sporting cliché which combines the heroic and the far-fetched. “Boy’s Own stuff”, we say (or at least journalists do) when the debutant football arises from a tackle that looks as if it had put him in hospital to score […]
The land in which I grew up was mostly famous for its witches, but there was also an ogre. He was fierce and cruel yet he was able to give the people magnificent gifts because he had absolute power over the thing most people cared about. This was Bob Lord, chairman of Burnley Football Club […]