Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, General Jorge Rafael Videla’s junta in the Argentine, the People’s Republic of China, Mexico’s notoriously corrupt and immovable Institutional Revolutionary Party and now Vladimir Putin’s Russia: all of these have hosted major international sporting events. The prima facie case against the international organisations which have co-operated […]
Author: chris@arcimedia.co.uk
Blueprint for a (Real) Conservative Policy on Sport
Hugh Robertson, the Shadow Minister for Sport and the Olympics (note the title), along with his “team”, has spent three months researching British sport in order to make a statement about future Conservative sports policy. The result, published in March 2009, can be described as a “more of” approach in relation to the existing […]
Philosophy versus Prostate Cancer
When you are diagnosed with prostate cancer you are faced with a number of aphorisms with more than a hint of paradox about them: “You are far more likely to die with it than of it.” “The cure, of course, is worse than the disease.” And then your friend remarks, in the pub, “It’s just […]
Fun with Pareto and Pyramids
On an edition of University Challenge in 2013 there was a question on elite theory. I was pleased and relieved that the student competitors had heard of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels, even if they mixed them up a bit. All of this intellectual triumvirate were born in the mid-nineteenth century and […]
In Memoriam (?): the Gentry
Adam Nicolson, Gentry: Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly English Class, Harper, 2011, pp. 460 My wife was brought up in a house where the number of people exceeded the number of bedrooms by five. There was no car and no telephone and no prospect of a holiday. She worked hard at school and went […]
Ched Evans – and the state of contemporary ethics
In forty six years of lecturing I have only had to deal with one protest against the content of my lecture. The subject was coercion; it raised questions about the nature of choice such as when one can be said to have a responsibility for an action as opposed to being “made” or “forced” […]
Whatever Happened to Social Mobility?
Captain E.J. Smith of the Titanic was described as “the highest paid seaman on earth” and “a celebrity in his own right”. He was born in 1850 in a terrace house in Hanley, Stoke, the son of a potter. Sir William Robertson (Bart.) was born in 1860; the son of a Lincolnshire farm labourer, he […]
Are Novels a Waste of Life?
Earlier this year I realised that three months had passed since I last read a novel and that it was the first time in the sixty years I have been able to read that this had happened. And then I also realised that the novels I had read in the last few years had not […]