Category: Books
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Home to Roost
It’s been a week of chickens coming home to roost. Salman Rushdie has probably realised that no matter what your haughty principles are, sometimes it’s wise to be just a tad pragmatic. He wrote a book to provoke a reaction, and it worked. He slated Islam and motivated 1.9bn Muslims, one of whom was bound…
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Recto Verso
The UK’s Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, has written a poem to commemorate the Duke of Edinburgh’s passing. The Prince famously loathed sycophants, which must have been a hefty burden in itself given his position in the crosshairs of the nation’s most devoted bottom-feeders. Accordingly, the poet compensated for this with wide spadefuls of pretension: Last…
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Verona Crisis
It seems like the luvvie cabal is getting all bent out of shape about the current demise of the theatre. Well, times change, and people change with the times. In 500 years’ time, people might pay to watch mime artists prancing around a turntable offering up their ABBA-inspired interpretative dance. I don’t recall these ponces…
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Publisher Be Damned
Earl Spencer has struck again – 23 years after his pulpit skewering of senior royals, he’s pulled the rug out from under serial toad Martin Bashir over some roguish manoeuvring to obtain a sit-and-chat with his sister, the inveterate jizz-whisperer, Princess Diana. Why the jackoff Earl opted to bash Bashir now has not yet budged…
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Strong Harmed
It is not just resistant chauvinists who are spiking the guns of the drive for gender equality. Nor is it the wandering band of fake-woke rogues who slyly adopt the rhetoric of fairness but continue to act to shore up its ingrained structures. There is another band of self-interested twisters who are gorging at the…
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The Feminist Front
Time for the most hazardous of exploits: a dalliance with matters gender and sex. The last time I entered that particular fray, the sound of mushrooming psychos online popped like a gaggle of clowns sprinting over bubble-wrap. One even threatened to buy one of my books and burn it. They should have bought and burned…
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Bitter Ex
I made a trip to the opticians recently, which considering the now mandatory COVID re-engineering of processes went essentially smoothly. Professional and organised staff, hassle-free, and frames that nestled peacefully on my asymmetric features. To top it off, I saved a hefty chunk on my last similar purchase. A fat, juicy tick in the customer…
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Buggers With Large Lies
In recent weeks, I’ve been working with an organisation on some recruitment activity, which has proved to be eye-popping candy. Now, I’m well-conversed with the approaches of recruitment charlatans; in fact, their peccadilloes were once the object of intense personal curiosity. The UK recruitment sphere has long since been a social large intestine. But now…
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They Don’t Half Pick Them
Grim news from the Lebanon where Beirut has been left looking like, well, Beirut. Domestically, commentators on all sides were shaken by the proclamations of Sir Iain Duncan Smith who has concluded that the EU Withdrawal Agreement – that he voted for – is in fact a juicy steamer. Even a nine-month old baby would…
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Fraudian Slip
Remember when Dr Jenny Harries, the UK’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, first attended the daily Government briefings? She was drowning in an ocean of kudos. Clear, articulate, and factual with ‘a measured tone’. She was, in March, an ‘unlikely hero’. Of course, at the start of this whole mess, much was unknown, and we were…
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