I will never forget the first time I saw Leonard Cohen in the flesh. It was the autumn of 2007, and Leonard was scheduled to appear “in conversation” with with Philip Glass at the Barbican. The Leonard Cohen forum – an online gathering of die-hard enthusiasts – had arranged a day-time meet up at a [...]
Impressive piece by Sam Leith in todays evening standard. Responding to a senior police officers call for the use of soft drugs to be decriminalised, Leith called this a half baked solution. “Drugs can’t be half-illegal”, he writes, “any more than you can be half-pregnant… It simply does not make sense, either morally or practically, [...]
I know that the next few years will be tough, very tough for some, but I also believe that the changes we make – empowering you, trusting you, listening to you – will make the public services a more rewarding place to work. I know there are a minority in the trade unions who will [...]
With the Pope arriving, attacks on the the Vatican have reached something of a fever pitch. Criticisms of the Vatican range from the valid and utterly necessary to the downright stupid. Commentators are, for example, absolutely correct to attack the catholic hierarchy for covering up cases of child abuse. Yet the oft repeated claim that [...]
Today Boris Johnson called once again for a strike ban on tube drivers. The evening standard reports that: The Mayor said he would lobby government to bring in new legislation to help prevent strikes on the Tube. He urged ministers to be “diplomatic and creative” in bringing in a ban. In his manifesto, Boris implied [...]
Towards the end of the book, Hitchens calls his memoir a ‘highly selective narrative’. I’m not even sure if ‘narrative’ is the word. Having begun as a fascinating and wonderfully readable account of his boyhood, family and education (all full of class, empire and literature), the book simply stops around 1980 – about the time that he [...]
As the trade unions awake from a decade of deep sleep and call for a wave of organised attacks against the austerity budget, I think it’s important that we get a grip on the timescales we’re talking about with these cuts, and the kinds of effects they may have. There’s a temptation to fall into [...]
Campaigns against the government’s cuts programme are incredibly important, and only going to become more so in the coming months. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about such campaigns, and Save the Arts’ new video seems to be a pretty good illustration of the latter: We’re presented with an unconvincingly-accented [...]
Is the reaction to the quran burning pastor not just a little bit over the top? Ok, so he’s a bigoted prick, but as acts of interfaith aggression go, this one is at the more benign end of the scale – I mean nobody is getting hurt, killed or imprisoned on account of their faith. [...]
I signed on today. (This isn’t the first time, and I don’t think I’ll be claiming for too long, in case you’re worried). Because I was raised properly and don’t like confrontation, I made a point of waiting at least fifteen minutes after my appointment time before asking why I hadn’t been seen. They were several people [...]
