The bomb might be dropped any time soon now, apparently. The end of all ends, a nuclear war, looms among the narratives of where Ukraine and Russia’s war might end. Timothy Snyder warns in this regard that a nuclear bomb ‘would make no decisive military difference’; adding that looking at ‘the mushroom cloud for narrative … Read more
Ger-mania… Extraordinarily, Germany appears on the brink of following the lead of Austria in mandating a vaccination against COVID-19, as segregation of the unvaccinated continues. We seem to have entered what Gore Vidal described as the United States of Amnesia, as all history is forgotten. So let us cast our mind back. I maintain the … Read more
A poetaster’s tribute to Geoffrey Hill’s The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). I heard Sir Geoffrey refer many times in his Oxford lectures (2010-2015) to our current situation as one of ‘plutocratic anarchy’. I suspect that, like many, he was fascinated and frustrated by the oxymoronic sight of ordinary, ‘common’ people persistently … Read more