May 2020

James Butler has thoughts! You should probably read’em! However, this take seems stale: Such permeating cynicism arises above all from depoliticisation: the claim, advanced over the past few decades, that ideological difference is dead, markets ought to be insulated from political contestation, and politics is merely a set of technical quibbles between administrators. Depoliticisation has…

Did the Government abandon a working strategy when it shut down contact tracing after the now notorious March 12th COBRA meeting that decided to move from the “Contain” to the “Delay” phase of its flu-based pandemic plan? It’s what I said at the very beginning of April: the worrying thing is I think we might…

While I was writing the previous post, on a table outside my flat, I noticed some sort of commotion in the street. Then somebody shouting from the third or fourth floor of the block: “There’s…someone behaving…oddly in the road…do something”. Looking across the street I could see some people who might be doing something, and…

The fantastic Schibboleth blog recently ran this recipe, and I can tell you that it makes an absolutely superb steak. You don’t really think of Vienna as steak country but of course it was old central Europe’s stockyard city, with its vast rail-fed central markets. When I lived there, although the markets were no longer…

When something is described as a classic, we expect it to be, most of all, capable of endless re-invention. I was reminded of this by the incredible story about an Oxford professor of classics allegedly selling papryi for hard cash (more). The classic I am thinking of is a theme rather than a single work.…

The Guardian‘s Harry Fox Davies has picked up on the Tigger thing. Neil Davidson is quoted so: According to the report, the documents were destroyed “during the winding down of operations”, but Davidson said this related to actions taken by former members of staff between June and July last year. So – in his telling…

If you read this I promised you a review of Adam Tooze’s Crashed. I didn’t write the review, but a major theme of the book seems enormously important now. Here’s the FT‘s Edward Luce, with a magisterial piece on Trump responding to a real crisis in the way it was obvious he would. It was…