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A sideways look at everything from POLITICS to the ARTS, with regular blogs, photography reviews and arts comment
Recent Posts Tagged With 'Opinion'
What’s right about America
Bronwen Maddox is a tough-minded editor and reporter who prefers to do her own thinking, so she might not like to be told that she has written a…...
In defence of Indian Vogue
The fashion industry often attracts criticism: models too young, models too thin, clothes too expensive... Today commentators from across the world are united in damning it -…...
Sarah Palin, Boadicea of the backwoods
Sarah Palin gave what one could politely call a passable speech at the Republican convention in St Paul last night, but it's a measure of how desperate both…...
Real IRA targets Catholic officers
In the ten years since the Good Friday agreement brokered by Tony Blair kick-started the peace process, Northern Ireland has made impressive progress towards a deal acceptable…...
Has the Fake Sheikh become a busted flush?
The long-standing News of the World 'investigations editor', Mazher Mahmood, has a book out this month called Confessions of a Fake Sheikh. The not very original title…...
Barack Obama still needs all the help he can get
Last night in Denver, Barack Obama gave a strong, fighting speech that reassured an edgy Democratic Party that he is ready to trade blow for blow with John…...
Get the kids back in the boozer
I first drank in a pub aged 15 or 16, at which point I must have looked 14 at most. We thought we had 'em fooled, but of…...
Boris ploughs into the Olympian throng
The eyes of the world were on Boris Johnson yesterday, and what they saw was a moon-faced fat man who kept putting his hands in his pockets. Was…...
Logic – and memory sticks – go out of the window
This is a massive failure of duty. It is not the first time that the government has been shown to be completely incapable of protecting the integrity of…...
Give nationalism a chance
Let's try to be consistent about this. If Kosovo has the right to be independent, so surely have Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Their claims are precisely analogous.…...
Georgia's loss is John McCain's gain
They obviously don't teach Cold War history at the law schools at Columbia University in New York or George Washington in the nation's capital, otherwise Georgia's president,…...
Taking the fun out of enjoyment
Is it at best unreasonable to expect of a work entitled Enjoyment, that it actually be enjoyable to read? I say, at best, because some might think this…...
The unasked question about China
The great question - which nobody asks is - what would happen if the Chinese government did grant its citizens all the freedoms which the West enjoy.…...
Russia knew the West wouldn't dare step in
With its brutal show of force in South Ossetia, Russia has proved one thing to the world: the bumbling old bear which used to fall flat on its…...
Women can look after themselves
Most of us will have found last week's picture on most front pages of a young man punching a girl in the face so forcibly as to lift…...
Toynbee: the great comic figure of the age
None of us," boomed Polly Toynbee the other day, in her now famous attack on the super-rich, "like to feel guilty about our comfortable lives." Like much of…...
Did Bush manipulate the post-9/11 anthrax scare?
Just five weeks shy of the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, a mystery linked to those attacks…...
Compassion starts at home, your ex-holiness
If you want to see a post-Christian fish flapping and gasping after it has jumped out of the water of the Christian faith onto dry land, then read Between the…...
The non-aligned line up against America
With little media fanfare a meeting took place in Tehran last week that could have huge repercussions. The gathering of the 100-plus nations of the Non-Aligned Movement…...
Double standards that damn S&M enthusiasts
Her day job might've been working in a chip shop but she knew how to handle a cat-o-nine-tails. My best friend's bare bum hanging out of his trousers…...