Vera Bax drawings: the recent discovery of thirty-odd sketches and portraits.
In January 2025, a portfolio of Vera Bax sketches in crayon or pastel on various colours of paper was put on sale on eBay and bought by Richard D North (VB’s grandson) and Emma Richeldis North (VB’s great-granddaughter).
These… Read more...
I propose that soft-left, bossy, green liberals are in a long and wrongly celebrated tradition. Indeed, most non-liberals are almost right to believe that most self-proclaimed liberals propose an ethic of “kindness” which, actually, does more harm than good. Worse even than that: Bossy Liberals have from their mid-19th Century… Read more...
AI and its deepfakes pose an unusually powerful challenge to the individual human psyche and thus – bulked-up – to human society.
This is a question of human authenticity, which has been an anxious preoccupation for millennia. The bright sparks of Alphabet, Meta, X, and Anthropic have richly intensified it.… Read more...
This piece is a twin to another which looked at the failure of various modern liberalisms and was a plea for an alternative: conservative pragmatism.
Here, I discuss what I call Techno-liberalism. I hadn’t noticed it properly until I read
I argue here that several modern "liberalisms" have failed their proponents (and the rest of us). They were too optimistic, too dreamy (though some were extremely aggressive or cavalier). They were all, I think, substantially light on history and factual evidence. Some claimed to be in the same sort of freedom-loving territory as much of modern conservatism. Read more...
I have for years wanted to understand and explain the soft-left liberal mindset which has become increasingly bossy and dominant since the 1960s. I didn’t enjoy it 60 years ago, when it was the domain of various Hampstead journalists I met as a young man. I like it a lot… Read more...
Hunston’s nuns: Records of their earthly deaths, 1872-1994
This is a record of the 36 nuns who died and were buried within their enclosure during the 120 years’ existence of the Chichester Carmel (aka Hunston Convent). The closure of their convent led to their being reinterred in 1994 in Portfield Cemetery,… Read more...
Richard Hughes produced three enormously interesting novels. High Wind In Jamaica (1929) and Fox In the Attic (1962) are much the better known, but In Hazard (1938) has a devoted following.1True to my usual perversity, I haven’t yet read “High Wind… Read more...
I have nurtured an enthusiasm for “slow movies” as a way of filming scenes which I think lend themselves to quiet inspection but also for the sort of gaze which might be called “meditative”. I find myself staring at, say, flowers or stained glass windows. To say I “zone out”… Read more...
I am posting three MS Word documents and identical PDF versions which gently but firmly interrogate Critical Theory and some allied ideas. These all have long back-stories and some merit if viewed with decent scepticism. The 21st Century has allowed them to grow like Topsy-Turvy and to an unchallenged prominence… Read more...