In Excelsis – Lord Alfred Douglas (FULL TEXT)

May 17, 2019

Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945), Bosie to all and sundry, is, and will always be, seen as a secondary character in the life of Oscar Wilde, whose rise and fall in Victorian England is inextricably bound up today in the intersection between literary history and queer consciousness. Bosie himself knew that very well and spent much […]

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Shakespeare Slam: Richard II

April 23, 2019

Part of my effort to see every Shakespeare play. Richard II is one of Shakespeare’s most lyrical plays. Covering the final two years of Richard’s reign and chronicling his fall from power, it is one of only four plays entirely written in verse – there is no prose. Puns, rhyming couplets and soliloquies abound, meaning this […]

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Shakespeare Slam: Richard III

April 23, 2019

Part of my effort to see every Shakespeare play. It seems to me, there are three types of professional Shakespeare production. One, the Shakespeare specialist companies, the RSC, the Globe etc. They know what they’re doing, they hire people who are trained specifically to do Shakespeare, and they are badass at it. Two, the celebrity productions, […]

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A long-but-condensed guide to the even-longer Mueller report (April 2019)

April 22, 2019

Originally posted to Facebook on 19th April, 2019. Edited for clarity. Previous comments: Your Trump/Russia Briefing (January 2018)Trump/Russia: The Michael Cohen Update (April 2018) * Yeah, this report in absolutely no way exonerates Donald Trump. Indeed, it contains pretty clear, and substantiated, allegations of corruption, witness-tampering, obstruction, and pretty much everything that all of his […]

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Shakespeare Slam – The Merry Wives of Windsor

February 1, 2019

Part of my effort to see every Shakespeare play. Merry Wives of Windsor was the first Shakespeare I’ve ever encountered that made no pretence to be literature, and is not treated as such by teachers and people who would make me study what are living, breathing texts. Allegedly it was written at the behest of Elizabeth I, who loved the character of Falstaff […]

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The Withdrawal Agreement and the Meaningful Vote

December 9, 2018

Two years of arguing and negotiating but mainly blustering in the papers later, the meaningful vote in Parliament to approve the Withdrawal Agreement is on Tuesday. No-one thinks that Government is going to win. What happens next, is a complete unknown. Do I regret my vote? Some Bregret in there somewhere? Just a little bit? […]

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Brexit and the Constitution

December 9, 2018

Originally posted to Facebook as a series of comments in March 2018. Edited for clarity. “The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised […]

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Lexit: On a Second Referendum

December 9, 2018

Originally posted to Facebook in January 2018. Edited for clarity. Say we finish drawing up our Brexit negotiations in January 2019, and allow six weeks for a referendum on the matter. Your voting options will likely not be: * Approve the deal * Reject the deal * Cancel Brexit and remain in the European Union. […]

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Brexit: A educational dialogue with Remainers

December 9, 2018

In March 2018, there was a public scandal about the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which had illegally used Facebook data to manipulate voting intentions to influence the 2016 EU Referendum. Remainers everywhere took this as a sign that clearly the vote was illegitimate, because people could not be trusted to understand what they were voting […]

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Lexit: After the 2017 General Election

December 9, 2018

Originally posted as a series of comments to Facebook after the general election in June 2017. Edited for clarity. The binary choice of the referendum was a hard one. Many people told me that they understood my arguments regarding democratic deficits but they wouldn’t risk the economic impact of a No Deal Brexit. And it […]

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