Mars and Microbes
Excellent news: NASA is off to Jupiter’s moon Europa to scour beneath its icy surface for microscopic organisms. The United States, it seems, is determined to treat us to the most stylish insolvency in...
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As the Scottish independence referendum circus enters its final couple of weeks, it is blindingly obvious that, whichever side noses ahead on September 18th, the Union is emotionally and spiritually...
View ArticleThe Throwback
Following our brief hiatus, we return to normal service by marking the death of the late Lord Bannside, better known as the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley, whom history seems determined to remember as a...
View ArticleQuote of the Day
For American Independence Day – and for Magna Carta anniversary year, too, since Uncle Jack was nothing if not versatile: “I will ever, gentlemen, avow myself a friend to universal liberty…Liberty I...
View ArticleNo Greece in Our Time
Francesco Morosini was arguably the last great Doge of Venice, and just as Belisarius’s military exploits against the Vandals and Ostrogoths and other assorted colourful barbarians in sixth century...
View ArticleRhodes to Perdition
Oxford University, famed throughout the world for being the one that isn’t Cambridge, is apparently seething with controversy over the reputation of Victorian philanthropist Cecil J Rhodes. Oriel...
View ArticleThe Croaking of a Boiled Frog
The European Union, an enormous and dysfunctional agglomeration of squabbling nations with less in common than the average cast of I’m a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here, has a north-westerly sort of...
View ArticleQuote of the Day
It is easy to forget that we Whig-liberals and libertarians are the real socialists in the only meaningful sense of the word: we understand the nature of social relations and we want them to go on...
View ArticleEt tu, toupee…
We take no side in the seething debate within the Republican establishment as to whether Donald Trump is a fascist or a fraud or some unedifying combination of the two, but we are certain that their...
View ArticleClub Outing: the Hellfire Caves of West Wycombe
There are few ways to spend a Bank Holiday Monday more worthwhile than in the footsteps of some eighteenth century hellraisers. Quite apart from anything else, it reminds us that the unlamented...
View Article2016 – A Review
Somewhere or other (you don’t get proper footnotes at this time of year) Karl Popper urged anyone masochistic enough to be reading his stuff to guard against the fashionable disease of our time, viz.-...
View ArticleWilkes in America
Huge thanks to Joey Kemper and Jon Fann, who were kind enough to share with us their discovery of a genuine eighteenth century John Wilkes commemorative medallion found in an undisturbed road bed in...
View ArticleHobson’s Choice
Jeremy Corbyn, the somewhat hapless leader of Her Majesty’s opposition in the United Kingdom (although, to be fair to the bloke, less hapless than the leader of her same Majesty’s alleged government),...
View ArticleThe Whiggery of Dune
“The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend towards each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him...
View ArticleThe Second American Revolution
“Then Jove resolved to send a curse, And all the woes of life rehearse Not plague, not famine, but much worse He cursed us with a Congress. Then peace forsook this hopeless shore Then cannons blazed...
View ArticleTrumped
We like to take the long view here at the JWC. A few years ago, we wrote about the late Roman Republic flavour of American politics, with particular reference to the way powerful and wealthy families...
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