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Channel: History – The John Wilkes Club
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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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Quote of the Day

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...

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The 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...

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Quote 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...

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No 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...

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Rhodes 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...

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The 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...

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Quote 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...

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Et 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...

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Club 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...

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2016 – 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.-...

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Wilkes 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...

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Hobson’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),...

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The 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...

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The 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...

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Trumped

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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