“Oxford and Cambridge Universities are being accused of a form of “social apartheid”. More than 80% of their offers go to “the top two social classes, the children of barristers, doctors and CEOs”, many of them privately educated pupils from the south-east. In 2015, one in five colleges at Cambridge and one in three at …
Continue reading ‘Are Oxford and Cambridge being racist? Part 1’ »
When my wife and I were growing up, she in Virginia, I in England, we never ever, either of us, heard our parents, their friends, our friends, use crude language. Indeed, I remember a teacher telling the class, “We have an amazing language with a huge vocabulary. There are subtle, clever and inoffensive ways of …
I, on this blog, have frequently deplored the state of American infrastructure in general, but one might reasonably assume that the roads in the nation’s capital might be in good shape. Assume nothing! Last night we drove home after a concert on the Beltway, the major highway that rings Washington DC. There was fierce, driving …
Continue reading ‘American roads are becoming simply dangerous’ »
Anyone who supports fair taxation has heard this line a million times: “If you raise taxes on the rich, they’ll just move away.” The argument sounds commonsensical. Opponents of higher taxes on the wealthy make it without much fear of contradiction. But new research exposes this argument for what it really is, a fabrication. A …
Under Barack Obama, as former State Department official Jeremy Shapiro informed the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week, US diplomats viewed the notion of a “special relationship” with the UK as “a joke”. Unkind words, perhaps, but Shapiro “did us a favour” by telling the truth. The phrase “had freshness and relevance” when Winston Churchill coined …
