The Politics of Dancing

I heard they shot a fourteen year old girl in the head for challenging secular values and demanding to be taught about Islam. I heard that innocent bystanders were killed, cinemas and bookstalls wrecked and death was threatened to all believers following a film that they say denigrated Voltaire. I heard that they burnt down mosques and murdered Muslims. I  heard that they burnt down churches and murdered Christians. I heard that they burnt down synagogues and murdered Jews. I heard they scrawled obscene graffiti on religious graves. I heard they killed priests, imams and rabbi’s for ‘flaunting’ their spirituality. I heard they said that spirituality was unnatural, an offence against reason and should be outlawed. I heard they burned copies of religious books that they say insulted secular values.   I heard they stoned a woman to death for praying in public. I heard they threatened children with the death penalty for allegedly defacing copies of...

Have recently joined a writing group at The City Lit in Holborn, consequently I am writing a lot of fiction at the moment, this never feels like a wholly grown up activity and also has the particular side effect of making one look at every event from the angle of its fictional potential. So as it grows steadily colder outside I watch incredible scenes on the TV of lower Manhattan now under several feet of water. I am trying to write about New York , though was already trying to compose a piece on the city before recent events.. At the same time I am also reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, partly set in New york City. I made several visits to New York, both the state and city, in the mid 1990’s and also spent some time studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which  allowed me to visit the city that never sleeps on numerous occassions. I became very fond of New York City, which,  for all its existential energy, can be one of the most welcoming of cities; [1...

HORUS EGYPTIAN GOD WORSHIPPED SINCE 2200 B.C. BORN OF A VIRGIN HAD 12 DISCIPLES HEALED THE SICK AND INJURED RAISED ASAR FROM THE DEAD (ASAR TRANSLATES AS LAZURAS) CRUCIFIED THEN RESURRECTED AFTER 3 DAYS KNOWN AS THE ‘LAMB,’ ‘THE WAY,’ ‘THE LIGHT’ [1]   SOUND FAMILIAR?   [1] With thanks to Rob Casson Having visited this page I would be grateful for your feedback, either tick one of the boxes below or make a comment via the comments button.

I don’t know so much about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, at the moment it feels more like the season of slate grey skies and drizzly rain, though that may just be my current state of mind. So much is happening, all of it depressing, that I feel I should write about, that I end up writing nothing. Indeed I have also now joined a writers group at the City Lit in Holborn and paradoxically this has also led to a lessening in my will to set pen to paper, or more accurately tap the QWERTY keyboard. I blame my self, on the first meeting I rather cavalierly boasted of my rate of productivity and of course since have dried up. Today I take into the group a rather experimental piece to read, though do so with a rather gloomy expectation of its reception. I have just finished reading Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, David Leigh and Luke Harding. [1] I had already decided if it contained any new information on Assange that changed my opinion of him I was honour b...

During the 1970’s history was dominated by Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, E P Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm; some, like Hobsbawm never left the Communist Party. Being politically educated by Orwell this meant that I could never, as we used to say, ‘get into’ Hobsbawm, a funny smell came of his books for me and consequently I tended to steer clear of him as an historian. I am perfectly willing to concede that I have been the poorer for it, still one has one standards and I draw the line at apologists for mass murder. Now he is dead and the eulogies have commenced, starting last night on Radio 4 with a tribute headed up by a nauseatingly gushing Simon Scharma. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01g4f87/Archive_on_4_Hobsbawm_A_Life_in_History/ One of the most chilling parts of this, at times embarrassing love fest, was a clip from Desert Island Discs when Hobsbawm is confronted by Sue Lawley about his failure to leave the Communist Party in the face of the horrors ...

'The quiet despair about anything ever really changing is the single most lethal threat to British democracy.' [1] On Saturday evening I started to watch The Thick of It, which can be amusing, but it irritates me profoundly to think that people imagine this stuff to be subversive, even ‘left wing.’ [2] Three minutes in, the dialogue goes as follows:- “I have persuaded Nicola [Leader of the Opposition] to do a tour of the country.” Underling: “Oh great, having people tell you they hate you, in different accents.” He proceeds to imitate a range of British accents intoning, ‘I hate you.’ Now it is probably true that some of our elected representatives and their advisors despise the electorate, however if you believe that whoever writes this kind of stuff doesn’t to some extent share this worldview you are fooling yourself. The Joke works because you imagine you are on the inside sharing the joke, when in truth it is you they are laughing at. This kind of cynicism m...