the view from fanling

There are few words and phrases to which revulsion is an almost instinctive reflex, where the idea behind the word or phrase is so repugnant...

What is wrong with America? It is now three weeks since the US presidential election, and more than two weeks since it became clear that ...

I imagine that most people will have some idea of what constitutes a banana republic. Countries such as Zimbabwe, which was ruled by a geria...

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. Winston Churchill. People of...

There was an old toad called Nigel Farage, Who couldn’t get his car out of the garage.  He blamed the EU  For this silly to-do, Saying, ...

In 1999, two academics from Cornell University in the United States, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, published a paper in the Journal of Pe...

Penrith is currently being roiled by a document put out by the local council under the title ‘The Penrith Strategic Masterplan’. I haven’t...

So the American electorate has spoken, and to my mind it hasn’t just shot itself in the foot. To maintain the shooting analogy—and the presi...

In August 1985, I wrote to the South China Morning Post to express my outrage at the attempts to suppress democracy that were taking plac...

I don’t know how many Americans know this, but ‘trump’ is a genteel British English term for ‘fart’. Sound appropriate? The Republican candi...

The British Labour Party is facing a serious existential crisis following the referendum on EU membership and its acrimonious aftermath. I a...

The European Union (EU) is a moribund organization and is probably now on the verge of collapse. It was once a good idea. The European Coal ...

I imagine that most people are familiar with the informal definition of optimists and pessimists: that an optimist would view a glass as hal...

When I was a pupil at my local grammar school between 1957 and 1964, I did my best to dodge playing rugby, for reasons that I described in A...

In the wake of the indiscriminate atrocities carried out by murderous thugs in Paris a week ago, and the deliberate destruction of a Russian...