More news on my book. I handed over the corrected proofs this morning, together with an index. Compiling the index was easier than I’d thought it would be, but still not exactly fun; it was one of those tasks that leaves you looking round for the next chunk of mental hard labour for several days [...]
22 February 2009 – 1:33 am
My book: an announcement and a question.
I’m quite excited about my book. Or should I say, my book – for lo, that’s an actual link to a page where you can, apparently, pre-order it, with free UK delivery and everything. And here’s the publisher’s page about the book, and here’s what it says there:
‘More work! [...]
31 January 2009 – 2:11 pm
Nick Cohen in Standpoint (via):
a significant part of British Islam has been caught up in a theocratic version of the faith that is anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-democratic and has difficulties with Jews, to put the case for the prosecution mildly. Needless to add, the first and foremost victims of the lure of conspiracy theory and the [...]
31 October 2006 – 10:42 am
I attended part of a very interesting conference on terrorism last week. The organisers intend to launch a network and a journal devoted to ‘critical terrorism studies’, a project which I strongly support. As the previous blog entry suggests, I’ve studied a bit of terrorism in my time – and I’m very much in favour [...]
18 September 2006 – 10:40 am
Nick:
Larry Sanger, the controversial online encyclopedia’s cofounder and leading apostate, announced yesterday, at a conference in Berlin, that he is spearheading the launch of a competitor to Wikipedia called The Citizendium. Sanger describes it as “an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance.”The Citizendium will begin as a “fork” of [...]
I hate it when my doctoral thesis gets topical. Here are some figures:
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
333
282
277
190
103
33
81
92
169
460
1110
802
258
141
3
8
5
28
21
25
15
Take a moment to read across the rows and get a feel for the shape of the series. Row one starts pretty high – almost one of these things per day – then declines year on year, plummets to almost nothing in 1980 [...]
3 February 2006 – 10:18 pm
As a postscript to this, here’s Stephen Sedley from the current LRB:
When I read for the English Bar in the 1960s, the legal history lecturer stopped when he reached 1649 and explained that he was now moving directly to 1660, because everything that had happened between the trial of the king and the restoration of [...]
1 February 2006 – 10:43 pm
Steve Bell (via) anticipated Blair’s reaction to the hundredth death of a British soldier in Iraq since 2003: the deskbound patriotism of Kipling’s jelly-bellied flag-flapper, in a low-key, robo-managerialist form. But Blair’s actual reaction was quite different:
Mr Blair said the country had to understand why it mattered that “we see this through”. It was important, [...]
25 August 2005 – 10:46 pm
Light blogging ahead – life calls.
Very briefly: Ken Macleod asks, “if you are going to limit free speech at all, is it more illiberal to do so by making the proclamation of certain specific and narrowly defined doctrines illegal, or by making administrative decisions based on broad and vague provisions?” It’s an interesting dilemma, but [...]
In a comment thread on his blog, Brian Barder writes:
You [meaning me - PJE] take a more generous view than I do … of the opinions, implied or explicit, of those many commentators who have been saying (and continue to say) that because Blair must have known that UK participation in the invasion and occupation [...]
Let us just take this issue of Iraq and expose it for a moment – frankly, the obscenity of these people saying it is concern for Iraq that drives them to terrorism. If it is concern for Iraq, why are they driving a car bomb into the middle of a group of children and killing [...]
[Some edits and additions in response to Robert's comments, 26/6 and 27/6]
In 1997 Francesco Cossiga was interviewed for a book called Una sparatoria tranquilla (mentioned back here). Cossiga was one of the leading figures of Italy’s old establishment – a former President of the Republic, a former Minister of the Interior, an unapologetic defender of [...]
The idea of a ‘just war’ has been around for a long time – since the fifth century, in fact, when it was formulated by St Augustine. One of the key criteria in judging whether a particular conflict can be considered ‘just’ is that war is not waged lightly: it has to be a ‘last [...]
