Academics never fail to amaze me with their innovative methods of acquiring grants to study yet another obscure subject. I well remember writing a post on the obscene size of the grant obtained by some American academics

Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Honecker’s DDR – mandatory reporting to the authorities by friends, families and neighbours, phone-taps, wire-taps, cameras tracking the moves of every citizen, persistent persecution of targets by a police force making

No we didn’t put the sails up.

You can’t put up the sails when the wind is coming from the opposite direction to the one you have a pre-arranged appointment with – the wind would

Christopher Rudd was a Kent school teacher, grandson of the famous Cape merchant and adventurer Charles Rudd, who also took his pupils out to sea in a dinghy to teach them the art of seamanship. Sadly, he

I wish to live as a free man in a free country.

I wish to live under the rule of laws created by elected politicians, who I can hold to account and vote for, or against,

David Bowie once said we’ve got five years. Well, we’ve got five days now. No, don’t worry; I haven’t received advanced warning of a meteorite poised to crash into the planet. I’m referring to the fact that,

Rape and culture/rape and culture/go together like a…well, those two words don’t really go together at all, do they? An oxymoron is, I believe, the correct term. Culture is described by the dictionary I prepared earlier as

So many nautical terms are open to misinterpretation by landlubbers that anyone poised to set sail really needs to know a gash fanny from a cunt splice; failure to do so could result in kissing the gunner’s

Family feuds can drag on for decades. We’ve all known siblings who had a big bust-up over something years ago, something nobody can even remember anymore, and still refuse to be in the same room as one another,

The great sea change, believed JG Ballard, was the assassination of President Kennedy. The author whose theory was expanded in his 1970 collection of stories, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, saw the shocking events of November 22 1963

I know some of you out there are regular Radio 4 listeners and I know some of you are familiar with the station’s forays into the world of situation comedy. I myself only find a couple of