Despite everything, the BBC has hired another Gronmark!

Mrs. Anna Leena Gronmark joined the BBC earlier this year. An old BBC chum of mine emailed me about this exciting development earlier today...

The National Trust gay pride furore, and the difference between toleration and celebration

The National Trust has told volunteers they'll be banned from jobs which involve meeting members of the public, unless they agree to wear gay pride badges (rainbow lanyards). It's all part of the organisation's prejudice and pride programme to mark the 50th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality in the UK. The announcement follows the outing by the Trust and Stephen Fry (who, rumour has it, may possibly bat for the other side) of Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, who bequeathed Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk to the Trust, as a homosexual. His descendants have criticised the organisation,  on the grounds that Kelton-Cremer would have been embarrassed to have his sexuality made public. But, of course, nothing must be allowed to stand in the path of the Great Progressivist Juggernaut.

Book Report Part 7: "All the Pretty Horses" by Cormac McCarthy

In March, I gave myself a year to read 25 literary novels I reckoned a keen reader approaching his 65th birthday really should have under his belt. Having got through fifteen of the novels on my list (which you can find here) by early June, I decided to cut myself some summer slack and slow down. I've read a lot these last two months - but only three of the books on my list, and comparatively short ones at that. They're all by modern(ish) American authors, none of whose books I've previously read. The first was All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, who also wrote No Country for Old Men, which the Coen Brothers turned into one of the best films of recent years. I almost chose the latter, but, as I've watched the film several times, that felt like a bit of a cheat. My wife had read All the Pretty Horses for a book group, and had raved about it - so that's the one I chose. Glad I did. It is a stunning masterpiece - one the greatest novels I've ever read...

The enemy - I am literally shaking!

Meanwhile, this dork's spiritual leader - Ken Livingstone - knows exactly where the blame for Venezuela's current problems lies (you will be surprised to learn that socialism had nothing to do with it)...

Yippee! According to researchers at Stanford, CFS is an inflammatory disease, not a psychological disorder!

From today's Telegraph:

Chronic fatigue syndrome is an inflammatory disease which could soon be diagnosed through a simple blood test, scientists have said.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine discovered that people suffering the symptoms of CFS show spikes in 17 proteins produced by the immune system. The bigger the rises, the more severe the condition...

...for decades the illness was largely dismissed by sceptics as ‘yuppie flu’ because no cause could be found.

The new research is the first to show a concrete reason for the condition: chronic inflammation, driven by the immune system. Inflammation is the body’s way of responding to an invader and the reason that people feel so groggy when combating a cold or the flu.

I'd been thinking about my mental/physical condition this morning when I picked up the paper, after ingesting the array of pills, capsules, potions and powders with which I habitually start the day (they may not make a blind bit of difference...

Lock your doors! They're getting madder with each passing day...

"Heed full o' wee broken biscuits" was a phrase often employed by my Scottish mother and...

The brilliance of Peter Biskind's "Seeing Is Believing" and the classic right-wing 1996 Mel Gibson film "Ransom"

One of the most exciting books about cinema I've ever read is Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, left-wing film historian Peter Biskind's 1983 study of the political attitudes underlying 1950s American movies. It's worth reading for the first chapter alone. In it, Biskind dissects Sidney Lumet's claustrophobic 1957 drama, 12 Angry Men, in which a New York jury tries to reach a verdict on a young Hispanic accused of murdering his fodder (sorry - his father). At first, they're all for frying the little bastard, but, gradually, the achingly rational architect Henry Fonda - the representative of the corporate-liberal state - convinces the others that the little bastard is innocent...

Twitter suspends right-wing satirist Godfrey Elfwick for being mean to multimillionaire BBC leftie, Gary Lineker. Shame!

I became aware of Twitter's attitude to right-wing snark-meisters a few years ago when Old Holborn used to disappear on a regular basis, only to pop up under another, similar name - but "Britain's vilest troll" appears to have learned how to play the thought-police's game. America's alt-right twitterati felt the mighty force of the platform's disapproval in 2016 (the actor James Woods stopped tweeting for a while in protest, but his splendidly splenetic fellow-thespian Nick Searcy kept on swinging). Now, possibly emboldened by Jeremy Corbyn's unexpectedly strong showing at the general election and the tsunami of ersatz leftie fury following the Grenfell Tower fire, British Twitter is falling into line by suspending various alt-right/right-wing/libertarian troublemakers. This comment on Gary Linkere's eye-wateringly vast BBC salary is what earned Godfrey Elfwick - currently the funniest thing on Twitter - a ban (if fruit language offends you, please don't read it).

The centenary of the Russian Revolution is an opportunity to restore the reputation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

(This is an article written for the next edition of The Salisbury Review.) When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn rose to deliver his Commencement Address at Harvard University in June, 1978, he was arguably the world’s leading cultural figure: a globe-bestriding literary giant in the tradition of Tolstoy; an implacable, grim-faced Old Testament prophet in the mould of Jeremiah; a heroic, seemingly indestructible truth-teller who survived imprisonment, exile and cancer to bear witness to the horrors that ensue whenever Communism is put into practice.

"Let me not digress" - Damon Runyon lives on in a Noo Yawk lady's splendid denunciation of Mayor DeBlasio

It all fell into place when the lady from Queens...