On games to play with babies.

There you are, innocently dandling the Star on your knee as he manipulates his coloured curly rings into his mouth.
Cautiously, you grope for your (lukewarm) tea and make as if to drink.
Instantly, the Star’s eyes light up. His mouth opens wide. He flings his plastic plaything across the room, and shoots his hands out in an attempt to snatch [...]

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On lies and damn lies.

You have to confess to a certain ambivalence towards news journalists.*
One of the charges the postmodernists throw at historians of the old school is that they create the illusion of empiricism by the style they employ in their writing. No hint of a mention of ‘I think…’, an attempt to surpass the amount written in [...]

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On Solzhenitsyn.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died last week.
You thought the reactions to his death in the West were quite interesting.
Considering that people held in prison by repressive regimes the West disapproves of who subsequently spend a lot of time and energy denouncing the same are usually accorded irreproachable sainthood status, some of the commentators were surprisingly grudging.
For [...]

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On how to produce a good Eurovision entry.

You adore the Eurovision Song Contest and you say this totally without the kind of qualifiers that Brits usually add at this point. Such as ‘it’s so tragiclly kitsch’.
In fact, you are rather bemused by the fact that the British persist in regarding the thing as a monumental joke and yet follow programmes like Pop Idol with [...]

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On bad habits.

By and large you have not embraced the mobile phone.
The last time you had to use one, you spent ten minutes swearing under your breath and had to punch every button on the thing at least three times before you could remember precisely which combination was needed in order to get it to connect with [...]

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On activating your schemata.

You can be very boring on the topic of grammar. And punctuation. Particularly commas. The rules are comforting, even if you do treat them as something of an abstract concept when it actually becomes time to apply them.
You are considerably more interested in how we actually use language, though. And the routines we follow and [...]

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On supporting the troops.

A chap called Hobgoblin, who you came to via Charlotte and Aphra Behn’s postings on the topic, has requested movingly and persuasively that people blog about what it means to support the troops. This seems like an admirable project, even if it didn’t run headlong into your latest train of thought, so here goes.
It’s not something you feel you [...]

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On humanity.

So there you are about to recommend a book in a thread as a result of Midnight Jester’s very thoughtful and sensible post on the nature of responsibility in war. Suddenly you realise that you have done this so frequently over the last few years that rather than wear out the keyboard and encourage people to read it one at [...]

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On more things to be in favour of.

There are a number of things which colour your attitude towards the whole debate about whether or not Muslim women should be allowed to follow their religious duties and impose their dress codes on the rest of the work force, not least of which is that your stubborn puritan streak puts you much more in [...]

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On being in favour of inequality.

You are no longer convinced about the value of the concept of equality.
This is mainly because there’s a common misconception that in order to be equal, things have to be the same.
You can claim until you are blue in the face and ready to stick a fork in someone’s eye that, say, feminism – to take a concept entirely at [...]

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