Peter Risdon

Tomorrow evening, Channel 4’s Dispatches profile of Boris Johnson will include parts of a taped conversation between him and his old school friend Darius Guppy. Channel 4 is able to broadcast these extracts because I supplied them with a copy of the tape, which I was able to do because I recorded it in 1990. [...]

Norman Geras ruminates here on the difference between entitlement and desert: the runner who trained hardest and sacrificed the most might deserve to win the race, but the person who crosses the line first is entitled to the medal. He goes on to say:
I find it startling that anyone could believe – even before the [...]

I was just reading about how the 1911 railways strike boosted the use of motor cars, people used them to go holiday for the first time. Railway use continued to rise but its monopoly was broken and the motor car had begun its climb to prominence.
And it struck me how strikes have sometimes acted as [...]

Interesting post here from the Irish Liberty Forum.

Here’s a use, at last, for this idiotic word: as a euphemism. The Primal diet consists of eating raw meat and vegetables, preferably when they are seriously past their best.
“It took me a long time to try high meat because I was scared,” John says. “It does stink like hell and it tastes like an [...]

I’ve been arguing with inaccurate definitions of the free market recently, here and here. Misprepresentations of the market abound, though; here’s another example, spotted by Jonny Newton, and unsurprisingly enough taken from the Today programme on BBC Radio 4:
[the real Robin Hood was] an extremely unpleasant kind of madman really who believes he is greater [...]

Bishop Hill recently posted a video of a speech by Sean Gabb, of the Libertarian Alliance. Gabb quotes from the same document I quote from on the masthead here. He feels we need a new constitutional settlement. And he has stepped back from his monarchism:
I was, until recently, a committed monarchist. I now have to [...]

Here’s a revealing little incident from Turkey:
The main Turkish government agency responsible for funding science has provoked outrage by apparently censoring a magazine article on the life and work of Charles Darwin.
The article was stripped from the March issue of the widely read popular-science magazine Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology) just before it went [...]

You’ve heard this. It doesn’t stale. You haven’t? You should.

A guest post by Sir Liam Donaldson. Read it. Genius.