Tag Archives: nick duffell
Boris Johnson’s London
You’ve got to hand it Boris. What mastery at linking his normalised bully style with the great old traditions of state and religion, learned at places like Eton! I remember a free moment in October 2011; I was skimming a copy of the Evening Standard, and there he was, ‘Boris’ (he doesn’t need a surname),…
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Joly thoughts on boarding families
Brave of comedian Dom Joly to speak to The Guardian, about being a boarding school survivor. Not that he actually said those words: he was simply being interviewed for a column called My Family Values. He got it in pretty early, though and – of course – made a joke about it. But the sadness…
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Pantomime Time
It’s Pantomime Time again. What’s your favourite: Jack in the Bean Stalk, Cinderella or Peter Pan? They are all ways of approaching the mystery of childhood and the hold it has on our imaginations. Psychohistorically, Peter Pan is an important piece, I think. Boys are always destined to become men, but if the process is…
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Traditional Britain
The season of Christmas Merriment brings round once again the need to examine what is kitsch, what is tradition, what is ersatz. In Britain we have to borrow Yiddish and German terms, because we are can’t quite name these things over here. The preferred traditional childhood for our elite is to send them a way,…
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Mission Accomplished or Mission Impossible?
Just when you imagined that the capacity of our Wounded Leaders for self-deception had been exhausted, David Cameron issues his pronouncement on Afghanistan: “Mission Accomplished.” What is going on? Has the man any sense of history? Does he not know that white hyper-rational culture has failed to tame these Afghans for two centuries? Only George…
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The collapse of British democracy?
Donnachadh McCarthy, former deputy chair of the Lib-Dems, is a man who has seen what damage Wounded Leaders can lead us into, without feelings and conscience tempering their actions. McCarthy highlights the collapse of governance in modern day Britain, which he names a s a Prostitute State. He believes that reform is both necessary and achievable. In…
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Plebgate 2: the Wounded Leader’s baffling immaturity
How the internet has changed everything. One of its marvels is that you just type in the words ‘Blair’ or ‘Cameron’ and immediately get to watch video clips of these men speaking, meeting, walking, from their earliest arrival in the public eye right up to the present day. Long ago, it seems, we used to…
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Wounded Leaders – the low down
Despite the complexities needed to fully explain it and the controversy that it inspires, the chief point of this book is simple enough. Because the our elite are raised in boarding schools – away from families, out of the reach of love, far from the influence of any feminine values, and so on – we…
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‘Plebgate’ – A very British Emotion or an Entitlement Illusion Meltdown?
We British are not renowned for what is called ‘emotional availability’, a term made popular by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 bestseller, Emotional Intelligence. In fact, we are rather more famous for our stiff upper lip. We can be ‘upset’ or ‘cross,’ but that is about all we are really comfortable with. We certainly mustn’t…
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