The Plashing Vole

A few weeks ago, I posted a long and quite diffuse piece on the declining prominence of public intellectuals: leading thinkers who used the...

What is  the serial adulterer, moral hypocrite and political know-nothing saying to this woman? Me first, because it's my blog. ...

I'm not sure who Mark Wahlberg is. Is he Marky Mark, or was that someone else? Either way, he's got a mouth on him: "If I was...

It looks like we might be getting hover cars after all, thanks to the Japan Institute of Science and Technology and their quantum levitation...

OK, I'm not saying that Plashing Vole is the second-most popular and trusted site on the entire internet, but I think it's significa...

The surely-not-long-now death of Thatcher is going to be a horrible time for those of us with a conscience: the right is going to behave as ...

I'm actually embarrassed by the intellectual frailty of my MP, Paul Uppal. As I predicted yesterday, his speech in Parliament was a sh...

Feeling lost? Homework impossible without Wikipedia? Fear not, brave webnauts! Plashing Vole, as a service to readers, has harvested the ...

I spend a lot of time abusing politicians, I'll admit. In particular, one Mr. Paul Uppal, the Mediocre Millionaire. To add a bit of cl...

Well well, Uppal's tweeting from the House of Commons: In the chamber, hoping to contribute to the debate on the future of town centres...

Presumably they mean well, but this horrified me on moral grounds. I visited a friend last night, and called in to Waitrose near his house...

Fresh from the triumph of his naked self-interest, Paul Uppal made another foray into grown-up politics yesterday. In a brave break from po...

Speaking strictly for myself, I'd have to say that the last couple of hours were amongst the most enjoyable I've had in a classroom ...

Over at the Leveson inquiry, the editor of the Daily Mirror  has said this about bloggers: Asked about bloggers, Wallace says: "The o...

Sadly, this sketch from the early 1980s is entirely relevant. Despite smug bourgeois claims that Britain is the home of individual liber...

I see that unpleasant student politician Jim Murphy, now an unpleasant rightwing Labour MP, is calling on Labour to rally round the Union Fl...

The Enlightenment is, for Americans, very much over. Which is a shame, because it was explicitly founded on Enlightenment principles by the ...

OK, the vast majority of essays I mark are honestly and carefully written. Some are excellent, many are good, too many aren't very good,...

I'm still reeling from Richard Desmond's appearance yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry. Together with the editors of his newspapers, t...

I've been following the Leveson inquiry as well as marking and attending a school meeting. In case you've missed them, there have be...