The Plashing Vole

Some of you young folk may not be aware that this country has had privatised or pay-as-you-go roads before: hence the sprinkling of rather p...

As you may have noticed, brevity is not one of my strong points. In my defence, the world's much more complicated than Tories and associ...

I wrote a piece a couple of days ago on why the resigning Goldman Sachs manager was wrong to claim that a good system was being damaged by ...

Yes, bearded Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has stepped down, and is to take up the Master's post at Magdalene College, Cambrid...

I'm not a huge rap fan, to be honest. In fact Ben says my music collection is the whitest in the country. My sum total of rap and hip-ho...

When I was a teen (and perhaps well into my twenties), I assumed that everything NME  said was right. Even when last week's Great New Ho...

I'm thirty pages away from finishing Trollope's He Knew He Was Right , the covert motto of all bloggers, in my experience. To be hon...

Today's Twitter sensation is this article in the New York Times , in which a Goldman Sachs equity trader explains to his company why he...

Here's Dick Fedorcio, suspended head of press relations for the Metropolitan Police. He employed a vast number of News of the World  jou...

Despite being part of the Olympics organisation (better not give too many details or I'll be thrown out), I've already expressed mis...

As readers of Plashing Vole, you'll be a connoisseur of Boring Issues. So you won't be particularly surprised that our favourite MP ...

No, not that kind of babes. Merely young people - two rather talented young writer/actors starting with Shakespeare and going off in interes...

What a successful seminar we had this afternoon. I don't want to be all 'Your Free Mountain Bikes Are Waiting To Be Collected From T...

Normal service is resumed in terms of book deliveries - 5 today. Four of them are minor Keith Roberts novels and short stories, some of them...

This pretty much sums up the Republican Party: "If the federal government were run more like the government here in Mississippi,"...

OK, I haven't received many books this week - though I've ordered a lot of previously unavailable Keith Roberts novels: he wrote th...

What a frustrating but amusing morning. I was called for a 'Banking Health Check' by the Co-Op. It's not that long since putti...

It only lasted 21 years. It has never had a Chair who wasn't a Conservative peer. It's being replaced by a 'transitional body...

Final few pictures of women being cool to mark International Women's Day. OK, being a Muse (history in this case) is a bit ideological...

Every woman I know has a residual horror of Girl's World A bust of Hilda Ogden, terror of Coronation Street Determined public sector w...