Is the Drachma doomed?
Interesting piece by an American investment and free trade advocate giving a handy bit of background to Greece’s money woes – just in case you weren’t pessimisitc enough already. Has some convincing,...
View ArticleThe euro: A domesday machine
As a counter to the last post, an interesting from investment banker Marshall Auerback at EconoMonitor, worth a read for a bit of history on the (evidently flawed) economic assumptions underpinning the...
View ArticleMy return to blogging: A mission statement
There’s infinitely more being written about the EU these days than when I started this blog 9+ years ago. Some of it is excellent, some of it interesting, some of it utterly fatuous. My aim with this...
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The failure of European centrism: Towards a hypothesis of historical recurrence
Likely the first of many posts on this – as a fairly hardcore centrist (arguably a stupid concept in itself, that, if you ask most people today) with a dogmatic refusal to align myself to any one...
View ArticleWhy the UK’s “audit” of EU law is a waste of time
So, supposedly in a bid to allow any future in-out referendum on UK membership of the EU to be based on facts rather than ideology (fat chance), Foreign Secretary William Hague has announced an “audit”...
View ArticleAnaximander and the importance of finding new perspectives
From Jerry Brotton’s promising A History of the World in Twelve Maps (got for Christmas, currently reading, good so far, but too soon to properly rate it): “virtually all Greek wtiters point to...
View ArticleLessons from writing about the Habsburgs for writing about the EU
A review of a book I’ve been meaning to pick up (Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe, by Simon Winder) has some useful passages: “Austria-Hungary seems rarely to be taken seriously,...
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Succinct dismissal of Michael Gove’s fatuous take on the First World War
Sock it to ‘im, Prof Evans! http://zite.to/1cr5zxb “‘ How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism...
View ArticleUkraine uprisings: News coverage of events in far-away lands, 2004 vs 2014
The pictures coming out of Kiev yesterday (decent galley here) gave me – and no doubt plenty of others – a bit of a flashback to November/December 2004’s Orange Revolution. The riots are in protest...
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On Anti-EU Lies and Retiring from Blogging
Yesterday I returned from work to find an anti-EU leaflet on the doorstep. So you can imagine my surprise to find it was covered in an array of spurious bullshit. Let’s take a look, “point” by “point”:...
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