Society

Is the Loch Ness Monster real? Many thousands of people think so. ‘Existence “plausible” after plesiosaur discovery,’ the BBC reported. ‘Hundreds join huge search for Loch Ness Monster.’ Not only that. The Beeb had live coverage of congressional hearings about possible UFO sightings in July. It ran a series on the yeti the previous month asking: ‘Is something out there in the Himalayas?’ Last year, an Autumnwatch presenter took seriously the possibility that large cats are roaming the countryside. What’s coming back next? Poltergeists, Ouija boards, the Bermuda Triangle, crop circles? Have we been time-ported back to the 1970s? I know clickbait journalism these days requires you to set your

For most people today radioactivity is synonymous with bright yellow warning signs, explosions and poison. But there was a time when radioactivity was revered, not feared. And when it seemed like everyone in Britain was clamouring for more of it.  In the late 19th century Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a previously unknown form of powerful radiation that was invisible to the human eye and so mysterious that he simply named it ‘X’. Working from Röntgen’s findings, the French engineer and physicist Henri Becquerel identified the phenomenon of radioactivity – both as a concept and as a force – and Marie Skłodowska Curie would later give it a name.   Radium also began

For reasons that not even Czechs can explain, in the past they developed a habit of throwing their rulers out of windows. It started in the early 15th century, but it was in Prague in 1618 that the word ‘defenestration’ entered the English language. The word derives from the Latin word for window, fenestra.  A year earlier the dying and childless Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Mathias, named Ferdinand as his successor. Ferdinand II, a Jesuit educated zealot, immediately begun to row back on guaranteed protestant freedoms in Prague (Bohemia). On 23 May 1618, a group of angry protestant noblemen led a mob across the Charles Bridge and upward to Hradcany Castle. There

One August afternoon, my dad, my uncle, and I were walking along Hadrian’s Wall. It was pouring. Our shoes were full of water, our glasses had steamed up, and our pac-a-macs were sticking to our bodies.  Seemingly out of nowhere, we came upon a little dip in the cliff, within which was nestled a tall tree. We stopped under the cover of its wide branches and five-lobed leaves and ate our ham and cheese sandwiches. There was no one else in sight and we had this beautiful part of Northumberland to ourselves.  Thanks to an individual act of vandalism, the Sycamore Gap is now really a gap That tree was

The campaign to destroy GB News in Britain is precisely mirrored by a campaign to eliminate CNEWS, its French equivalent. The French political and media establishment would dearly like to shut down CNEWS which has overtaken #BFMTV (ipso facto BF Macron TV) as the most watched news station here. The campaign against CNEWS is intensifying since the channel has started routinely beating its establishment competitors. This seems also to be the case with GB News. The station’s refusal to conform to the groupthink of the establishment Parisian media blob is driving the bien-pensants mad. The accusation that it’s an extreme-right disinformation machine is absurd. It tilts right, but no more than