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Rod Liddle

Stop the sabre-rattling

I have been wondering these last few weeks whether it would be cheaper to excavate a basement and buy a Geiger counter and iodine tablets, or emigrate to New Zealand. Call me frit, but I don’t like the way things are heading. Probably the second option is easier: Armageddon outta here, etc. I can re-enact

Putin’s next move

The old KGB headquarters in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, is a sinister place, full of ghosts. It is a solid 19th-century neoclassical building with walls thick enough to have muffled the screams of those under interrogation. The cells in the basement are as cold and damp as they were in Soviet times and there are

Climate of ignorance

Global greening is the name given to a gradual, but large, increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past three decades. The climate change lobby is keen to ensure that if you hear about it at all, you hear that it is a minor thing, dwarfed by the dangers of global warming. Actually,

Hope, fights and grammar schools

A typical Kentish town, with its grammar school at one end and its secondary school at the other, is a throwback to the Bad Old Days, or the Good Old Days, depending on what your views are on academically selective state education. If Theresa May’s plans go ahead, the whole country might look something like

Carney must go

Oh dear. Mark Carney is irritated. His proud independence has been challenged. The Prime Minister had the temerity to admit that she was not altogether thrilled with his ‘super-low’ interest rates and quantitative easing. These policies meant that people with assets got richer, she pointed out. ‘People without them suffered… People with savings have found

Ghosts of the seasons

Forget killer clowns. Halloween was once a very different affair from the Americanised gorefest it is now. In its-original Irish form, as when I was growing up, it was an opportunity for children to dress up in their parents’ clothes, wear a mask and a hat and go begging from door to door for nuts,

Notebook

Japan Notebook | 20 October 2016

Tokyo is visual chaos everywhere, the antithesis of the Japanese interior. It is a multilevel jumble of overpasses, neon signs, electric pylons, railway lines and traffic lights. The pavements are empty, not a pedestrian human in sight. And the leader of North Korea is still lobbing ballistic missiles right over Japan and cackling away about

Notes on...

Notes on… Champagne

The British are notoriously cheap when it comes to wine; the average bottle price is around £6. On one wine, however, we’re happy to spend five times that: champagne. We love champagne, and champagne producers love us: Britain is their biggest export market and it’s only getting bigger: up by 4.5 per cent last year.