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How the Daily Mail Sees EU Rule

Traders in Frankfurt followed a long tradition by turning up to work in costume to celebrate carnival this week, thereby confirming the Mail readers’ worst fears.

The Responses To That Letter

Well, THAT was an interesting exercise! ‘An Open Letter To Harper Collins’ generated five times the normal amount of mail ranging from the outraged to the unprintable. I had to weed out the comments carefully, something I don’t usually do, in order to get a proper range to them – there were some which were [...]

An Open Letter To The Publisher

Dear Harper Collins,

I see that you are to pay Amanda Knox £4 million for her memoirs. Apparently she hired a top lawyer used by Barack Obama and George W. Bush to negotiate a book deal about being jailed in Italy for her part in the murder of Meredith Kercher, a British student.

I see that she [...]

Why People Can't Be Trusted

For your delectation we present the billionaire Charles Koch, a key financier of the Heartland Institute, which apparently works to undermine the established science on climate change.

The institute has built a reputation over the years for providing a forum for climate change deniers. It hosts lavish conferences of climate science doubters at expensive hotels in [...]

Let The Sun Set. Let's Have The New York Times Instead.

With Rupert Murdoch in town to clean out the Augean stables of News International, the general theory is that he’ll leave the Sun newspaper twisting in the wind and concentrate on overseas arms. And why not?

Choice isn’t everything. The UK may have eleven or twelve national newspapers but it now lacks a single newspaper offering [...]

Where Ideas Come From

My old friend Kim Newman, whose own excellent Sherlock Holmes book series far exceeds the quality of the current TV reinvention, has pointed out that TV doesn’t need to purchase new ideas so long as they can get away with stealing work from writers, in the same way that TV reality shows don’t need actors [...]

Celebrating St Martin's

KINGS CROSS SOUNDS from Short Form Film Company on Vimeo.

Since 4,500 art students suddenly appeared in my neighbourhood the area has got a lot perkier. I haven’t seen clothes this fun and stupid since I was 21 myself, wandering about in rainbow loons in midwinter, although generally these students seem more intense and conservative than [...]

Why The Kindle Doesn’t Fit The Crime

Having finally succumbed to a Kindle, and reluctantly agreeing that it’s better (if uglier) than the sleek steel Sony eReader, there remains one massive obstacle for me to overcome. It has no riffle-factor. If you read long novels which are quite complicated (try David Mitchell’s ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet’) it’s impossible to [...]

Why Men Care Less About Fashion

Givenchy were rightly fearful of menswear from Paris Fashion Week being ridiculed. This outfit wasn’t even the silliest on the catwalk, but it did have the most hilariously understated caption, which read:
‘It’s difficult to imagine Givenchy’s latest looks making the transition to the high street.’
Although if you’re intent on looking like a cross-dressing Albanian clog-dancer, [...]

Time For A Change

Running websites is a trial-and-error system, and you learn more with each passing day, so there will shortly be some changes. It’s becoming clear that the Peculiar Crimes Unit site isn’t working for several reasons – it’s consistently targeted by massive amounts of spam and requires a lot of maintenance. And in many ways it’s [...]