Paul Whelan

No government, it may confidently be said, would hold a referendum it expected to lose. And, of course, that is how referendums have be...

The received wisdom at present is that a Brexit ‘deal’ will be scrambled together between Britain and the EU at the last moment because th...

Perhaps it is superfluous to point this out, but all the articles, commentaries and inflammatory issues they raise are part of the 'na...

  You cannot describe an evening at Macbeth as entertaining, as lovely; rather I must say I have never found the play so absorbing an ev...

  Moore's Paradox, in the headline, is an effort to remind us how 'the truth' is not simple.   Pontius Pilate long ago as...

Except for asking how wide the universe is and what we are doing here, there is no more difficult question than why and how to teach Histo...

Consciousness is itself explaining itself. There is no answer. It is the piece of string asking how long it is, our questioning what came...

  You and I agree that race is a divisive issue in South Africa; I assume you would agree that is not surprising in view of the country...

21 March 2018 at 12:20:30 AM Life is full of surprises and I have just had such a lovely one: seeing L'elisir d'amore for the fi...

With politicians you have to distinguish between what they say and what they mean and between what they promise and what they do. It ...

My farewell to school at 18 before going on to university text of the original on 'A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Dreamer' ...

My farewell to school at 18 before going on to university (tap and enlarge to read or see a legible text published as 'Chant du Cygn...

  The world appears to be in more than its usual disorder. Religion is dividing societies and nations and, where religion is not doing it...

Politics is about power, about the pursuit of power, the contest for power, about maintaining and losing power.  That does not mean ethics...

I haven't seen or possibly even heard anything of I Puritani and I don't think I've seen a Bellini opera. Can't think of ...

As the polls showed Donald Trump was likely to win the US elections, Gerard Araud, French ambassador to Washington and a career diplomat k...

They say we live in a post-factual age where we decide things irrationally, purely on our emotional feel, and most of that is decided on l...

Politics in the end is someone's personal responsibility as well as the impersonal art of the possible.   Challenged by his own pa...

  There will be minority governments in South Africa's major metros, coalitions that are led by either the African National Congress ...

Brexit was not about 'ordinary people' being confused by the facts; not about expert opinion being superior to grassroots opinion;...

Following David Cameron's triumph in the Brexit referendum, which enabled the British people to vote for or against almost anything be...

Serious thoughts   After his inglorious defeat in the UK referendum, David Cameron has resigned as Tory prime minister.  However, li...

Cheer up - well, at least cheer up a little.   There will be some kind of renegotiation because it is unavoidable. Britain is 'in ...

Since I started my blog three or four years back, I've had by this morning 66666 reads - if that is what a 'hit' is.   I ...

There is something incongruous, if not contradictory, about Julius Malema holding up on TV a copy of South Africa ’s constitution and swea...