Richard FarrMar 29Covfefe-16 crisis solved?For three long years now America has been ravaged by the highly infectious and potentially lethal disease Covfefe-16. You may recall that it emerged in the i...
Richard FarrMar 27The Pied Piper of Pennsylvania AvenueWe received this frightening little postcard yesterday. The contrast between the front and the back says so much. On the back there is important information ...
Richard FarrMar 27The uselessness of Eric AmblerIn the years leading up to the Second World War, Eric Ambler wrote some of the most influential thrillers ever published - more or less invented the genre, i...
Richard FarrMar 17A storey on or about dinasuors in Teh GrauniadI love The Guardian: it's one of the best news sources in the world. I feel guilty about The Guardian: I use it every day and ought to send lots of money to ...
Richard FarrMar 17Testing, testing ... coronavirus and a dangerous drug called FictionA lot of people are being tested for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. (Not enough in my neck of the planet, thanks to our communicable-disease-in-...
Richard FarrMar 8Piketty's primaryIt's a commonplace in American and much other discourse, from the farthest reaches of the market-evangelical libertarian right to the Biden smile-n-waffle ce...
Richard FarrFeb 27Nasty viruses and a question about precisionListening to NPR yesterday, I was informed (is that the right word?): "There are only 60 confirmed cases of infection by the Covid-19 virus in the US, but ex...
Richard FarrFeb 18Kafka's progressToday's quote of the day from The Browser - which I recommend to everyone - struck a cord for me. It's a commonplace in our culture to talk of "advanced civi...
Richard FarrFeb 13Dis Barred?Attorney General William Barr has complained that Donald Trump's tweets make it impossible for him to do his job. This is tellingly inaccurate. Trump's tweet...
Richard FarrJan 31American politics: the mistake of the ModeratistsMy old friend Aristotle is well known for the claim that moderation is a virtue - indeed, that we can locate virtue at the point of moderation. The latitude ...
Richard FarrJan 3It was a peach while it lastedFor three years now, an oily moral poison has been leaking from the wrecked hull of that stately grand dame of the democratic oceans, the USS White House. Th...
Richard FarrNov 27, 2019Hong Kong election latestThe People: 30%. Reactionary lick-spittle unpatriotic bourgeois foreign anarcho-terrorist student black-hand hooligan elements: 70% Uighurs: Who? Long live C...
Richard FarrNov 27, 2019Coup d’état, ou L’état c’est moi?Donnie! Bibi! Evo! Irony alert. They’re all corrupt and they are all prepared to cling to power through lies and force even when their corruption is no longe...
Richard FarrNov 25, 2019Italo Calvino on how to be an efficient writer“Every morning I tell myself, Today has to be productive—and then something happens that prevents me from writing. Today . . . what is there that I have to d...
Richard FarrNov 23, 2019Happy birthday George Eliot!One of the most luminous, most humane intelligences in history was born two hundred years ago today: But the effect of her being on those around her was inca...
Richard FarrNov 20, 2019Al-chemieReading all the depressing news about plastic, which has now found its way to the bottom of the Marianas Trench – I’m reminded again of a gorgeous paragraph ...
Richard FarrNov 18, 2019English and its HistorieWhy is English so much simpler in grammar and richer in vocabulary than so many other languages? (Why does the OED need twenty volumes?) I’ve been reading Ro...
Richard FarrNov 16, 2019Oh, and lock him up too.Criminals, criminals, everywhere And none that stopped to think Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Crime of the Ancient Panderer A friend, out jogging this morning,...
Richard FarrNov 6, 2019A total lack of common senseA spokesperson for survivors of the Grenfell tragedy have apologized for saying that Jacob Rees-Mogg “showed a total lack of common sense” in failing to leav...
Richard FarrNov 5, 2019Borne back into the pastApparently the new season of The Crown will take us into the 1960s and actor David Wilmott will play union leader Arthur Scargill. This is disturbing. As a s...