not to put too fine a point on it

Give the elbow

Down the Swannee

Artists Eyes

Dad bought us a model Globe - it meant the world to us

Dignified in defeat

Here at Brest on the River Bug—travellers who wish to rest overnight may stay in the Hotel Bug—stands the final frontier of the European Union, an abrupt and total stop to that strange, postmodern empire of deliberately forgotten history, bureaucracy, and subsidy. The EU may dream of one day incorporating Ukraine and even Turkey. But Belarus? I don’t think so. The place is too troublesome and unpredictable. An inhabitant of Brest—provided he was on nobody’s death list and was generally lucky—might have lived in five different countries in one century without so much as moving house.

In this disputed city, just by the Polish frontier, are the ruins of the mighty fortress of Brest Litovsk, built by the Tsars, acquired by Pilsudski’s Poland in 1921, taken back by Stalin in his pact with Hitler in 1939, conquered by Hitler in 1941, retaken by Stalin in 1944, the property of an independent Belarus since 1991, and who knows what next?

But I maintain that there is such a thing as a Left-wing face – and a conservative one, and a Right-wing one, and a soft-liberal one – and that Ms Colman possesses the first. The latest stills of her in the role suggest she is acting the part with her usual outstanding skill, and is extremely well made-up.




I have considerable confidence she will succeed. But there remains something about the mouth which is not right. The Queen’s mouth expresses an acceptance – strong-minded yet gentle – of whatever life may throw at her. Ms Colman’s has that hint of complaint and hauteur which is such a feature of the educated Left.

So no-platforming can be fun. But I am also frightened by it. Slowly, it is winning. When these mini-censors begin to fan out into the law, the media, the Civil Service, the legal profession and schools, they will be a real threat. Unlike Howard Marks, they have never been taught to value their liberty. They genuinely think their own opinions are so virtuous that they are entitled to silence others. I have read the attacks on me that have been circulated in these seats of learning, and they are enough to make the blood run cold. They look like charge sheets in some revolutionary show trial – a trial which I increasingly fear I may one day face in reality. Someone has usually spent days looking for things that I have said in the past, and then twisted them to give a false impression to the ill-informed.