Month: December 2014
-
How to have your coke and snort it too
In 2013 the comedian Russell Brand guest-edited an issue of the New Statesman magazine and declared in his editorial that he had never voted in a general election. An interviewer on the BBC’s Newsnight wanted to know why, and also, given the comedian’s apathy, why anyone should care what he had to say. As he…
-
The invisible censor
Confessing one’s ignorance is not, perhaps, the ideal way to begin an article, but the recent debate about whether or not Grand Theft Auto V is misogynistic is not one to which I’m able to contribute. The last video games I played regularly were Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, and, frankly, I was terrible…
-
Strictly speaking, grammar nuts have a point
There is a scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch in which a retired school mistress, Mrs Garth, is attempting to drill her son, Ben Garth, in the finer points of English Grammar. Master Ben is proving a reluctant student. ‘I hate grammar’ he declares; ‘What’s the use of it?’ His mother, however, is in no doubt…