The idea of writing a whole book which is self-consciously a rebuttal to an existing work, but not directly addressing that book or its author, and doing passive-aggressive little digs instead, is so incredibly alien to me.

https://twitter.com/si_rubinstein/status/1963967718429778258

An openly sceptical and robust reply to Dominion by a non-believer would be a very interesting exercise! But it doesn't sound like Roberts has written that book.

Of course exams are discriminatory, that is literally the purpose of them. It's amazing how people don't understand that learned professions are always going to need some form of quality control of their members. If you make it impossible to do that openly via rigorous meritocracy, you will instead get hidden, informal, secret judgements being made.

Got accused of being "far right" earlier, ppl insinuate this to me on a somewhat regular basis. A little while back, someone I thought I was Twitter friends with called me "fash" then cut off all contact. Want to say something re. why this misreads my politics > (& RW politics more generally). I once heard RW politics described as "ferocity in defence of gentleness" & I think this touches on an important truth. I am very attached to things like due process, free expression, policing by consent & freedom of religion.

Forty-five heirs to peerages were killed in the first eighteen months of WW1. Perhaps as many as 10% of army officers killed in the first year were Old Etonians. Whatever your view of the war, in those days the ruling class led by example, from the front. From Simon Heffer's (very good) Staring At God: Britain In The Great War.

Listened to a couple of Kermode reviews for the first time in a while. He finished the second one by scolding listeners who disagreed with him, and telling them not to listen to him and Mayo. Truly insufferable man now. People say "oh he hasn't changed, you just notice the politics more now" but that is simply not true. I was a regular listener to K&M for 15 or 16 years and before 2016 set in he was always more jokey and light and self-deprecating with the politics stuff.

Headshot here from @si_rubinstein in his enjoyable review of that new book about how awesome all the people who fought the British Empire were. Whole piece here: engelsbergideas.com/reviews/the-br… Sounds like Veevers is exactly the kind of historian I thought he would be when I read about the subject of the book.