The Pod Delusion is a new podcast that I really like; in their own words: The Pod Delusion is a podcast about interesting things. From scepticism to lefty liberal things, it’s commentary from a secular, rationalist, ‘Guardianista’, sort of perspective. A bit like From Our Own Correspondent but with more jokes. I’ve contributed a piece [...]

The thesis of Garreau’s 1981 book, The nine nations of North America, is deceptively simple. Not only, he argues, are the borders between the states of the USA and between that country and Mexico & Canada are artificial constructions – they clearly are – but that they are irrelevant. There are commonly recognised regions with [...]

A friend and former teacher of mine from LSE, Leda Glyptis, has set up a blog over at tsikitsiki.blogspot.com. Tsiki tsiki is, I am told, the Greek annoying, onomatopoeic expression of an annoying names. In a post on the Hellenic Republic, Leda talks about the recent riots and the threat, in Weberian terms, that they [...]

China is on the up. All, however, is not rosy. China faces a few problems; these are my impressions. Tibet and Xinjiang both have groups that seek more autonomy or even independence. They are in the interior of the Asian continent and a long way from the rich cities of the coast. With disparate geography, [...]

Lord Goldsmith’s proposals on citizenship include a Britishness day of some sort. There is something quite ironic about the idea. Where other countries have national days, days of liberation and holidays for freedom, justice, liberty, equality and peace, the British seem to be minded to celebrate the banks being shut. It is a curiously British [...]

Ewan Watt asks me what I think about military uniforms being worn in public by service personnel and, more particularly, the instruction to troops of a RAF station commander not to wear uniform in town. Remarkably, this issue has affected me; at school, we weren’t allowed to wear CCF uniforms in the minibus if we [...]

As I understand it, the modernist take on nationalism requires that the nation is not prior to nationalism; that is to say, nationalism may cause the nation or something causes both the nation and nationalism to come about. The nation cannot come first and therefore cannot cause the nationalism. There are many, competing definitions of [...]