Miscellaneous

Any site like this is bound to have material that doesn't fit anywhere else. It's obvious I have a wide range of interests, and curiosities crop up all the time. Some I thought were worth sharing, so here's a selection.

THE BREXIT-TRUMP PHENOMENON

Although it is not my main concern, anyone living in these curious times after 2016 cannot but be affected by the rise of populism symbolised by the BREXIT vote and the election of Donal Trump. I found myself writing compulsively about these matters, and finally my son and I decided we would try to explore the common ground between the two sides. We are both amused to find ourselves ‘fundamentalist remainers’, yet we wanted to find out whether dialogue is still possible, hence the following:

An Open Letter to Any Leavers Who Might Be Listening

At the end of 2020 it is clear that Donald Trump will be a one-term president, yet it has been an extraordinary four years. It has been particularly difficult for liberals to understand how Mr Trump’s ‘base’, and the phenomenon of ‘Trumpism’ has emerged in such strength. The following essay is an attempt to explore this question through the intersection of several distinct explanatory threads, and it asks whether liberals themselves have anything to learn from the analysis.

Theories of Trumpism

Stop Press! Writing this in November 2024, Donald Trump has been re-elected, truggering another spate of head-scratching. How is this ever possible? There will be more, so watch this space.

BITS ‘N

In 1969 I found myself a guest of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, rubbing shoulders with some of the demigods who wrote the textbooks. One of the many curious incidents is told here. It is not often you get to meet both W.H.Auden and Arthur Koestler on the same occasion.

The late Jack Parsons was one of Britain's most persistent and vociferous campaigners on population issues. Although we disagreed about many things, I considered him one of the great unsung heroes of the environmental movement, and wrote this memoir

A friend of mine was the editor of a delightfully obscure academic journal of Marian studies. Knowing my interest in botany and wild plants, she asked me to review an even more obscure book devoted to plants named after the Holy Virgin. It turned out to be a charming work, with the additional quirk that it was....written in Norwegian. How quirky can a review get?

In 1982 I became fascinated by the unfolding of the Anglo-Argentinian conflict around the Falkland Islands, and kept a diary recording my thoughts. The interest arises from the fact that as events unfolded, nobody knew what the outcome would be. This is accessible through a special blog I created for the purpose, www.harpersmuse.blogspot.co.uk. It is a kind of notated Oral history, and would be of special interest to those who were also there at the time.

MY BROTHER

My brother is an unusual person, more unusual I would say, than the usual run of brothers. He describes himself as an ‘applied epistemologist’, but that is not really a thing, more something he made up. Nevertheless he treats it as a proper subject with rules and principles and a community of practitioners. He likes to say ‘as we applied epistemologists like to say’, stuff like that. But it’s just him.

Others would describe him as a ‘revisionist historian’ in that he likes to tell historical stories backwards, or upside down, or any way but the standard Received Wisdom. And he comes up with some absolute crackers (and few lemons, but let’s focus on the good stuff). For example he believes that the English language is not just some creole that allowed serfs to communicate with their masters in the thirteenth century, but — wait for it — is aboriginal in Britain, and was spoken in Roman times. He also believes the old trackways, megaliths and stone circles are the remains of a sophisticated routeing system for travellers and trade, administered by a decentralised civilisation thousands of years ago. His latest work is on forgeries, mostly of texts and manuscripts. He thinks for example that The Book of Kells, Beowulf and the works of Giacomo Casanova, are all forgeries. Blimey.

It’s all a bit like conspiracy theories: once you get into it, it becomes compelling and the evidence can seem overwhelming. It really is completely fascinating, and I cannot resist from time to time ‘helping him with his enquiries’. There is never a dull moment. He publishes the stuff himself under the name M.J. Harper, and you can see for yourself

The History of Britain Revealed

The Megalithic Empire

Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries

Here is an example of my taking the forgery hypothesis seriously:

Invented Ancient Languages