Gordon of Khartoum

by nigelscotchmer | Essays

An overdue retrospective Major General Charles George Gordon, CB, 1833-1885 The Victorian Age was an idealistic age, beginning with the might of the Royal Navy breaking the thralldom of slavery outside the British Empire. There was a dawning acceptance of Darwin’s...

A Culture of Reticence

by nigelscotchmer | Essays

The past is another country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between   (A mosaic from Hadrumetum, in Tunisia, an important pre-Carthage Phoenician city, which depicts Aeneas surrounded by Clio, (history), and Melpomene (tragedy). This...

The Luring of Children

by nigelscotchmer | Essays

A Bookseller’s stall in Kutaisi, Georgia Now the ‘Luring of Children’ is a provocative title for an article in a non-political periodical like The Ironist. It comes from a picture, (above), that I took in Georgia (the country), recently, at a bookseller’s stall in the...

What can We Believe?

by nigelscotchmer | Essays

The Need For Critical Thinking   Children, quite rightly, expect adults to look out for them. Maybe, when we grow up, we continue to expect others in authority to look after us. Or we WANT to believe they care. The more fools we are. Last night my bank called and...

Supreme Irony

by jpAdmin | Essays

It is a supreme irony that the Ontario public school system, at least in its Peel District school board, should fall victim to wokeist activists of the ‘cancel culture’ persuasion, militants unrepresentative of Canadian majority opinion. Recent news reports of a...

Play

by jpAdmin | Essays

If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, it makes Jill pretty boring, too. If truth be told, those workaholics Mr. and Mrs. Jack are tedious company, as well. So obsessed has our society become with work, usually paid work, that its antithesis, play, has become...