Maxims and Missiles

Christopher Hitchens is nothing more than the William F. Buckley of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Punditry Profundity

“It is so quiet in White Hart Lane this afternoon that you can hear a twenty pence piece hit the defender’s head”

Election Special

Things you rarely hear

“You’re not getting down from the table until you have finished your chicken nuggets, chips and onion rings!”

What have the Normans done for us?

In the London Review of Books, Christopher Kelly argues that the “Romans were accommodated in narratives of Britishness” rather than presented as the “invaders and occupiers who brutally suppressed native independence movements”. (LRB, 11^th Feb 2010).  The Romanization of Britain was, therefore, inscribed into the narrative as a necessary civilizing force.  It is revealing, then, to read Joseph Conrad’s comparison of Britain as “one of the dark places of the earth”: “cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death” at the arrival of the Romans, “they who were men enough to face the darkness”, not as a critique but rather as a preemptive justification for the imminent imperialization of Africa.

However, Kelly goes on to claim that “only the Normans conquer”, correctly affirming the British acceptance of the Roman invasion but also wrongly inferring that the Norman subjugation hadn’t become increasingly useful, in a calculated celebration of the nation’s