There was no round up last week due to that sodding talk which took up rather a lot of my time.

1. Laban reprints Paul Dacre’s Hugh Cudlipp Memorial Lecture.  I am far from a fan of Dacre’s Daily Mail but anyone who points out that:

   ...when The Times’s Ms Sieghart, the very embodiment of modern free-thinking women, holds forth on feminism, she does so courtesy of the topless girls in the still vastly profitable Sun.

   ...can’t be all bad.
2. At risk of turning this into a Crozier-Micklethwait Appreciation Society I would recommend that you take a look, if you haven’t already, at Brian’s first piece (there will be more) on the French anthropologist philosopher Emmanuel Todd.  Anyone who, in 1975, predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade or so later deserves attention.
3. “Anti-Americanism has acquired the status of Western Europe’s lingua franca.“According to The Chronicle. To paraphrase Fred Boynton: I think it’s well-known that anti-Americanism has its roots in impotence, at least in Europe. (Hat-tip: A&L Daily)
4. It would be far better to lower - rather than raise - the school leaving age, argues Theodore Dalrymple.  ‘Nuff said.
5. Don’t learn Japanese.  No really.  I can say this from personal experience.  It’s as mad as a box of frogs.  (Hat-tip: Rob Fisher)
6. Can we really compare Iraq’s insurgents with the Werewolves, the Nazis’ attempt to start an underground campaign against the Allies?  Michael Ledeen thinks we can.