Museum Hours

The biggest cheers of the whole speech given by Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party Conference in September were generally reckoned to go to his plea for an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people. There is indeed much to applaud in this. Labour has traditionally been a party of the oppressed and the Palestinian people are widely acknowledged, including in several UN Resolutions, to have legitimate demands for restitution, focused particularly on the annexation of land by Israel following the 1967 war.  For many in the Labour Party Palestinians are, however, seen as uniquely oppressed.  Moreover, support for Palestine allows some in Labour to turn a blind eye to antisemitism. Worse, support for Palestinians for some Labour members moves over into being actively antisemitic. So why are some in the Labour Party so concerned with Palestinian rights compared to many other oppressed people across the globe; why is antagonism towards Israel as a state so much s

I am in love with bathos. Bathos may not know this and would doubtless find the whole concept a touch overblown.  Rather than an overwhelming crush one should have a mild disposition towards bathos. Otherwise it would doubtless need to take things down a peg or two.  If bathos were French it would not pirouette or stoop to a proper moue  but merely shrug you a bof.  If you look up bathos on Wikipedia (rather than Tinder) you will be see it defined as a literary term, coined by Alexander Pope, to describe amusingly failed attempts at  sublimity    In particular, bathos is associated with anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one. This may be either accidental (through artistic ineptitude) or intentional (for comic effect).  So why the love?  As a staple of satire, bathos is one of the great ways of puncturing and undermining the arrogant and the self obsessed. At a time when there are more people than i