Blogcoven

If a speech depends on nothing else, it depends on the crowd receiving it. The best thing about the speech I gave on Friday night was that I was facing not my usual crowd of stoney-faced academics, yearning for a coffee break, but a jubilant, recently-fed crowd with ready access to alcohol.
Perhaps I should [...]

We’re currently the only country in the EU that has to vote on the Lisbon Reform Treaty.
When it comes to the EU, Irish political debate goes from the stupid to the random. The yes side trot out the dire warnings about lost influence and lost opportunity. They tell us that Ireland will be so hated [...]

I was a member of what was perhaps the last year of undergraduates to have known the old Lincoln’s Inn. Apart form the clever joke, the best thing about that pub was that, inside its purple-and-white livery, it was an uncompromisingly dingy pub. The important thing was that it was a friendly, uncompromisingly dingy pub. [...]

Many popular and well-loved bloggers occasionally resort to posts of random miscellany. I poked around in the Way Back Machine yesterday and found some of the earliest Cobweb posts, as it appears the good folks at the Internet Archive are better at holding onto our posts than our old hosting company. I used to blog [...]