The Critical Commentator

  By All Means Get Good Wages But - Mind How You Spend Them Sam Fitton (1868-1923) Photo Credit: Gallery Oldham [BY-NC-ND]  Bosses of Britain's largest listed companies have taken home record-high pay packets for the third successive year, according to a thinktank. The latest record, set in the 2024-25 financial year, means the average FTSE 100 chief executive is now paid 122 times the salary of the average full-time UK worker, analysis found. Executive pay has been on the rise for the past four years, partly as a consequence of pay cuts taken during the pandemic, at a time when many households are struggling with a cost of living crisis. The median pay of a FTSE 100 chief executive climbed to £4.58m in the past financial year, up from £4.29m a year earlier, an increase of nearly 7% the High Pay Centre said... Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, said: "These figures will feed a growing sense that low and middle earners don't get a fair share of the wealth t...

  Here  is Judith Butler's winning entry in the 1999 "Bad Writing Contest" for academics, established by the journal Philosophy and Literature. "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibilities of ..." (John Maier, The Observer, 2025) The move from repetition marked a shift in power, thinking and the possibilities of social insights. The Writing Lesson Robert Braithwaite Martineau (1826-1869) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] My hair is a bandmate. It's a way of expressing and flailing and raging. It's like a typewriter. It speaks on my ...

  Sometimes I feel like I have two jobs. One is my day job as a writer for The Times. The other is what's beginning to feel like a full-time career perfecting my night-time beauty routine. Beauty and the Beast John Dickson Batten (1860-1932) Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust [Public Domain] At the moment, it begins with 45 minutes in a red-light sauna blanket that is meant to help inflammation and muscle recovery. While that's going on, I also whack on an LED face mask with a blue light function, which is supposed to help to manage my acne, and a hair mask meant to strengthen my hair. Once that's over and I've showered, I spend another 15 minutes attempting to meditate while sitting in front of a red LED panel, which is supposed to help to manage wrinkles and stress. Then it's back to the bathroom to begin the eight-step skincare routine that involves double cleansing, serums, oils, moisturisers and various face sculpting tools. Then time for dinner, before kic...

  I'm writing this from Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, where I've just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven month old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her as a newborn. The phrase "skin and bones" doesn't do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes, and we are powerless to save her. We are witnessing deliberate starvation in Gaza right now. This is my third time in Gaza since December 2023 as a volunteer surgeon with Medical Aid for Palestinians... The malnutrition crisis has become catastrophic since my last visit. Every day I watch patients deteriorate and die - not from their injuries, but because they are too malnourished to survive surgery... Four babies have died in the last few weeks in this hospital - not from bombs or bullets, but from starvation.. Children are being given 10% dextrose (sugar water)...

  "There are a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life [but] you get to No1 in the world and they're like, 'What's the point?' I really do believe that, because what is the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad? It's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis." John Locke (1632-1704) unknown artist Photo Credit: Yale Center for British Art [Public Domain] This was one quote from what will perhaps go down as the most frank, raw and profound press conference, well, ever. It involved Scottie Scheffler and if you are surprised as to the identity of the man who spoke the above words, join the club. Press conferences are typically forums that incubate banalities (I know: I've been to a few) but this was a brilliant golfer and reflective man pondering some of the deeper questions confronting someone who has spent most of his life - this brief illumination of existence that is all any of us gets - hitt...

  Sorry seems to be the hardest word , sang Elton John - but not for British people it appears, for whom it has 15 different uses (and only one of them expressing true regret). Linguists have analysed the context in which we say sorry and identified multiple meanings. They say it often causes confusion for foreign people moving to the UK, who take it as a literal apology rather than decoding what is truly being expressed. Frances Abington Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) Photo Credit: Yale Centre for British Art [Public Domain] Karen Grainger, a lecturer in linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University , says the word has become a reflex to be polite, soften disagreement, ease awkwardness and navigate social norms... The truly regretful meaning comes with someone being genuinely sorry to hear someone else's bad news and means they care what that person is going through. However, "sorry" can also be used in a passive aggressive way: "I'm sorry if I offended you",...