The Critical Commentator

  Merit Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery  [CC BY-NC] ...Last week the US Department of Justice (DoJ) found that Yale University discriminated against white and Asian applicants, for whom, said the finding, admission was between four and ten times harder than for black applicants with the same qualifications. The DoJ has demanded that Yale cease using race-based admissions for at least the next year... Yale has vowed to defy the order. ...Russell Group universities are also under pressure to further diversify their intake, and last year Oxford University announced that for the first time in 900 years it would accept "disadvantaged" students on the basis of lower grades. Post-George Floyd, American affirmative action - in Brit-speak, "positive discrimination", a contradiction in terms - grows ever more popular in Britain, not only in university admissions but also in employment. Recall this summer's promise to ensure 20 per cent of the...

A Grotesque Accouchement Pietro della  Vecchia (1603-1678) (attributed to) Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] The good news is that Spitting Image , the satirical puppet show that lampooned politicians and celebrities, is back on our screens this autumn. The bad news is that the current climate of fear around causing offence means that the new show could be a politically cowardly imitation of the original, which glorified in pushing the boundaries of the acceptable. The early signs are not good. Senior ITV executives have already held meetings to discuss how high-profile figures such as the Duchess of Sussex, Beyoncè and Kanye West should be portrayed amid concern that puppet caricatures could prompt accusations of racism. Kevin Lygo, ITV's director of television, said that the conversations covered "What's OK, what's not OK. This question itself shows a certain tone-deafness about what makes for good satire. Surely the whole point of a show like Spittin...

Charity William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust [Public Domain] ...Fewer than a tenth of charities publish the exact salaries of their chief executives in an easily accessible form on their website. Only four in ten give the precise sum in their annual report. The rest publish only salary bands. ...Of the five largest charities, only Oxfam gives the precise salary paid to its chief executive on its website. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is paid £120,000 a year. Nuffield Health, the biggest charity listed the total pay of its chief executive, Steve Gray, within an income band of £840,000-£849,000 in its annual report. This included a performance-related bonus of £300,000. Cancer Research UK ... chief executive Michelle Mitchell ... was paid £244,000 plus benefits worth £11,600. ... Sir Stephen Bubb, director of the Oxford Institute of Charity, said: "The country's national charities have nothing to hide. They make an enormous contribution to t...

Black Retriever in a Landscape Richard Ansdell (1815-1885) Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery  [CC BY-NC] These are confusing times for historians. We were educated to believe that our responsibility is the examination of evidence, in an attempt to make a stab at truth. Some teachers at great universities now assert, however, that not only is there no such such thing as truth but also that we should refashion our accounts of past words, events and people to conform to modern mores. I received an email last week from a man who deemed it racist that, in a recent book, I named Guy Gibson's dog. I responded that, while of course no modern person would use such a word, in 1943 the dog and its name were facts. Nonetheless, last month the dog's gravestone was removed from RAF Scampton. We chroniclers may come to be grateful that few people nowadays learn any history except about slavery and the world wars. Most are thus blissfully ignorant that our ancestors did even worse things than g...

  Giles Brandreth has just published his history of jokes. Here are a selection of them. An airline pilot is speaking to his passengers: "Our cruising altitude today is 35,000 ft, the weather is set fair, with just the possibility of light turbulence, so do keep an eye on the fasten seatbelts sign, and enjoy the flight. In accordance with government guidelines, I'm working from home." Shakespeare used variations of one joke at least eight times in different plays. "Is this your daughter?" one character asks. "So her mother told me," the other replies. Some favourite jokes. I have kleptomania. But when it gets bad I take something for it. A Capital Joke unknown artist Photo Credit: Preston Park Museum and Grounds  [CC BY-NC-ND] There was an elderly couple who noticed they were getting more and more forgetful, so they decided to visit their doctor. The doctor told them that they should start writing things down so they wouldn't forget them. They went...

Milton  visiting Galileo when a Prisoner of the Inquisition Solomon Alexander Hart (1806-1881) Photo Credit: Wellcome Trust  [Public Domain] Pro-Brexit and right-wing academics feel forced to censor their political views, putting free speech at universities under threat, a report has said. Campuses are increasingly governed by unwritten rules that mean lecturers are under pressure to muzzle unfashionable opinions for fear of being ostracised or passed over for promotion, the Policy Exchange think tank said. A YouGov poll of 820 academics found that nearly a third - 32 per cent - of those who say their political views are 'right' or 'fairly right' have stopped openly airing opinions in teaching and research, compared with 13 per cent of those in the centre and on the left. ...The report said that academics on both the right and left discriminate against each others' applications for grants, promotion and manuscripts submitted for publication. ...While those on both s...