The Critical Commentator

   Gifts from the Afghan            Over the next few weeks I'll be publishing four posts about a novel I've written called Gifts from the Afghan.   Hindu Kush Mountains It's a work of historical fiction, set initially during the Soviet-Afghan war and some of the background comes from my own experiences. I'll be telling you a little bit about the story, how I became involved with an Afghan refugee and his family and how fact eventually became fiction. The first post will appear in November. I hope you will find it interesting.

  Singapore is paying its citizens to pick up a book for at least 15 minutes a day in an effort to fight the rise of doomscrolling. The affluent city hopes the strategy will improve concentration, critical thinking and the imagination of its citizens  . Readers will be awarded points that can be redeemed for cash. Logging 50 daily  reading sessions on a government website will earn one Singapore dollar (58p). Payable sessions are limited to one a day and must be 15 minutes or more. Singapore: View across the Harbour to Fort Canning and the Cathedral John Edmund Taylor (active 1860-1885) Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] The national library board's chief executive, Melissa Tam, said sustainable reading habits were built through small and achievable steps. "We live in a world of extraordinary abundance, of content, information and stimulation," she told the Straits Times. "At any moment, we can scroll through hundreds of headlines, watch a video or get a summary of ...

  The annual UK supplement market is worth £3.6 billion, more than £50 per person,    and most of us have a similar collection of pills which, while not, clinically approved drugs, promise that illusive modern nirvana: "wellness". But Van Tulleken, [Medical Doctor and honorary associate professor at University College London] having interrogated the evidence and witnessed how they are produced for his new book, Make Me Well, believes we're all wasting our money... "Manufacturers," he says, seize upon research that shows feeding collagen to mice stimulates collagen production in their own skin. "Yet when you remove studies that are paid for by the industry, the effect vanishes."...  Van Tulleken,  48, and his identical twin brother, Chris, have spent much of their careers debunking fashionable ideas. In their BBC What's Up Doc? podcast they argue that fears about microplastics are overstated, that we don't need eight hours' sleep a night or...

  Real ale is a traditional draught cask beer, a "living" product that is produced and stored in its cask. It differs from a cold, fizzy lager, in which the yeast is killed and carbon dioxide is added. Real ale contains live yeast so it continues fermenting until it is served. Outside the Devonshire pub in Soho, central London, there is an ever-present horde of drinkers downing pints of Guinness, a stout made by the multinational company Diageo. But the landlord and co-owner Oisin Rogers says: "Real ale is all I drink." "It is a properly handmade product," says Rogers, "produced in exactly the same way it has been for centuries. It has never been industrialised like some of the other drinks that are for sale in bars in London... Tom Stainer, Camra's [Campaign for Real Ale] chief executive says independent breweries are facing unfair competition from multinationals. If you walk into a pub on the high street, you are often confronted  with the same ...

  Whatever else it is, Prince Harry's proposed return is a gripping story to tell around the smouldering national campfire. Animals live in the moment but human beings need narrative: gossip, myth, parable, legends. Stories can be inspiring or malicious, sacred or profane, downright dirty or innocently funny but we need them. The problem and pleasure lies in  embroidering: inflating villains, weeping for victims, adjusting the plot... No New s Thomas Sword Good ( 1789-1872) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] So all weekend millions gasped at the suddenly reanimated tale of a discontented prince and his wife: as twisty as an 18th century picaresque only posher and unsettlingly subversive to a functioning monarchy. They fled, hurling resentment at fatherland and family, made big money and friends and lost some of both. They gathered sympathetic admirers, angry opponents and gleeful mockery. They waged legal battles and lost the biggest, narrated a new family story and served it on...

 MPs have been accused of failing to learn their lesson over freebies after taking almost £400,000 of hospitality to concerts and sporting events this year... Despite the outcry in 2024 over Keir Starmer accepting football tickets and clothing, MPs appear to have been declaring hospitality this year on a greater scale than previously seen. The most recent disclosures include tickets worth £858 to a Harry Styles concert at Wembley from PRS for Music, an industry group, which was accepted by Powell, Labour's deputy leader and now education secretary. Rave Punk Gal Jaksta Image Credit:  Maarten Roes Franken [CC BY-ND] Wes Streeting, now defence secretary, accepted tickets to the Chelsea flower show worth £1,839 from Lloyds Banking Group. Haigh, who is Andy Burnham's deputy, accepted a £1,314 ticket to the Ivor Novello awards, while Annaliese Midgley, now chief whip, enjoyed Brit awards hospitality for two worth £3,432, hospitality at Cheltenham festival worth £350 from the bettin...

  Ordinary has become an insult in the 21st century. [ Goodness, I didn't know that. ] No one aspires to be average, that sounds mediocre and dull: they want to excel. [ So that's what I must be then - mediocre and dull .] Everyone now dreams of being extraordinary, talented, gifted, different, unique in their own way. [ I don't really remember my dreams .] It's all about "main character energy" as Gen Z. calls it.  Nothing less, we have become convinced, will make us feel contented and fulfilled [ Are Gen Z Chinese? Don't they believe in energy flow when using holistic medicine?] We need to max our lives in every way, push ourselves to the limit, perfect our daily routines and sleep schedules, curate our existence and compete to win. [ This sounds very complicated to me. Is there to be any time for the craic and banter? The pub? Reading? Walking? No time to stop and stare?] A Portrait with Books Madge Gill (1882-1961) Photo Credit: London Borough of Newha...

  According to his former economic adviser, Gary Cohen, "Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing." Instead he gets most of his news from screens: Fox News and Truth Social are favourites. This preference explains a lot about the chaos of our present politics. The president is hardly alone in his allergy to the written word. Reading is in decline everywhere. Most widely cited are a series of reports suggesting that students from universities  are increasingly unable to read the books their lecturers assign to them. According to one professor, his students were "intimidated by anything over ten pages." And this is more than merely the sort of thing professors always said about their students... The Inattentive Reader Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC ND] A study of the leisure habits of nearly a quarter of a million Americans found that the number who spent time reading on a typical day (including n...

  What I find strange is that everywhere else in psychiatry we take a person's circumstances  seriously and understand that the world someone lives in can impact on how they feel and behave. No competent doctor treating a depressed woman would disregard the fact that she has been made redundant, or hasn't slept since the baby arrived, and we'd think it negligent to hand her a prescription and not consider the environmental, psychological and social factors. With ADHD that habit has been mislaid and we have settled on the idea that the difficulty sits inside the child and the world around him is beside the point. Patients Waiting to See the Doctor, with Figures Representing Their Fears Rosemary Carson (b.1962 Photo Credit:: Wellcome Collection [CC BY]   Yet look at the world we have built for him. The criteria have widened over the years, so behaviour once thought unremarkable now falls inside the diagnosis. We've handed children devices engineered to capture their at...

  You may think it's a commitment to buying a round, the ability to chat at length about the weather or make a proper cup of tea. But when it comes to what makes people proud to be British there is a consensus across all ages, demographics and political groups and tea, pints and the weather don't get a look in. Hard work, fair play and community are the values that voters - no matter which political party, age group, social class or region they come from - instinctively believe capture what it means to be British, according to a large-scale study of values by the research firm Public First. The Food Queue Joseph Edward Southall (1861-1944) Photo Credit Gallery Oldham [CC BY-NC-ND]  "When you talk to people across Britain it's clear they have a shared set of values - if fairness is Britain's moral compass, hard work is its character, and community the thing that binds us," said Olivia Walsham, the director of social policy at Public First... In the study, which...

  And what was this delirious, delicious night if not fantasies bleeding into reality? It happened gradually, then suddenly; first seeming as though it would never start, then as though it would never finish. A silver haze poured from a sky that betrayed neither day nor night, the lines between heaven and earth blurred as though even the gods deemed this a spectacle they couldn't miss. The anarchic mass of sound and colour was so overwhelming and primal that this resembled more revolution than sporting event. The stadium shook as though dancing along to the rapture, as though the earth might give way at any moment. (Private Eye, 2026: Rory Smith on England v Mexico, Observer) Tlaloc, Aztec God of Rain unknown artist Photo Credit: Hastings Museum and Art Gallery [CC BY-NC] The official Adidas Belgium away jersey for the World Cup is a unique, light blue shirt featuring pink, white and black accents, designed as a tribute to the Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte... The base col...

  Many kids at my comprehensive [school]were as talented as my peers at Balliol [Oxford University] but never got close to university. What I saw at Oxford was not the soft bigotry of low expectations but of entitlement: kids who lacked ability but had plenty of credentials (a very different thing) and contacts. "One or two telephone calls are still necessary to find places for the borderlines," John Rae, the head master of Westminster School in the 1980s, admitted when talking about how he got so many pupils into Oxbridge. "Some lavish dinners for dons may have gone into preparing for those calls." In his book Chums , Simon Kuper notes that Alec Douglas-Home was admitted to Oxford "practically as his birthright, got a third class degree and still went on to become prime minister, the third consecutive Etonian in the job". Merit Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery {CC BY-NC]   A version of this rigged system persists today: 7 per ...

 Hamid Nouh, Salah's first coach: "He was ready to sacrifice everything, he wanted to work hard, and liked to learn." It sounds simple, until you start drilling at the heart of what it means for a boy from Nagrig to endure a  nine-hour round trip five days a week to train in Cairo. Cairo: Shoe Bazaar Robert Charles Goff (1837-1922) Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] Salah's route [at age  14 ] has become so well known, you can read the tale of the minimum four buses he needed to take each way in Chinese, Spanish and every other major language. One from the T-junction at the edge of his village to reach Basyoun. The transfer from there to the capital of the Gharbia Governorate, Tanta. The great slog of around 100km to reach the rush of Ramses Square. A connection from Cairo's chaotic central transport hub to Nasr City. And, on the luckier days, a ride close to the club's gates to spare Salah having to run almost two kilometres up a steep hill to ...

  Ok. I've waited long enough. Where is it? I have just turned 52. Where, oh where, is my promised no-f**ks-to-give era that people have now been promising me for over a decade? When do I get this surge of self-confidence that allows me to shuck off social convention and expectation. [Has it ever occurred to you that you might be one of those people who just lack self-confidence. Perhaps you are also one of those people who just likes to accept social convention and expectation.] Merry Go Round Mark Gertler (1891-1939) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY NC ND]  When I was in the throes of adolescence I was, like most of us, so acutely self-conscious I could barely walk down the street without suffering violent mental agonies. [So most of us were so acutely self-conscious and suffered violent mental agonies? Really?] Dealing with school discos, first nightclubs, parties was commensurately worse. [Uncomfortable, I can understand. So h ow violent were your mental agonies?]   But I to...

  Take Cristiano Ronaldo, Serena Williams and Taylor Swift, a triumphant trio for the ages. Each is blessed with the two things you need to reach the top: huge talent coupled with a ferocious work ethic. There's an awful lot to love - if only they didn't seem to love themselves so much. Swift's talent and generosity are as awesome as the wealth they've generated for her. Why, in a Disney + docuseries about her huge Eras tour, we saw her distributing envelopes to emotional crew members, sharing out some of the profits. Wonderful! Who does that? On the other hand, who has themselves filmed doing that. And now she's married, which is wonderful too. Millions shared her joy. But was it necessary to book for the purpose one of the world's  most celebrated venues, bringing New York City to a standstill? At the moment the deed was done, in the manner of smoke puffing out of the Vatican chimney, the billboards at Madison Square Garden flashed up the glad tidings for the ...

  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a simple step. So goes the ancient Chinese proverb, and so it is with the announcement from Buckingham Palace that we are to learn this week how much tax the King paid in 2024-25. In one sense this is nothing new, as the Palace acknowledges. As Prince of Wales, Charles regularly declared how much tax he paid. It was however, a practice foolishly abandoned  by William when he became Prince of Wales. Now he has been forced into an embarrassing about-turn. When Poverty Enters the Door unknown artist Photo Credit: Worthing Museum and Art Gallery [CC BY-ND] The public, outraged by the burgeoning cost of the monarchy, have been appalled to learn of Charles and William charging a fortune for soldiers to yomp across Dartmoor, and for charging the NHS millions to park ambulances in an empty warehouse in London.  They have been disgusted by the peppercorn rents charged to Andrew and Edward for their mansions in Windsor Great Park and Surr...