Why is America the way that it is?
Wrong question, the author of Albion’s Seed would say. America isn’t any one way, and hasn’t been since the very beginning of European, particularly English, colonization. David Hackett Fischer puts the core of his argument straight into his subtitle: Four British Folkways in America. He identifies four distinct [...]

Torture, war, elections. Let’s talk about birdwatching for a bit.
Twitchers. The term is British. When a rare bird shows up, twitchers are people who will drop everything and rush to the scene.
They used to have phone trees, then for a while it was beepers. It’s cell-phones and e-mail now. Here [...]

Via Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, an interesting article by Matthew Tempest in Spiegel Online (in English) comparing the rather contrasting fortunes of the German and British Green Parties. Both were founded at around the same time (the article does make an error in saying the Ecology Party renamed itself as the Green Party in [...]

The Independent has an interesting article today entitled ‘Why will a quarter of Spain be supporting England tonight?’ (for those of you who aren’t aware, there’s an international football friendly tonight between Spain and England in Madrid) which looks at how the Spanish national football team is not supported by many of the people of [...]

My out-of-consensus speculation that the Bank of England’s round of interest rate rises may be pretty much done looks sounder by the day. There may be one more rate increase, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they were pretty much over with it, and even if the next move (the end of this [...]

Earlier today, the draw took place for next year’s European Football Championships (Euro 2004), placing the sixteen teams into four groups:
Group A: Portugal, Greece, Spain, Russia
Group B: France, England, Switzerland, Croatia
Group C: Sweden, Bulgaria, Denmark, Italy
Group D: Czech Republic, Latvia, Germany, Netherlands
The BBC Sport website has a good page detailing all the fixtures for the [...]