Paper tigers

Paper tigers

Cynicism about the mass media, and newspaper journalists in particular, is hardly a new phenomenon. In 1928, Chicago newsmen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote Broadway comedy The Front Page, an instant classic that cemented the idea of the hard-boiled,...
Let’s hear it for Rumpole’s liberalism

Let’s hear it for Rumpole’s liberalism

I think about Horace Rumpole a lot these days, because he taught me the principles of justice. Not social justice in the modern sense. I’m talking specifically about the philosophy that underlies English common law and the court systems that sprang from it across the...
The thing with two heads

The thing with two heads

The Hexham heads. It’s a phrase I’d never heard until this year, when I attended a show called Scarred for Life. Actually, I may have heard it before, in February 1976 when I was seven. But if I had, I’d repressed it, such was the trauma of hearing werewolves...