Sign-up to receive Only Connect every four weeks and get notified when new articles are posted.

In a year which has seen clampdowns on online posts in the UK following the Southport riots and endless examples of police overreach on ‘hate incidents’, and in a week in which hundreds have been arrested for demonstrating in support of Palestine Action, recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the government, questions of how free we are, or indeed should be, under a democratic system spring to mind.

As a boy at school in the 1950s I once had to speak in a debate on “A woman’s place is in the home”.  My own mother had been a housewife all her married life and my five siblings and I enjoyed the fact that she was always there for when we came home from school or from whatever we had been doing. Perhaps because of that I had been nominated by the teacher to speak in favour of the motion.  Nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable with the idea.  I had been struck by a quote from Ge

Possibly the 20th June was not the cleverest day to choose to fly directly over the crow- fly-line between Tel Aviv and Isfahan; so our Airbus 380 pilot from Dubai wisely turned due west across the Empty Quarter, over the Red Sea and into Egypt before heading north for Zurich. On the plane were at least 200 Chinese tourists, each group led (normally) by a small lady armed with a wooden stick and a coloured flag. On arrival in Zurich the sheep and goats were separated: the Swi

At last, some good news for California.  The Golden State, which for so long seemed the ultimate in seaside, wealthy, laidback living, has been through some bad times recently.  Increasing and painful poverty, failing services, devastating fires in the beautiful Pacific-side suburbs, the flight of some of the great tech companies and their enormously wealthy employees to Texas and the south.  But finally good news to report:  Kamala Harris will not be running for Governor in

On 28 December each year Western Christian communities  around the world mark the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the horrific events recounted in the Gospel of St Mathew (Ch 2 vv 16-17) when, having learned of the birth of Jesus Christ,  Herod the Great, King of Judea (modern day Israel/Palestine) ordered the killing of all babies under the age of two years in Bethlehem and the surrounding district. Herod had been told of the prophecy that from among these childre

So, Sadiq Khan is now a knight of the realm. Could anyone please tell me quite what Sir Sadiq has done to earn this knighthood? He is the first mayor of London* to have been so honoured, yet, under his watch, our capital city seems not so much to have flourished as to have become a rather diminished version of its former self.  Crime has risen, homelessness has increased, and in common with so many other British cities mainstream business, retail in particular...

... to buy a fat pig, Home again, home again, jiggety jig” is one of the more ancient English nursery rhymes, dating at least from the time of Elizabeth I.  Unlike many of those old songs it does not have a hidden meaning – unless our readers know otherwise – such as “Ring-a-ring of roses” which is about the 1665 plague year; we sneeze and all fall down because we are dead!

YouGov’s latest Multilevel Regressive Post-stratification (MRP) poll of the likely result should there be a general election in the UK now is bad news for both of the country’s main political parties....

When I started my tree project 20 years ago it was almost unheard of that an indigenous Kenyan would come and buy native trees. The combination of knowledge, increasing wealth and concern about the environment has meant that in recent years, more and more Kenyans come and buy seedlings of East African trees. A couple of months ago a man appeared looking for unusual tree species. His name was Michael Mwangi Muthee and he invited my assistant and me to visit his shamba in Karen

“I’m off to Bulgaria.” So said Nick, the man who had helped boost our Sky broadband download speed at our house in Bath from a piffling 3 to 5 Mbps to a hardly less piffling 12 Mbps (compared to a download speed of 37 Mbps in our house in deepest rural France). Nick had come because we had decided to try again to up the speed by contracting with a provider who could give us full-fibre connection. Again? Yes, we had signed up with True Speed, a Bath-based full-fibre broadband