The Colony Room bio! If you're any kind of cunty, buy now

I never had the pleasure of being called 'cunty' by Soho's Colony Room founder and proprietor Muriel Belcher. Some people have all the luck. So, I'll have to settle for second best.

Sophie Parkin's chronicle of the high culture boozing parlour, The Colony Club 1948-2008: A History of Bohemian Soho, is due out on 10 December 2012 - and she's declared open a dedicated website where you can find more book details - click here.

The book is a huge collaboration involving a great many of the former habitués of the establishment. Memories, conversations, goss, names - they're all here. Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, Tracey Emin, Princess Margaret, Molly Parkin, Lucian Freud, Jeffrey Bernard, Peter O'Toole, Kate Moss (barmaid), Christopher Hitchens, Will Self and so many other super-luminaries of stage, screen, canvas and piss contributed to the Colony legend.

Sophie is the ideal biographer. Quite possibly (or not), she trod on the dew of the vomit that Dylan Thomas projected onto the Colony carpet: she absorbed the soul of the place as a hereditary bon viveuse at her mother's knee, and for decades thereafter. Just how many of the ex-Colonists will still be talking to her post-publication?

Three editions of the title are available: Collectors, Limited and Standard (the last priced currently at £30). Without giving too much away, the Collectors and Limited editions comprise artists' prints which alone are worth the investment. Never-seen-before photographs grace all three. If nothing else, think Flog It!

Visit The Colony Room website as soon as and secure your copy - aside from my personal horoscopes, what better Christmas present is imaginable (to oneself)?

PS: For a flavour of the Colony, do read my post on writer Duncan Fallowell and the night he took off with Muriel Belcher's crutches. Be warned: the piece is illustrated by a nude photo of Duncan, cock and all. Click here.

Francis Bacon at the Colony, video

Richard Dawkins: The real message of his atheism poll

I see yet another professor, the Richard Dawkins one, is bidding for guru status: he's trying to make capital out of a poll which tells us that most Christians don't read the Bible and probably don't go to church much if at all. Apparently this is evidence that atheism is the growing faith du jour.

Perhaps he's right. But then again how many atheists have read AC Grayling's The Good Book: A Humanist Bible? Very few if sales have any say. You'd think your average fashion follower would acquaint him or herself with the godless script(ure). But no. Instead, he or she watches another TV professor, the Brian Cox one, and marvels at the universe as fascinating facts are reeled off from the textbooks.

This approach at least permits one to embrace the stats of eternity while grazing on cashews.

If the Dawkins poll has a message, it is that no matter what one's belief system (and atheism is just another belief system), most followers are happy to take their position cues from the idiot boards of priests and professors. There's just too much sex and socialising and work to get through.

Controversy after Davros announces: There is no Doctor Who and I've got a book to flog

The Dalek creator Davros has declared that there is no Doctor Who and that heaven is about as likely as time travel.

'Neither as head of the Kaled Scientific Elite on my home world of Skaro nor as Emperor of the Imperial Dalek Faction did I ever see anything to contradict my view that Doctor Who is nothing more than a figment of a writer's over-active imagination,' he said in his characteristic staccatissimo style of speech.

'Even with the aid of my one and only 20-20 vision-plus cybernetic blue eye, mounted on my forehead, I saw nothing but Daleks, luvvies and dead Thal prosthetics. Believe me, my eye is the acme of cutting edge technology and misses nothing! As for heaven, when you're exterminated you're exterminated - as they say at Dignitas in Switzerland.'

Attempting a smile for his many fans on the Guardian, he added: 'Stephen Hawking is a valued friend.'

Prof Brian Cox's wife, Gia Milinovich, bans Madame Arcati!

Prof Brian Cox more famous than wife

Ooh, diddums. I notice that Prof Brian Cox's delightfully outspoken wife, nuclear energy-loving Gia Milinovich, has banned Madame Arcati from joining her following on Twitter. I do hope it wasn't something I said. She describes herself on the site as 'married to that mindless pretty idiot from a pop band @ProfBrianCox.' It enhances my sense of romance that she aids self-definition by reference.

I do like her sense of humour. While tolerating certain fans' foolish suggestions that her husband is gay - I fear he is too unimaginative for that lifestyle option - she is happy to reveal, 'My last tweet was about how my chance to shag David Tennant was foiled by Paul McCartney sleeping on my hotel room floor.' Anyway ....

I can understand Gia's sensitivity to my trenchant criticism of her husband who is now the BBC's licence fee-paid voice of secularism and unelected, self-appointed scourge of all faiths. Criticism can be a painful thing, even for one who engages in pre-emptive self-laceration and larky asides. Oh, the pillow laughs! But is divisive opinion much tolerated chez Cox? I sleep alone.

Certainly Gia and Brian are one on nukes. She writes (see link above): 'Nuclear Power Is Not Nuclear War.' He writes (in the Sun): 'Nuclear reactors ... cannot explode like nuclear bombs.' Aren't they just adorable?

Still, I'm not one to bear grudges. Enjoy Gia's blog; laugh at her post-modernist, astutely framed jokes. And read her heart-rending description of being turned into an Invisible Wife by Brian's fame.

Francisco J Ayala: Don't confuse Dawkins with God Almighty

Francisco J Ayala

Among the very few spokespersons for global sanity is Francisco J Ayala, recent winner of the Templeton Prize and its £1m (donated to charity).

An evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist, a former scientific adviser to Bill Clinton in the '90s - who has battled with deluded Christian creationists and intelligent designers for years - Ayala argues that spiritual faith and science ought to co-exist. As he says, "[They] are two windows through which we look at the world."

He has no time for Richard Dawkins who has misled a generation into thinking that the issue of God and science is an either/or. By way of example, Ayala refers to Picasso’s Guernica: "While science can assess the painting’s massive dimensions and pigments, only a spiritual view imparts the horror of the subject matter. Together... these two separate analyses reveal the totality of the masterpiece." (To quote the Templeton website)

In an interview Ayala further explains: "Science has to do with the expansion of galaxies and movement of the continents and the origin of organisms and adaptations. Religion has to do with our relationship to our creator and to each other, with the purpose and meaning of life, with moral values that govern our lives. So, they deal with different subjects... there's no need to contradict each other."

Ayala's is a large mind and a refreshing change from the juvenile, materialistic inanities of Dawkins and the Sun's favourite professor, Dr Brian Cox - the smiling rock star host of the Wonders of the Solar System.

And now for the volcanic ash denialists

You can hear the murmurs already. Where's the research, the evidence, that Europe had to close down its air space all because of some piffling volcano in Iceland? An Italian on Radio 4's Today this morning blustered against the "theoretical models" that caused airports and airlines to shut up shop. Told that a Met Office plane had encountered  dangerous levels of ash, he said he knew nothing of it. So let's ignore it?

Any minute now Andrew Neil will be galvanising the idiotic Spectator kids to cast doubt on the existence of the volcanic ash or its destructive effect.

These self-described "contrarians" will also be doubling as the climate change denialists who've gone quiet since the scientists at East Anglia University were cleared of misrepresenting research on global temperatures.  It's curious how the Church of Science has bred a new generation of secular flock uninterested in objective evidence. You can see in motion how religions spark to life.

The Large Hadron Collider: Madame Arcati's prediction

After the secular propaganda and excitement of this morning in our international media. a great silence shall descend upon the $10 billion manger of CERN, Geneva. Years will elapse and the multitude shall wonder, "What was that all about?" New theories of the "god particle" and "sooper-dooper partners" shall be bandied about, mainly by journalists proficient in synopsising press releases, yet no one will be any the wiser about the origins of the universe. But this won't stop ambitious particle physicists from locking horns in academic media about the significance of This and That, and the lay atheists shall take sides as at a football match, waving their flags and other partisan livery. In time Large Hadron Collider churches shall be built in the name of This or That and each of their clergy will bemoan the vicissisitudes of faith while some among them fuck the under-aged.

Dr Brian Cox and the Wonders of a Solar Smile

The latest sexy darling of atheists is particle physicist Dr Brian Cox, former rock star member of the band D:Ream. His current BBC2 show Wonders of the Solar System is wowing the so-called intelligentsia in the UK, for reasons beyond my understanding. It's telling us nothing we haven't heard already: the Sun is awfully hot, Mercury is hot, too, but gets very cold at night, Venus is Earth's carbon alter ego, and there are some helluva storms on Jupiter. True, I hadn't seen some of the pics of Titan's surface, but think of sand and stones and, presto, you have Saturn's Worthing.

What's tickling mental clits and dicks is Cox's ability to smile while talking. This is quite an achievement. Most people who smile while talking are probably planning to kill you; they're loons: but Coxy Babe couldn't drown a kitten. He's a cuddlesome, hard-geeing northerner geek in awe of the universe. His very orgasmic, transferable relish in repeating what his profs taught him at uni alchemises his commonplaces, with that toothy smile. That he sounds like a simpleton while parroting the number of air molecules in a pebble disarms because one knows he's a swot and make no mistake. We need to look down a bit first before we look up.

Cox is a man boy waggling his box of toys at us: he has nothing new to tell us, just a new way - thanks to his talking smile. At public expense he gets to fly at 60,000 ft to admire the dark blue of the sky, to drive over desert sand dunes to show us what Mars is like (air: thin), and he lights Chinese lanterns to demonstrate the effects of hot air. Oh, it rises.

No wonder he's smiling. I'd be laughing in his shoes.

PS:
(The Mail on Sunday columnist Suzanne Moore wrote me on Facebook after I said Cox was like a kid with toys: "Told Brian what you said. He said Tell them from me that they should stick to shaking their jowels and drinking Claret and leave science to the big boys and girls ;-) Oooooh x"

Young Hitler: No beekeeper's arse this time, just a man of God

I see the fabulous Naim Attallah and his Quartet Books is releasing a "non-fiction novel" in April called Young Hitler. It was the boastful Truman Capote who first brought this category - the non-fiction novel - to my attention, with his bestseller In Cold Blood and then the unfinished, promising Answered Prayers. The author in effect novelises documented or researched fact - actually, I'd have preferred the title Young Hitler - A Novelisation. Sounds less poncy. But anyway ....

The author of Young Hitler, Claus Hant, is being sold as the first non-fiction novelist to focus on Adolf's early years. This maybe true, though let us not forget the late Norman Mailer's attempt to novelise Hitler's childhood in the unfortunate The Castle in the Forest, which I wrote about in 2007 - click here. Mailer's "Young Adi" is given an older brother with a penchant for inserting "his happy blood-filled organ into the yearning lips" of an old male beekeeper's arse whose buttocks "feel like the portals to a bounteously endowed temple." I questioned the temple imagery, wondering whether "sweatshop" might not be a happier substitute in the sodomitic circs. But anyway ...

I don't think Hant will be reliving this revenge fantasy. His fantasy is that Hitler was a man of God and not the atheist most historians accept he was. Hant says, "Hitler did not just believe in God, he believed himself to be someone through whom God was revealing his existence." That would depend on your meaning of God. To Hitler, God, Providence and nature/science were interchangeable terms to suit his purposes of self-glorification, not the same thing as spiritual self-deification. Turn to Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 - transcripts of Hitler's unguarded chit-chat - and you find him saying: "A movement like ours must ... stick to the spirit of exact science."

He adds: "It would be appalling for me ... if I were to end up in the skin of a Buddha."

There is a line to be drawn between a despot's wish to make a cult of himself and a faith in a metaphysical system of ideas. I shall be interested to see where Hant goes with this in his non-fiction novel. I wonder whether he is yet another atheist propagandist with a fashionable loathing for religious faith. I could Google and find out, but I won't. I'll leave that one in the air for now.

The site for the book is fascinating and worth perusing - there are book extracts. I had no idea that Hitler's family home in Braunau, in Austria, is on the market (for £2m) and that the local council are trying to buy it with EU funding to fend off neo-Nazi interest. At another Hitler family home, Hant comes across a teenage girl lolling about in her bedroom, once young Hitler's, walls adorned with popstar posters. Asked what she thinks of the room's demonic past occupant, she replies: "It's just so super cool."

Fucking kids.

Oh, here's the super cool video for the novel.

Ray Gosling - of course he must be tried and jailed

Ray Gosling

I hadn't thought of broadcaster Ray Gosling for about 20 years until he confessed on BBC's Inside Out that he had mercy killed his dying young lover. From the jumble of reports, I think Gosling has admitted to honouring a pact with his hospitalised unnamed partner and smothering him with a pillow to end his "terrible, terrible pain" from an Aids-related illness.

Nottinghamshire Police are investigating the matter. But since Gosling has announced he will not cooperate with the inquiry, I am pretty certain he won't be prosecuted. I can well imagine a disinclination to follow the trail that may implicate others in what will be framed in the media as an assisted suicide.

Well, you know my views on the matter. Even my fiancee Molly Parkin is appalled by my hostility to the death camp Dignitas in Switzerland. Gosling wanted to end his lover's pain. In truth he also wanted to end his own. Dignity in Dying is already using this story to push its soap operatic, death camp agenda. I already see the TV show: Live or Die: You Decide. The decider won't be the life in question, but the emoting of loved ones - anxious to end their own misery.

As I write, aiding or abetting another person's death is illegal in England and Wales under the 1961 Suicide Act, and is punishable by up to 14 years in jail. Gosling has freely made his confession. He should be arrested, tried amd jailed for murder or manslaughter. He'll have ample opportunity to emote in the dock and on the TV breakfast shows for a public sympathy reactively honed by the talent shows. And the atheistic libertarians who now write national newspaper editorials will have acres of space to call for the right to exterminate someone whose health condition is a thundering and expensive nuisance.

Prepare for a whole new area of litigation: Assisted Suicide - Or Convenience Killing?

Pratchett and Amis unite against the 'silver tsunami'

A "gentle tribunal" for death cravers? A scene from Logan's Run

Why on earth would BBC News lead with a report on Discworld author Sir Terry Pratchett's support for assisted suicide? Easy. To promote its Panorama show tonight whose theme is the public's warming to the idea of exterminating people past their economic usefulness, as affirmed by a "poll".

Supporters of this might want first to look into the topic of elder abuse before they get excited about Sir T's naive suggestion of "gentle tribunals" to decide who qualifies to be put out of their misery. One study suggests that 64% of elder abuse takes place in the family home - perpetrated by so-called loved ones unable or unwilling to deal with aged relatives.

I can well imagine a bunch of tearful adult kids, going on about the "loss of dignity" of a sickly aged mum or dad supposedly in their care, queuing up for a judicial release from responsibility. The scarcely researched and resourced problem of elder abuse is part of this debate.

Another atheist author who appears to support corpse tips for the clapped-out is my darling Martin Amis. I fully intend to read his new novel The Pregnant Widow. He created a stir last week with his cry against the "silver tsunami" (he means people, with grey hair, who no longer can fuck or read his books, in effect) and his call for a euthanasia "booth on every street corner where you could get a Martini and a medal."

Now he tells the Guardian he was just being "satirical". I believe him. But the damage is done. As Amis' interviewer Stephen Moss points out, on Google you'll find "137,000 items referencing Amis + euthanasia."

So please correct: Amis + euthanasia + joke. (Nonetheless Amis adds: "I stick to my basic point: you need to have a means to end your life.")

Did Michael Lutin's USA horror-scope stick in Vanity Fair's Uranus?

Michael Lutin

One of the minor mysteries of our time is why Vanity Fair dumped its esteemed and popular astrologer Michael Lutin back in 2007. For nearly 25 years he wrote for the mag: his monthly Planetarium page nimbly balanced seership and edgy wit to please reader hopers and staff cynics alike: then he was gone without explanation - such bad manners! He was the one stargazer who impressed those of my friends who think my studies in astrology a sign of lunacy.

Lutin himself appears to have been nonplussed by his apparent dumping, judging by a message he left on his Where's The Moon? site in 2007:  "I can't personally answer the thousands of people wondering what happened to the VF Planetarium so all I can say is maybe you should ask them [the mag]." Thousands? And yet not one letter published in VF on the matter. There's journalistic democracy for you.

Lutin now can be found on the Huffington Post and one of his postings last year perhaps contains a clue to the reason for his departure: do remember, if the first and second parties do not explain, a third party is entitled to speculate.

Back in 2006 Lutin wrote an alarming piece for VF titled Special Alert: Horoscope USA. Alas, it failed in many respects to be as breezily optimistic as its editor Graydon Carter never was while Bush was in power. Lutin, as latterday Nostradamus, foresaw a parlous and dark future for America: "We've gotten fat and we've gotten lazy," concluded Lutin. "So don't blame George Bush [as Graydon Carter did every month - MA's note] or Bill Clinton or any of the elected officials in Washington. A country gets the leaders it deserves, and when we're ready to rise from the ashes of a fallen empire, we will find the leaders to help us do so. It will happen, but not in 2008. We have to go through the Pluto transit first."

Now I notice that Lutin used his Huffington Post blog to tell us of his problems in getting the piece published in VF in the first place, though he was a contributing editor. Was the article too dark? He writes: "That's what my editors at Vanity Fair thought when I submitted the piece... [it was] finally published... after it had been thoroughly edited 'for size'." Ah, does he mean toned down? Censored? His quote marks. Lutin adds: "Just as the issue was going to press, I told them how important I believed the piece was, and they should drop out my regular column if space were the problem, and replace it with the Horoscope USA. They did, but afterward I received a note from the editor-in-chief [Carter], saying, 'I hope you're wrong.'"

With evident relief, Lutin writes: "Thank God for the Huffington Post. Now I can say what I've been trying to say for going on three years," before regaling readers with more talk of revolution in the Cancerian US as Pluto does its worst in Capricorn, despite Obama. I am sure Carter would not have wanted to read in his glossy: "People are funny. Just before the catastrophic explosion, they get lethargic, apathetic and goofy, almost catatonic, crippled by shock into denial... "

Is it possible Obama-adoring Vanity Fair let their very own John Dee go because they preferred a toothpaste smiley view of the future, expected to be reinvented in 2008? Would they have preferred Lutin to spin some upbeat guff for their Pluto-fearing readers? Aren't stargazers just expected to be giggly? I don't think VF has ever replaced Lutin: one hopes the magazine is not getting, er, "goofy, almost catatonic, crippled by shock into denial."

God, tarts and a misleading Sunday Times story

Dr Andrew Newberg: Not quite the know-all atheist the Sunday Times would have us believe

"We are born to believe in God" is the headline of a Sunday Times story today. Various quoted research studies suggest that natural evolution requires us to have faith in a deity for the betterment of social bonds. Put another way, and leaving aside any independent paranormal, religious or mystical experience, people end up believing in God because our brains are hard-wired tarts, and a healthy tart will opt for whatever promises a good time. God-belief is a sort of john/client/punter/trick that delivers a benefit after the fantasy-screw. Yum yum.

The faith of Atheism appears to be going the way of all other religions: sinking into the pit of dogmatic fantasising. Having failed to disprove the existence of gods/afterlife/paranormal whatever, the salaried secularists in their uni labs are resorting to a form of academic Lego to construct theories from their experiments which are essentially unprovable (or essentially speculative). The agenda is to ignore countless subjective experiences of the mystical and explain them away in biological terms. Professorial livelihoods boom or bust on the dismissal industry.

Yet a closer inspection of at least one of these supposed apostles of Atheism reveals a more interesting and complex picture. Take Dr Andrew Newberg. for example.

He is quoted in the Sunday Times story. He's an Assistant Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Author of Why God Won't Go Away and other works, he uses brain-imaging techniques to show how religious and spiritual experiences are the result of "belief networks" operating across different parts of the brain.

You would think from the article that Dr Newberg has reduced all mystical or religious experience down to mechanistic brain function - it's all in the head. That is not the case. In a Q&A on Newberg's website, he states plainly: "Whether or not God exists 'out there' is something that neuroscience cannot answer."

He goes onto explain: "For example, if we take a brain image of a person when she is looking at a picture, we will see various parts of the brain being activated, such as the visual cortex. But the brain image cannot tell us whether or not there actually is a picture 'out there' or whether the person is creating the picture in her own mind. To a certain degree, we all create our own sense of reality. Getting at what is really real is the tricky part."

It didn't suit the Sunday Times and its Atheism agenda to flesh out this subtlety.

Dignitas: A death camp for air-conditioned lives

Oh, didn't I tell you? I won't be updating again until I feel there has been a satisfactory response to this posting. No one tells Madame Arcati what to write about. So, go read some boring newspaper atheist blog, penned by an editor-approved dollop, if you want your prejudices echoed.

One of the great priests of modern voguish atheism is Arthur Schopenhauer, the so-called "philosopher of pessimism" who viewed life as meaningless and the universe as godless. When, say, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens lecture us that religions (and not money, greed, nationalism, etc) cause wars, they are parroting Schopenhauer, and they in turn are parroted by the tots who write for a whole range of serious publications, literary, intellectual, whatever.

One organisation that heartily endorses Schopenhauer's worldview is Dignitas, the assisted suicide death camp based in Switzerland. While I am not religious myself (in the sense I do not belong to any faith) I am struck by how the humanist/atheist agenda invariably veers towards the joy of death and how to make it part of one's orderly schedule.

The problem identified by Dignitas is the human will to live: if only people could be made to feel that there's no earthly reason why they should feel obliged to stay alive when times are hard, they could make it better - by killing themselves. Religious faith just encourages people to stay stubbornly alive against adversity, distressing loved ones in the process and clogging up hospitals. Whether in fact religion is relevant to this debate is neither here nor there: Dignitas has decreed that it is. Dignitas isn't just a death camp. It's also a proponent of the atheist cause.

Back in 2006, Ludwig A Minelli of Dignitas gave a talk at the Liberal Democratic Party congress in Brighton. He painted a pretty picture of a future of assisted suicides which would... "save a lot of money in the public health system." He went on: "We have to avoid the heavy consequences of century-long indoctrination with religious dogmas." He then quoted Schopenhauer favourably: "The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity." The English are jeered at for "their stupid ecclesiastical superstition."

The point to all this is to be aware of how robustly and proactively an organisation like Dignitas advances its cause. It's not just offering a death service. It is out there drumming up business. It is doing so by ventilating a hostile, baseless view of faith - that it is at the root of all evil. Faith stifles compassion or conscience? You have only to open a history book at random to see what else might stifle our humanity.

James Delingpole: Muslims, Farah and Chippy Drivel-gate

Comments are welcome. But highly insulting or plainly defamatory remarks will not be posted. In particular, comments of a personal or insulting nature about Farah Damji and Toby Young will be ignored.

So, where were we? Ah yes, James Delingpole. The writer, novelist and rightwing joker whose work appears often in the Telegraph and Spectator. Last month he started a curious conversation on Facebook about Muslims: he invited people to name a Muslim peer who had got his or her job on merit. Naturally this precipitated quite a row with fellow Facebook writer Farah Damji (what do you mean you've never heard of her!). The exchanges also feature the novelist Susan Hill. I make no comment. Oh, and do read Delingpole's book Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work, click here. After you've read Farah's Try Me, click here.

James Delingpole
Can anyone name me a single Muslim peer who got the job on merit?
14:20 · via Twitter ·

Farah Damji at 14:23 on 03 May
Karan Bilamoria

Susan Hill at 14:26 on 03 May
How many peers of any faith or none got the position on merit ? 20%

Susan Hill at 14:26 on 03 May
That should have been 20% ?

James Delingpole at 14:30 on 03 May
You just made that one up didn't you Farah?

Farah Damji at 14:32 on 03 May
*drops her Mail on Sunday in shock *
Baron Bilamoria to the likes of you Mr D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karan_Bilimoria,_Baron_Bilimoria

James Delingpole at 14:35 on 03 May
Point taken Susan, but let's pick one target at a time. Baroness Uddin: £100,000 claimed from the taxpayer for a flat she didn't use; Lord Ahmed - killer, rabblerouser; Baroness Warsi - the Tories' chocolate fireguard on "Social Cohesion".

Farah Damji at 14:35 on 03 May
oh sorry, take it all back. But he is a Parsi, and they were kinda sorta one of "us Mossies," back in the day. Anyway he is brown. Isn't that your point?

James Delingpole at 14:46 on 03 May
Stop being so chippy Farah. And misleading for that matter.

Malcolm Hugh Delingpole at 07:52 on 04 May
Zoroastrianism = Islam ? Stretching it a bit!

Farah Damji at 09:44 on 04 May
Ah! Someone who knows the difference. Intelligent debate as opposed to rabble-rousing racism?

James Delingpole at 10:29 on 04 May
For FUCK'S SAKE Farah Damji. You really do have some gall. It was you who proposed Karan Bilamoria as your favourite Muslim peer. And now you have the bloody cheek to make out like I can't tell the difference. And since when was Islam a race?

Farah Damji at 10:43 on 04 May
I did. I made a mistake. I am not always right. And your initial comment was racist. Because I said so, learn Macpherson. "The definition of 'racist incident' should be: 'any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person'." After I realised Karan was a Parsi, I added three more Muslim Peers you haven't refuted. This is like the Sunny Hundial school of debate. Pointless.

James Delingpole at 10:57 on 04 May
Farah, are you stupid as well as annoying? I don't believe in the Macpherson report. No one with even half a brain believes in the Macpherson report. It set back the cause of race relations in this country by decades. If you want to talk chippy drivel go somewhere else.

Farah Damji at 11:05 on 04 May
As in Paki go home? I think you have lost this one. The Macpherson report is not a religion for you to believe in, unlike Islam. The Macpherson report remains the most important historical document YOUR country has produced since the Magna Carta. Chippy Drivel sounds like a character invented by you to cover up your "intelligence" which has as many holes as a hooker's fishnets. I'm bored with arguing with someone who can't hold an argument, can only lob insults. And not very good ones at that...later.

James Delingpole
All right, apart from Karan Bilamoria - inventor of that marvellous thing Cobra beer - name one other Muslim peer who got the job on merit

14:38 · via Twitter · Farah Damji at 14:43 on 03 May
GOTCHA. Wait calling my Jihadist friends for some back-up.

Farah Damji at 14:48 on 03 May
what is chippy? something to do with fishy? Off to the park, enjoy your snit.

Rob Stevely at 15:14 on 03 May
Jobs? Mostly I see muslims on the streets burning things in effigy and throwing stones at tanks

Jim Mellon at 19:49 on 03 May
and waht non Muslim peers got the job on merit?

James Delingpole at 20:25 on 03 May
entirely agree with you Jim. But that's a separate point.

Farah Damji at 20:37 on 03 May
Baroness Shreela Flather.

Josie Charlotte Jackson at 22:10 on 03 May
Easy: ÕÈÇÑ, ÔÌÑÉ ÇáÊíä ÇáÔæßí (Babylon English Arabic) or Êíä Ôæßì (plain ol' Arabic, Arabic) or "prickly pears" (English, English). Grown in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, prickly pears got the job of being used, most deliciously, in prickly pear juice.
Have a very, very nice week ( is it Monday over there yet?).
xxxxxxxxx

Farah Damji at 22:12 on 03 May
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usha_Prashar,_Baroness_Prashar

Farah Damji at 07:13 on 04 May
Oh and Lord Ali.

Nirpal Dhaliwal at 3:04pm May 4
can anyone name me one single right-wing privately-educated white-boy hack who got his job on merit?

To listen to libertarian conservative Delingpole click here. There's no (unnatural) climate change, global recession is all Blair's fault (but he was right on the Iraq War), and other simplistic crap. Bush W's fault was that he "was a compassionate conservative". Is that a joke?

Martin Amis: Teeth, literature and sneaky cock-cunting

When you have quite grown tired of the Katie and Peter (non-)revelations in the tabloids, do catch up with our cultural elite and their past cock-cunting activities. In Intelligent Life magazine, writer Julie Kavangh has written a beautiful memoir of love and life with Martin Amis in the '70s. Interestingly, it's a "consensual kiss and tell" because Amis himself contributes to her disclosures. Very post-mod. He is of course working on his own "blindingly" autobiographical novel.

In the piece there's much about Martin's teeth, cleverness, literary friends - such as Clive James and Christopher Hitchens - and skinny-dipping. He signed notes to Kavanagh as LS - Lazy Shit. My favourite bit reflects unkindly on Martin's sneaky side. Kavanagh recounts his infidelities with, among others, the critic Lorna Sage and Churchill’s granddaughter, Emma Soames and her own best friend.

Kavanagh describes a dinner with Clive James and Sage as evidence of Amis’ cunning duplicity. “I thought that Martin and Lorna were doing more than just sitting side by side, and after picking up the fork I’d dropped, had my suspicions confirmed.” Was Lorna giving him a hand-job under the table? We're not told.

To read more, click here. Or if you can't be bothered, I understand the Sunday Times is publishing the piece this weekend. Oh no, I tell a lie. The Telegraph's publishing it tomorrow (Wednesday) - I do hope I've not scooped them. They outbid the ST.

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A cultural critic writes: Julie's story is an Oxbridge and cerebral Grease template: Danny -"Martin Amis" - Zuko and Julie - "Sandy Olsson" - Kavanagh are the alpha-exemplars of their gender-based tribes: Danny's T-Birds could easily be Mart's gang members Clive, Hitch and the rest. Danny impresses Sandy with the cool emblemised by his black jackets and hold over his macho followers in much the same way as Julie is awed by Mart's The Rachel Papers and his kinship with fellow harbingers of future glamour: both men are custodians of the finest sperm of their generation (within a given affordable locality). Mart/Danny finds aspects of Julie-Sandy uncool: Julie does not appear to know the difference between Keats and Yeats - the cement of his male bonds - just as Sandy is not part of Danny's cultural reference system. Perhaps the stories differ only in the way they end.

Michael Gross and the furious Social Empress of New York

Is it the case that the uncrowned "Social Empress of New York" has waved her sceptre and decreed that a book she finds either embarrassing or inaccurate or both should be ignored by Anyone Who Cares What She Thinks? That it should in effect be allowed to die by ordained silence? Who knows?

The Empress in question is Annette de la Renta, the book, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, and its author the legendary, the inescapable, Michael Gross. His oeuvre includes non-fiction bestsellers Model and 740 Park.

Mrs de la Renta is the wife of the - omg!, gimme the grandest-sounding adjectival phrase, please - multiversal fashion designer Oscar. They are among the society Caesars and Cleos of America (NY in particular) - with the tragic ends missing, respectively. Apparently. They're so huuuuuge that even American Vogue editor Anna Wintour over-arches her back into an ageing stoop as she scrapes about in their presence. Not even the newly refurbished Hubble telescope can fully capture their social enormity. There isn't a lens big enough!

So, when this goddam writer Gross produced his sensational NY museum history book, which does not portray Annette (the sometime guardian of the late Social Empress of New York Brooke Astor's estate, and a trustees board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in an entirely approved light, all hell broke loose. Museum types raged for and against Gross' book: indisputably, Gross had hit a raw nerve about a national institution. And Annette threatened legal action - she could sue yet in the US or turn libel tourist.

Suddenly, promised book reviews did not run, scheduled interviews did not appear. All this in the Land of the Free. No writ has been served as I write.

Was she offended by the stories about her and her late, wealthy philanthropist mother Jane Engelhard or was she aggrieved by Gross' impertinence in delving into Oscar's well-known sexual past? Or all of the above?

Annette de la Renta is rich enough and powerful enough to hire the best lawyers to speak on her behalf. I spoke with Michael Gross about the affair. (If you want more background, read Jesse Kornbluth's excellent report, click here)

Michael, my dear. You're imagining that sections of the US media have banned coverage of your book, aren't you? You've got sensitive?

"No. I did a fascinating interview with Daphne Merkin, a celebrated writer, for a publication-day story on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's web site, that has still never appeared. I also know of at least one reporter who has received a warning letter from Mrs de la Renta's lawyers saying the book is 'full of misinformation' and another, at another newspaper, whose story on the book was killed by an editor who said that they would cause the book to be withdrawn and/or corrected and the newspaper would be left 'holding the bag.' I also know of several reviews that were scheduled and then mysteriously postponed. I hesitate to be more specific since I fear that the reporters and editors who have filled me and my publisher in on what's been happening (or more precisely, not happening) might themselves be at risk of retaliation."

You're saying the New York elite have closed ranks against you in defence of their Empress?

"I know that the New York elite - call them the 4,000 - love to know and discuss things no one else (ie, the public, the great unwashed, the NOCD types) knows. Much of what is in my book is no surprise to them. Many of them were my sources.

"That said, I suspect that the core issue here is not this or that nugget of revealing information but rather something larger and perhaps more threatening, my exposure of two things: the way things really work behind-the-scenes in a great American cultural institution - which no one involved wants revealed - and the picaresque saga of Jane Engelhard, whose riveting life story still has holes in it, despite my attempts to fill them, but which is nonetheless told in full for the first time in Rogues' Gallery. Both she and her daughter have battled every attempt to shed light on this saga - battles referred to in the book."

Is this just about the de la Rentas - or have you also upset the cultural snobs by telling the unauthorised and all-too-human story behind a national treasure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

"The sad fact is that the sort of people who create and sustain historical repositories like the Metropolitan do not want their own histories, or those of the institutions, revealed. Otherwise, why would they repeatedly obstruct researchers and make a mere book like mine into an object lesson, a warning to any who might think of following a similar path of crumbs?"

I understand the de la Rentas' friend Anna Wintour made her feelings known ....

"I ran into Anna Wintour at Graydon Carter's Monkey Bar shortly before the book came out. We have 'crossed swords' before, beginning when she was the editor of British Vogue and began an interview by instructing me in no uncertain terms that I was not to refer to her as Nuclear Wintour, so I was not surprised when she gave me a look I can only describe (by paraphrasing a designer) as 'standing in a strapless dress next to an open icebox.'"

As Kornbluth writes of the matter: "A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended." If Annette de la Renta's legal threats are intended to chill interest in Gross' book, then they may well have succeeded for now.

But would it not make more sense, and be more in keeping with the freedom-loving spirit of the US, if she published a statement of rebuttal for all to see? What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, banish a book to obscurity, and with the acquiescence of a generally gutless American media. Tina Brown - when will you become the mouse that roared?

For a great read, order a copy here.
Michael Gross website

Francis Wheen shock - 'Meditation is good for you!'

Francis Wheen: Anti-mumbo jumbo guru recommends meditation for its benefits - halting the interior dialogue through what some have described as the use of "magical passes"

In a shock development, Francis Wheen - author of the bestselling anti-new age How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions - has admitted that meditation is "good for you". This will surprise many of his followers who delighted in his mockery of Transcendental Meditation self-help gurus such as Deepak Chopra.

Wheen recanted in response to a Madame Arcati meditation science report which concluded that the new age practice helps keep the brain young. To read his letter and Madame Arcati's reply click here and then go to comments.

Those whose minds are still keen may also notice how Wheen's view has been somewhat exaggerated by this report without being entirely misrepresented.

Francis Wheen: Wrong on mumbo jumbo meditation

Five or six years ago, Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions had a giggle at the influence of the new age industry and its mystical ideas and practices. He was particularly scornful of the Hollywood "self-help guru" Deepak Chopra and the $20m he earns pa peddling spiritual advice to the likes of Demi Moore and Bill Clinton. Once a respectable "Harvard-trained endocrinologist", Chopra lost his way - as Wheen saw it - when he turned to transcendental meditation (among other things) in the early 80s: mumbo jumbo silliness had turned the head of an enlightened scientist - what a waste!

But a new study on meditation by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, may even cause Wheen to think again. They have discovered that meditation increases grey matter in the brain (related to "sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing") and that "regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex," reports Science Daily (click here).

I trust Wheen will include this research should his know-all book ever be updated.

Victor Zammit: His $1m challenge to afterlife deniers

Retired Australian lawyer Victor Zammit is offering $1m to any afterlife researcher who can rebut evidence for the afterlife. Click here. The applicant must understand scientific methodology, must know about admissibility of evidence and is recognised as an investigator in this field. In other words, your average pig ignorant sceptic who just hangs on the words of Richard Dawkins or Christopher "bisexual word god" Hitchens is not likely to get very far.

"Any evidence [for the afterlife] that's not rebutted remains valid," is quite properly his mantra.

You can read his book A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife here. It begins with this statement: "There is undeniable scientific evidence today for the afterlife. I am a former practising attorney-at-law formally qualified in a number of university disciplines. I am also an open-minded sceptic."

Zammit: What happens to us when we die, click here.