When you’re loafing around with your hands in your pockets, whistling, are you really working at optimum efficiency?
Read my piece in the 2025 Rathbones Review for free here. (And subscribe to my Substack, The whole caboodle, here.)
Is the whole caboodle serious? One comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well, but I should think very little of a man who didn’t keep something in the background of his life that was more serious than all this talking—something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink.1
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When does something stop being rubbish and start being a feature of the landscape?
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Are there any circumstances under which people won’t go on holiday?
In summer 1917, Russia was three years into a war that it was losing badly, there had been a revolution in February and there would be another one in October, and after that there would be years of civil war. Casualties in the army were shocking, as were civilian deaths from hunger and disease. Everything was chaotic and unstable; all that was solid had melted into air.
But when Lenin fled from possible arrest in St Petersburg in July 1917, leaving from Sestroretsk Station, the terminus for a small coastal railway, the trains were busy with holidaymakers:
It was the peak of the summer season and the trains were packed with middle-class passengers leaving the capital and going off to enjoy the seaside and the fresh air.1 Continue reading
My last piece on TV Licensing caught fire and is now the most read thing on my website. A few things came up in the responses on social media and elsewhere that I wanted to mention1. Continue reading
My first thought was, he lied in every word…1
As the television licence is in the news again, now might be a good time to describe my strange and illuminating experiences with TV Licensing. Continue reading
In 2014 the BBC asked whether we’d reached peak beard1. Not really. Not by a long way, it seems. Continue reading
Paul Fishman 