SOUTH Dakota is a conservative sort of place. It barely counts as a fly-over state for the sophisticates of America’s coasts, glancing down on the farmlands from 30,000 feet. Below, the descendents of west European immigrants have made little impact...
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I DON’T remember hankering after rocket-propelled grenades and anti-personnel mines until we lived close to a well-known Edinburgh public school. The institution and its pupils were no real problem, save as a matter of ingrained political principle worthy of the...
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There is a stand-by column always available to anyone who attempts to write about sport. It goes roughly like this: why is an activity as hideous as boxing called a pastime, and why is that hideous pastime eternally seductive? For...
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Once upon a time, nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition. Then plonkers began to demand it. In that instant, a phenomenon ceased to be. It joined the choir invisible. It became – you get the idea – an ex-phenomenon, pining for...
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Print is dead. I read that somewhere. Text is antique, at least according to the prophets of multiple media who can still string a word or two together. To hear it endlessly told, fragile paper and smelly ink are the...
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Ian Bell on Wenger's shared ethos
Reminiscing last week over his difficult early days as a unknown foreign pioneer in the Premiership, Arsene Wenger overlooked, perhaps forgivably, a previous wave of invading immigrants. There are fewer of them now. They no longer lead the line at...
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DOES Jack McConnell make you cringe? Or is the first minister the man with the plan that will help an entire nation stop behaving like a bunch of neurotic curs who have resisted every therapy known to history? Rhetorical questions:...
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NEVER trust averages. The difference between the mean and the median can be truly startling. For some people, it can seem like a matter of life or death. Are they doomed to be below average, or blessed and above the...
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Romanov should accept blame for stench of manure on ‘his crops’ says Ian Bell
The meaning of this strange remark will become clear momentarily, but let us spread a little manure over Vladimir Romanov’s crops this autumn morning. The owner of Hearts may find the whiff of truth unpleasant, but it is this: proprietors...
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GOD, sang the late John Lennon, is a concept. At the time, this prompted several profound questions, questions such as: “So?”, followed by: “And?” The former Beatle then launched into a primal scream of a tune in which he explained...
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The jury is still out on the regime of Gordon Strachan. One of the bigger squads in Scottish football has performed well enough, of late, but there remains a strange air of hesitancy, of uncertainty. What sort of squad are...
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HERE follows one of those crashing generalisations that have made the great British press a shining example to world civilisation. There are four types of men. No more, no fewer. The first is gay, and has no interest whatever in...
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By his own confession, Charles Kennedy drank too much, too often, while attempting to lead the Liberal Democrats. Neither aberration is, in fact, illegal. A handful of people in Kennedy’s party and the Westminster media knew that excess had become...
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