Off the Top of Greg Sheridan's Head

In case you were wondering at Greg Sheridan's lengthy absence from the pages of The Australian, that rag's  foreign affairs editor has been on a junket to the Jaipur Literary Festival in Rajasthan. Here are some priceless thoughts by this notorious Israel luvvie on the subject of said event. Talk about off the top of his head!:

"The event is the brain child of that British lover of all things Indian, William Dalrymple, whose books about India are very good. When he strays beyond India, he's not so reliable." (The Forum, Weekend Australian Review, 10/2/218)

"The main festival site was overwhelming enough. There were nearly 20 000 people there on the day I participated in panels morning and night. I had run into the Indian politician, Shashi Tharoor, in Delhi a few days earlier. He is a kind of Indian Boris Johnson, immensely clever, flamboyant, probably too witty and humorous to be completely successful in mainstream politics, and he seems to write a new book every other month."

Truly, this goose isn't worthy to tie either Dalrymple's or Tharoor's bootstraps.

A British Education

Last Monday's Q&A dealt, in part, with the issue of Britain's colonial crimes, particularly in relation to India. Among other things, we learned that discussion of these is absent from Britain's history curriculum:

Tony Jones: I'm just wondering, have young Brits come to terms with their colonial past?
Laurie Penny: No, we haven't at all. Young Brits of every class have no idea about our colonial past. That is being deliberately done. We're deliberately denied or kept away from education about the graphic facts of what the British did around the world, including in this country, to the people of this country. The crimes of the British and the crimes that we've committed and were done in our names, over 400 years of pillage and conquest is something that we don't like to think about. And yet, it is everywhere in modern British history. When people talk about Brexit, it's stunning to me that if you ask British people who voted for Brexit what their major fear is, their fear is people will come to our country and take our things.
Shashi Tharoor: That's exactly right.
Laurie Penny: I just can't... It doesn't compute. We don't know this history. I took history in British schools up to the age of 18. And I got a pretty good grade. And...
Shashi Tharoor: You never learned a line of colonial history, did you?
Laurie Penny: Almost everything you have just said, I learned from your book.*

It should never be forgotten that it was 'Great' Britain's issue of the Balfour Declaration that created the Palestine's Israel problem.

[*Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2017)]