Vincent James Hooper, at The Blogs

Vincent James Hooper

Jun 22, 2026, 6:01 AM

The World Is Not Multipolar. It Is Pluripolar.

There is a particular strangeness in being courted to embrace a product you have just been forbidden to touch. That was the position of the world's richest democracies at Évian this week: hosts to a summit whose star guests...

Jun 21, 2026, 7:14 AM

Plymouth’s Quiet Door, and the Long Memory of Fear

From Saltash you can see Plymouth across the Tamar, and somewhere in that grey riverside sprawl of dockyard and terraces sits a building most of the city walks past without noticing. That is rather the point. The Plymouth Synagogue...

Jun 20, 2026, 10:18 AM

A Snapshot Is Not a Forecast: What the Farage Poll Really Tells Us?

A poll lands, a presenter leans in, and the chyron does the rest: HUGE NEW POLL PREDICTS FARAGE AS NEXT PM. The clip travels far further than the caveats ever will. Yet the most arresting number in British politics...

Jun 19, 2026, 4:54 AM

The Thirsty Algorithm: Why Israel Should Price Water Into Its AI Ambitions

Who has the data? Every fashionable anxiety eventually finds its viral statistic, and artificial intelligence has now found water. The claim ricocheting around social media — that a single ChatGPT email "drinks" a bottle of water — is not quite...

Jun 18, 2026, 6:17 AM

What Wilde’s An Ideal Husband teaches about the secrets nations keep in reserve

The Letter in the Drawer. Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband has just closed a limited run at the Lyric Hammersmith, a bold new staging that ended this month, a century after the play was last performed on that stage. What...

Jun 17, 2026, 5:44 AM

Method, Not the Magnifying Glass: What Sherlock Holmes Teaches the Middle East

There was a particular pleasure in watching Joshua James stalk the lawn at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, breath hanging in the cold May air, announcing that the game was afoot. Joel Horwood's new mystery, loosely woven from The...

Jun 16, 2026, 8:37 AM

Hope Beamed Eastward: What a London Concert Tells Us About the Middle East

On Saturday 6 June, just after Pentecost, the Royal Albert Hall filled with the sound of a worldwide church. Prom Praise, the annual concert mounted by the 120-piece All Souls Orchestra under Principal Conductor Michael Andrews, took as its...

Jun 15, 2026, 10:11 AM

A National Draft for the Trades?: Britain’s Lesson from Israel

Britain's most expensive policy choice may be the one it never voted for: the slow demolition of its skilled trades. As of late 2025, 957,000 young people aged 16-24 in the United Kingdom were not in education, employment, or...

Jun 14, 2026, 7:14 AM

From Cornwall to Zion: The Cornish Tin in Solomon’s Temple

When I was a boy in Saltash, the Tamar at low tide revealed the grey-green slate the Cornish call killas — the foundation of a peninsula that for four millennia gave the ancient world one of its most precious...

Jun 13, 2026, 10:18 AM

The Cart That Could Not Stop

A new staging of Brecht's Mother Courage in London is being read as a parable of capitalism. It is also, more quietly, a Jewish story, and a warning about the wars we learn to live inside. A woman drags a...

About Me

Religion: Church of England/Interfaith. [This is not an organized religion but rather quite disorganized]. Views and Opinions expressed here are STRICTLY his own PERSONAL!