“Mackay is unwilling to venture into the semiotics of hairstyle, although he concedes that during the English civil war ‘every species of vice and iniquity was thought by the Puritans to lurk in the long curly tresses of the monarchists, while the latter imagined that their opponents were as destitute of wit, wisdom, and of virtue, as they were of hair’.

“The association between plentiful hair and the farouche is easy to divine, as is its paradoxical tangling of effeminacy and machismo. In our own era, the Janus-faced view of hippies – at once filthily feral and girlishly gentle – would seem to have been the apogee; by the mid-1970s, one might have hoped, the tedious go-round between long and short hair would have been abolished, peace and prosperity having been instantiated in the valiant figure of Richard Branson, with his carefully oiled locks flowing over his well-laundered collar.”

Read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman here.

To read James Macintyre’s blog about Vorderman’s appearance, visit the New Statesman here.

“The modern rambling movement began with a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District, but in my view what’s needed now is a mass exodus. The last time I was on Kinder Scout workmen were hard at it, laying a stone-flagged staircase all the way up from Edale. Even when I gained the ridge, I saw that more stone-flagging lay ahead of me, as if wayward Romans had been building wonky roads. Actually, the Roman analogy isn’t that misplaced, because in the last 20 years legions of walkers have invaded the British hinterland intent on stealing beauty.

“I say ‘intent’, but really, where’s the beauty to be found? It’s difficult to commune with nature when there are scores of other communards, just as it’s impossible to venture into the wild if it’s overpopulated by the civilised. Of course, I realise that if you get a little bit further off the beaten – or stone-flagged – track, you’ll soon find all the solitude you desire, but there remains something profoundly disturbing about the way our most celebrated areas of natural beauty are becoming replete with the same urban infrastructure we’re trying to get away from: car parks, gift shops, cafés – and now these metalled paths that mimic the motorways most visitors have driven along in order to get there.

“I blame the English Romantics: their obsession with the picturesque spread with lightning speed. When Wordsworth was still living at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, trippers were already pitching up armed with wooden frames through which to descry the surrounding fells. Two hundred years on that frame has become completely internalised, so that we head en masse for such locations, where we goggle at prospects that have already been worn smooth by our regard.

“Unfortunately, it’s a lose-lose situation: not only is our hunt for the unspoilt a spoliation, but the correlate of this is that we have little regard for the places where we actually live. Whether it’s fly-tipping or lousy architecture, littering or insensitive planning, the urban environment is endlessly traduced by not just commercial imperatives but our own studied lack of regard. Why bother? – we say to ourselves. After all, we’re effectively powerless when it comes to prettifying our immediate surroundings, so our best possible defence is to get out at the weekend for a good long walk somewhere lovely.”

To read the rest of the article, go here.

“This is not to suggest that Saddam could have been ousted during the first Gulf war by laser-guided egg, bacon, sausage, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, chips and toast – but the all-day breakfast coincided with a devastating new onslaught by irony on Britain’s social structure. Certainly, as the British middle classes loft-converted their way out of the recession of the early 1990s, they began eating all-day breakfasts (or ‘fry-ups’, as these are known to graduates), while washing them down with copious amounts of ‘builder’s tea’. Before this jumbling of mores, a café was a caff, and its clientele was decidedly proletarian.

“Lunching with the writer Nick Papadimitriou at the Max Café on the Wandsworth Road, we mulled over caff food as we dabbled our chips in the shocking fauvism of our oval platters. Nick observed that the meal was a Proustian madeleine, a sense datum linking one unerringly to the past. But which past specifically, I wanted to know? Nineteen seventy-four, Nick snapped – it’s always associated in my mind with leaving Emerson, Lake and Palmer concerts feeling incredibly hungry. But why, I pressed him, were you famished after prog-rock gigs? He grimaced: because they went on and on and on – especially Greg Lake’s bass solos.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column here at the New Statesman.

“It’s altogether pointless trying to winch these people out of their crevasse with a thin cable of reason, because they’ve already made the brave leap into believing something for which there is no real empirical basis whatsoever. Indeed, if you do challenge them along these lines, they simply turn on you with words to the effect that you cannot prove your version of these events, while they, at least, are maintaining a healthy scepticism – the implication being that you’re merely another dupe.

“What got me thinking about the collective insanity of the conspiratorial laity – besides running into it almost every day – was the experience of a young friend of mine who is studying philosophy at a perfectly respectable university. She was given by her tutor the assignment of watching on YouTube a ‘documentary’ called Loose Change. This, for those of you fortunate enough not to have seen it, is a series of ‘facts’ and ‘observations’ that, taken together, are intended to support one of the ‘arguments’ above; namely, that it wasn’t a group of Islamist jihadists who engineered the destruction of the twin towers and the attack on the Pentagon, but elements within the federal government itself who conspired to take the lives of thousands of their own citizens.

“When my young friend taxed her tutor with the ridiculousness of this thesis, she was told that watching Loose Change was integral to her study of Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

“That the September 11 attacks should have generated so much conspiratorial guff is woefully predictable. Loose Change is only a wilder and more explicit version of the thesis bruited by Michael Moore’s asinine Fahrenheit 9/11. In that feature-length exercise in infantile tendentiousness, Moore made great play of the connections between the Bin Laden and Bush families, hinting that these were causally implicated in the attacks. The truth is that it would be surprising if the Bin Ladens – whose vast construction company is by appointment to the House of Saud – didn’t hobnob with the Bushes.”

Read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column here.

There is also a version of Self’s talk in the New Statesman here.

“There is always a measure of surprise – from one dilettante to another – when we admit to this fondness for Bragg’s programme. In part, this has to be because of the peculiar position he himself occupies in the sixth-form common room of British culture: though a self-confessed swot, his face displays the sheen of populism – the result of several decades’ spraying by television’s incontinent regard. While other pupils have come and gone, he remains; and when it was announced last year that, after 30 years, Bragg’s principal vehicle, The South Bank Show, would be ceasing transmission, there was – among those I spoke with – a feeling that this was the end of an era: the barbarians were at the gate. Moreover, we would miss Melvyn’s perkily browned features – like those of a handsome walnut – as the camera cut away from this or that artistic nabob, to show him bobbing and grinning assent (shots that are known in the industry as ‘noddies’).”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Diary piece in the London Review of Books here.