by Xan Holbrook In the words of Vito Corleone, Drugs are a dirty business. Who can disagree, even when spoken by a pretentious hood? What isn’t so well appreciated is the way in which drugs and political power are so closely interlinked. The often-parroted Marxist misquote about faith is a

by Xan Holbrook I see you there. You’re twirling your Hercule Poirot ‘stache, adjusting your pince-nez specs and drinking espresso from a cup so small you hold it with tweezers. Sitting there, in your Fort Greene café, keeping an eye on the Penny-Farthing you rode here on. Watching the world

Step into a world of adventure with the San Francisco Beer Passport. There’s no better way to explore San Francisco than to literally drink it in. This passport is amazing! Each one contains 27 coupons to buy one beer, get a second beer FREE at 27 of the finest locally

Resolutions, like wishes, like dreams, are ostensibly reachable, hopefully, feasible goals that many of us around the globe try desperately to hold ourselves to in the new year. Depending on your perspective of the whole thing, you may not even think about resolutions, maybe concerned solely about where you’re going

by Xan Holbrook Little of the phony gravitas of Christopher Columbus remains nowadays. Not the first man to discover the Americas, nor the one who proved the world was round, nor a pious man, not even a man who loved the land he found… Columbus is an empty icon. More

by Xan Holbrook There’s a wonderful phrase that the idiot-savants at the British Army Rumour Service, or ARRSe, love to employ to describe something truly invincible. That term is squaddy proof. The thinking goes something like this: you can build something, spend billions testing it in civilian circles, and claim

by Xan Holbrook One recurring treat (among many) for the Bill Hicks fan is his theatrical disdain and revulsion for drug prohibition. Such a passionate hatred proved an excellent vehicle to showcase his near mastery of prose and rhetoric. In one of my favorite bits, he inverted the stifled, crusty

by Xan Holbrook The Mafia are a disgrace to our species. The true stories of the Mafia – of people too inept to handle laundry, too mediocre to hold someone’s hand or kiss a cheek, yet so brutal as to pull the richest nation’s strings – are at once horrifying,

by Xan Holbrook As a people, we Britons are stereotyped according to our drinking habits. This usually falls into the twee joshing about tea, as Americans love to remind us with teeth-grinding regularity. However, it is no exaggeration to say that the British love of alcohol is fabric-of-the-nation stuff. But,