Welcome to The Ironist

ISSN 2817-7363

The Ironist is dedicated to exploring irony wherever it occurs. We have a range of articles, stories and even book reviews which cover historical and contemporary life and events. We welcome you comments, support and submissions.

Dinner is Served: Trimalchio’s Banquet

Dinner is Served: Trimalchio’s Banquet

In this first installment of a series on the greatest meals ever (or never) served, Jonathan Bennett reconstructs a feast so vulgar that it achieved immortality. Written in the first century by Petronius, courtier to Nero and self-styled arbiter elegantiae, the...

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Love is Blind

Love is Blind

Peter Scotchmer writes a short story on how love sees truth even when the eyes refuse to. Near the beginning of the semester, Rebecca Cooper, slim, blonde and beautiful, stood somewhat shamefacedly before her teacher’s desk after class, self-consciously twisting an...

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Forgotten Heroes #7 – Boris the Butt Brush

Forgotten Heroes #7 – Boris the Butt Brush

Nigel explains how the Roman precursor to our modern toilet brush, the xylospongium, gave us our grilled meat on a stick, our modern kebabs…and then he concludes with an original Parthian recipe. The other day, while fulminating on the algorithmic vacuity of Facebook,...

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Rowing with Imagination – On Xenophon

Rowing with Imagination – On Xenophon

Nigel writes an encomium for the Cost of Glory... Twenty minutes on the rowing machine and the display will dutifully say I have rowed 3.7 kilometres. But that is not really where I am. In my mind, memories merge. I am rowing from Miletus on the Maeander to Lesbos....

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Ramblings #8 – Look Back and Learn

Ramblings #8 – Look Back and Learn

Nigel writes on the irony of hindsight, and how looking back is the only way we ever really learn.   “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” - George Eliot, Middlemarch It is a long drive to Ottawa, and one that I have...

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Irony #2 – The Virtue of the Ironist

Irony #2 – The Virtue of the Ironist

Irony and the human condition: Peter Scotchmer on why double vision matters more than ever. “…the ironist is caught in a boundary zone between two opposed and mutually exclusive perspectives… between the necessity to believe in the world as it ought to be, and the...

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The Banality of Evil

The Banality of Evil

Irony, #1 – Hannah Arendt, the Refugee from Königsberg - Nigel writes about a stateless thinker who made irony her weapon against totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture   Königsberg was a jewel on the coast of the Baltic. For...

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Author

  • Nigel Scotchmer

    Nigel’s peripatetic path in life gives him, he believes, a unique perspective on the world around him. He has worked at many occupations over the years from driving a truck, writing welding standards, to being an international salesman,\ accountant and business owner. Brought up in a family that believed that Antigone in the Greek myth was correct to stand up and die for her belief that fairness and truth were more important than the ranting raves of the unthinking mob – his father accepted the consequences of refusing to fire a homosexual in the 1950s – Nigel believes irony is the greatest tool for both encouraging equity and our enjoyment of life. Since irony involves the interplay between emotions, reality and chance, its appreciation can provide meaning to the often inexplicable world in which we live. He said, when interviewed for this summary: “No, we can’t all be heroes, and too often we make the wrong choice, for the wrong reasons – but at least irony can bring peace to us by helping reconcile the warring elements.” Nigel loves literature – especially books and poems that deal with universal themes such as love, war, and justice – and is now happily retired from the world of business. Ironically, (like countless retirees before him!), he says he has the ambition to be a great writer and is currently writing fiction full-time…. Visit him at https://nigelscotchmer.com/