For decades, Benjamin Netanyahu touted himself as Mr Security, the leader Israelis could count on to keep them safe. Then came Hamas’s October 7 assault, which killed 1,200 people, and took at least 230 hostages, shattering the Prime Minister’s image …
Wuthering Heights isn’t a love story
Not many films are panned even before they’ve gone into production. Such has been the fate, though, of yet another version of Wuthering Heights. Already derided as melodramatic trash, some reviewers are wondering whether the director, Emerald Fennell, has …
How the Tories can crush Farage
After they limped through four failed leaders in quick succession, only to be wiped out in the general election result, it is hard to believe a new leader will solve the Tory existential crisis. For one thing, whoever finds themselves …
Israel should hit Iran where it hurts
Through its early history — but not for the last four decades and more — the main threats to Israel’s security came from its Arab neighbours. That resulted in several wars against Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. But except for …
Can Kamala charm swing voters?
Never have two American presidential candidates been so different from one another. The Black-Indian daughter of Left-wing academics versus the white son of a wealthy Ku Klux Klan sympathiser. The woman who spent her entire career in public service versus …
The absurd optimism of Megalopolis
I attended a very special, and very strange, preview screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a few days ahead of its official release. Before the film ran, the screening audience was treated to what was surely meant to be a …
Antisemitism stains the art world
Venice during the opening week of the Biennale is the epicentre of the art world. Dealers rub shoulders with artists, sharing champagne and taking speedboats to after-parties in decaying palazzos. It is, at once, glamorous and intoxicating.
In theory, this …
The Miliband files
As acts of political fratricide go, few were as public — or petulant — as Ed Miliband’s defenestration of his elder brother David. After Ed beat David to the Labour Party leadership in 2010, the pair attempted an awkward hug …
The Tory contender Labour fears
It’s not easy judging a prospective leader. In 1955, Anthony Eden was the most impressive prime minister-in-waiting that Britain had ever seen. Put to the test in the greatest conflagration in world history, Eden had emerged with his reputation not …
Female ageing is the ultimate horror story
Contains spoilers.
When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More …
Inside the dangerous world of papyrus dealing
On 7 May 2018, Kim Kardashian made her annual appearance at the Met Gala. During the evening she posed for a photograph next to one of the museum’s newest acquisitions, a gold Egyptian coffin dated to the 1st century BC. …
Keir Starmer: a technocrat without a plan
Two episodes crystallised my opinion of Starmer. First, his dithering over school closures during the early months of the pandemic. Sir Keir changed his mind on the matter no less than six times. Boris, with some justice, was able to …
The Mississippi elites who broke democracy
The Mississippi GOP has near supermajorities in the statehouse and senate, controlling all eight statewide offices, both US Senate seats, and three of the state’s four Congressional seats. The last Democrat to carry the Magnolia State in a presidential race …
Why Lebanon can’t be saved
In 2018, Henry Kissinger observed that Donald Trump was one of those historical characters who “appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The same could …
The futile fight for England’s identity
As Conservative politicians continue to insist that “England’s national identity” is being undermined — while remaining scrupulous in their unwillingness to describe what they mean by that term — it turns out that, as usual, foreigners know exactly who we …