Uxbridge is Metroland, the paradise at the end of the Metropolitan Line. It is a century-old marketing invention selling the fantasy that, if you got on the Metropolitan Line at Aldgate, and stayed on for an hour, you would alight …
The clue China is preparing for war
In a sinister reversion to the very worst days of Mao’s rule, Communist Party officials across China are blindly obeying orders to rapidly increase the supply of arable land by any means possible. As with the “Great Leap Forward” that …
Why fascism won’t take over Spain
Spaniards heading to the polls this Sunday will not do so cheerfully. Not only is the election disrupting the summer holidays of more than a quarter of Spanish voters — but the options on the ballot paper are, at first …
A heatwave isn’t the end of the world
As I write this, in my favourite local café in Rome, the temperature outside is close to 40°C. So yes, it’s hot. Yet, thanks to a relatively old invention — air conditioning — I’m able to work in comfort. The …
Westminster has failed Selby
It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon in North Yorkshire, and Rishi Sunak is trying to reassure the North Yorkshire Conservative Association gathered on his front lawn that all is not lost. Sheltered under a marquee, he’s like a cruise-ship crooner entertaining …
The high priestess of celebrity therapists
Would you want to eavesdrop on an anonymous couple’s therapy session? Hear a woman talk to her husband about the revelation that he secretly fathered twins with a lesbian couple she had doubts about, just after he’d cheated on her …
Could you beat Elon Musk in a fight?
It never ends well when the geek humiliates the jock in high-school films. One minute the bespectacled boy is running rings round the football star in algebra class; the next, they’re in the playground, and the smart kid is getting …
The dawn of the Bohemian Peasants
It is a drab Wednesday in April and I am sat naked in a transparent plastic shed. Tucked away in a forest near the sleepy town of Uckfield, a woman starts to hit me in the face with some birch …
How disastrous births haunt women
The third time I went into labour, I was determined to avoid getting told off. With both of my previous births, I had somehow managed to get things wrong. My errors the first time: going to hospital too early, then, …
AI has always plagued mankind
Why are the countries of the West sliding toward electronically enhanced totalitarianism? Was it inevitable that government employees and corporate technicians wielding digital and psychological tools would promote a false conspiracy theory to cripple a sitting American president, and suppress …
Inside Liberland: Europe’s Bitcoin micronation
Chugging down the Danube in a fisherman’s boat, past the unrecognised exclave known as Liberland, it’s hard to reconcile fantasy with reality. This patch of land — lushly forested, mosquito-ridden and boggy — remains unclaimed by neighbouring Croatia and Serbia, …
Washington DC is a failed city
If you had to pick the exact day when the young, affluent, and oblivious of Washington DC were forced to accept that they live in a failed city, 22 July 2021 would be as good a choice as any. That …
The French need a revolution
You have to wonder what Indian PM Narendra Modi, guest of honour at the Champs-Elysées military parade today, will be making of the political fever in France. The tremulous mood was captured well in his counterpart Elisabeth Borne’s recent interview …
At Nato, America recaptured Europe
It is now clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of one era in world politics and the beginning of a new one. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of détente …
Should Huw Edwards have been named?
The Yewtree investigations into historic sexual offences by public figures changed two things about the British relationship with celebrity. First, it made us more suspicious of it: the nice men in your living room had in several cases, it turned …