When John Maynard Keynes visited Orkney for two months in the summer of 1908, he wrote, enchanted, to a friend from Stromness, claiming “the view from this town is the Bay of Naples and the Island of Capri”.
This stunningly …
Will the hard Left ever leave campus?
“I’m Jeff Bezos’s arch-nemesis.” A man dressed as a West Coast rapper is speaking before a 1,000-strong crew of Britain’s hardest Leftists. Since this is London, my first thought was: Ali G impersonator. “I cost Amazon $4 billion,” he swaggers. …
Why CBT won’t set you free
One of the more entertaining parts of my training in Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy — an austerely philosophical style of CBT — was how tribal our course leader was about its merits. He got particularly exercised about psychoanalysts. If a prospective …
The Puritan spirit of America’s civil war
It is hard not to look at modern America without getting the sense of a country that is frantically shedding its skin, in the process of becoming something new. But what will that be?
The country once defined by its …
Who should Starmer sack?
Henry Kissinger memorably observed that the reason academic fights were so vicious was that the prizes were so small. So it has been in the Labour Party for most of the last 13 years, when the chances of overturning the …
Russia’s toxic military politics
No group in history has posed as many dangers as soldiers who feel abandoned by their leaders. Whether they are conscripts, volunteers or mercenaries, officers or rank-and-file, the men who fought for a cause that later became reviled as failed …
Big Fertility profits from women’s pain
The female reproductive experience is an endless morality tale. To try for a baby is to watch yourself constantly, knowing each stage of the process involves a judgement, if not on the performance of your body, then the legitimacy of …
As France burns, the far-Right rises
What the street barricade was to France in the 19th century, the burning car has become in the 21st: a preferred means of violent protest, and a key theatrical symbol of political defiance. In 2005, after two boys named Zyed …
Why I’ve given up on the Conservatives
Victory should feel more satisfying than it does. Just a few years ago, arguing that globalisation had been a great policy error by the West’s political class was still viewed as a heretical position, its adherents fighting in vain against …
Jacinda Ardern still haunts New Zealand
New Zealand’s prime minister, Chris Hipkins, had a bumpy ride on his recent trip to China. Not only because of technical issues with his official plane — the defence aircraft used by the PM keeps breaking down, so the delegation …
The danger of treating doctors like saints
The idea that doctors are saints is relatively new. For much of the 19th century, they were held in pretty low regard by the general public. Some were seen as social climbers — men using their medical training to get …
Dodging shells on Ukraine’s eastern front
I’m running. Shells explode around me. Sometimes they roar like thunder; sometimes they whistle on approach. Large parts of the forest are on fire. Smoke rolls by like dry ice.
“Run. Run. Run,” says Dima. I follow him over the …
The awkward truth about free speech
Is it ever possible to take a neutral position on the importance of free speech? The task certainly seems quite difficult. As Vogue’s favourite philosopher, Amia Srinivasan, notes this month in the London Review of Books, many Right-wingers seem to …
How PwC captured Australia
PricewaterhouseCoopers claims it was created to fulfil one purpose: “To build trust in society and solve important problems”. Inevitably, its mission statement contains a list of platitudes explaining how it hopes to achieve this; among them is the insistence that …
Inside the mind of a monkey-torturer
In 1944, my grandfather was serving aboard the USS Sealion (SS-315) when it became the first and only Allied submarine to sink an enemy battleship. The operation inadvertently imperilled more than 1,000 British and Australian prisoners of war. My grandfather …