Georgia Gabriel-Hooper was just 14 when she saw her mother, Cheryl, being shot dead through the window of her car by her stepfather. This was the culmination of seven years of abuse, threats and control.
Cheryl had always been “the …
Is Spain too late to apologise for fascism?
A year ago, I met a man in Madrid who expected to be sued for body-snatching. He gave me the news with a shrug. It was the price, he said, of joining a socialist government that was drafting a new …
Can gratitude save humanity?
https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CRAWFORD-SPEECH_mixdown-1.mp3
Listen to Matthew Crawford’s UnHerd lecture.
We feel gratitude when someone does something for us outside the realm of exchange. One wants to mark it, this arrival of something that overflows what is expected, and recognise the source …
The hypocrisy of Witch Lit
While presenting the award for outstanding British film at last year’s Baftas, Emma Watson made clear that, unlike J.K. Rowling, she was “here for all of the witches”. Her purpose was twofold: to broadcast her moral superiority to the author-turned-alleged-enemy-of-the-trans-community, …
Putin is sabotaging Ukraine’s grain deal
To walk along the Odesa seafront is to briefly forget that you are in a country at war. Several times each day, the sounds of Russian attack start up, and soon after comes the Ukrainian retort. The alto of the …
Harry and Meghan’s Montecito prison
Jeremy Clarkson’s savage polemic against Meghan Markle, with its sick fantasy of splattering her naked body with mud, may be of interest to, of all people, philosophers. Philosophers of language talk about “performatives”, meaning bits of language which get something …
The Dreyfus Affair is not finished
On January 13, 1898, Parisians awoke to the chorus of hundreds of news criers who, striding along the grand boulevards and brandishing copies of the newspaper L’Aurore, were shouting passages from the article that sprawled across the front page. It …
The art of empty apologies
Everyday life is full of unwitting moral pitfalls. Overnight, formerly benign words can take on strange and harmful new meanings. It is easy to be blindsided by the rapidly changing public fortunes of activities you’ve always enjoyed — using gas …
Westminster isn’t that corrupt
Britain hates its MPs and loves a moral crusade; outrage at their behaviour is a feature of political life. Yet while the hue and cry is often well-directed, popular ire tends to obscure the reality: that few of our politicians …
Why the West should go nuclear
Nuclear power is often described as “the double-edged sword of science”, reflecting the fact that it can be used for both useful and peaceful purposes as well as deadly and destructive ends. This has never been truer than today. On …
My Prince Harry moment
I became a priest on a hot summer’s day at Lichfield Cathedral. I was as prepared as I thought I could be for the vows I was about to take. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the whole paraphernalia …
Why Harry couldn’t be a hero
Prince Harry has finally taken up the role he was always destined to fill. If Diana was, as Tony Blair dubbed her, the Princess of Hearts, Harry is her true heir: the Prince of Lolcows.
A “lolcow”, for those who …
Inside El Salvador’s brutal gang crackdown
In her cramped breeze-block home on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital, across an alley from a school currently occupied by soldiers, 65-year-old Francisca Alas rolls down her sock to show a scar from the machete of a gang member. …
How universities entered Cloud Cuckoo Land
What explains the recent, alarmingly broad and rapid capture of cultural, political, and economic institutions by neo-Marxist identity politics and liberation ideologies? Writing in Tablet, Russell Jacoby argues that the end of the rapid expansion of universities in the late …
What’s wrong with violent fiction?
I was last asked the question three weeks ago at a panel discussion on crime fiction. The time before that, it was in a written Q&A for a literary magazine. I no longer remember the first time I heard it; …