Tommy Robinson is a paradox: he is a brave and enormously successful activist-journalist with a mean right hook. At the same time, he’s prone to sentimentality, sensitive to criticism and sees himself as a victim, tethering his own private troubles …
Why women love Ryan Murphy’s Monsters
Crass, titillating and (at best) casual with the truth, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story takes an instance of real-life cruelty and violence and twists it into oversexed entertainment. It implies an incestuous connection between the two brothers whose …
How the Mob went mainstream
As far back as he can remember, Michael Franzese always wanted to be a gangster. Just head online if you don’t believe me. There, across dozens of videos and thousands of views, the former caporegime in the Colombo crime family …
It’s time to re-enchant the world
The meaning of the leaf is the leaf, as I once heard Roger Scruton say. Perhaps it was an original coinage from the Sage of Sundey Hill Farm, but it has the slight feel of a Zen koan: a …
Donald Trump’s strange sincerity
The faster American culture spreads, the less foreigners seem to understand it. In October, the Irish novelist Anne Enright shared a few thoughts about the US elections. “[T]hese politics are playing out in some secret part of the American psyche,” …
Why Scotland can’t get clean
Tourists emerging from Glasgow’s Central Station onto Gordon Street are immediately confronted with a scene familiar to every Glaswegian: cold air, tornadoes of litter, and the visible overlap of the city’s drug and homelessness crises. To the right, a group …
Gaza’s children have no future
When I was a boy, growing up in Gaza, we used to play a game called “Arabs and Jews”. Two children would be designated captains and pick their teams, then we would find some sticks, pretend they were guns, and …
Israel’s plan to weaken the Iranian regime
Before Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei set out to conquer the Sunni Arab world in 1989, there were self-imposed rules that set real limits to Arab-Israeli warfare. In all the conflict between Israel and Arab states since May 1948, the world …
Why I miss the bitchy fashion police
Do you remember a time when women on television could be exhilaratingly rude about what other women looked like without everyone else being Deeply Disappointed? On Wednesday I had a flashback to this distant state of affairs as I saw …
When Trump fed the press a nothingburger
In his 1991 song “New Jack Hustler”, Ice T tells a tale that was already a gangsta rap cliche when the song was released — a narrator’s first-person story of his career as a successful seller of drugs, a busy …
Britain won’t be Balkanised
Imagine: the border with Scotland is closed and your home city of Manchester besieged. Before you know it, you and your family are having to flee to Wales to escape bombs and full-blown civil war. Such is the scenario of …
Sahra Wagenknecht’s insider revolution
When Sahra Wagenknecht founded her new “Left-conservative” BSW party earlier this year, it seemed as if it might fill a gaping void in Germany’s political spectrum. In the UK, Maurice Glasman famously branded this combination “Blue Labour” — but until …
Trump senses British weakness
It must be all-so familiar to Theresa May. There she was in 2017, holding hands with The Donald, walking in the White House as the first foreign leader invited to see the new Caesar after his inauguration. Poised to assume …
Would you move to Mother Russia?
Last year, Tucker Carlson scandalised America by travelling to Russia and interviewing Vladimir Putin. As US viewers denounced the idea that one ought to speak to an enemy such as Putin, Tucker strolled around Moscow, filming himself taking the subway, …
How intersectionality killed feminism
You’d think that Suffs, a play about women’s suffrage, would be considered to be pretty progressive. It’s currently playing on Broadway, and has enjoyed broadly positive reviews from all the usual outlets. Yet earlier in the year, this most liberal …