In a quiet group chat in an obscure part of the internet, a small number of anonymous accounts are swapping references from academic publications and feverishly poring over complex graphs of DNA analysis. These are not your average trolls, but …
Starmer’s ruthless attack on the Left
For Lauren Townsend, becoming an MP was an obvious choice. Born in Milton Keynes to a working-class family, she has lived in the city all her life, working in a variety of jobs, including as a waitress for TGI Friday …
Why is fashion selling children?
It’s always difficult to decide what to buy the toddler in your life for Christmas. A handbag shaped like a teddy dressed in BDSM gear, perhaps? Or a dog collar and lead? In a new ad campaign for the fashion …
The hidden desire of Tennessee Williams
Loss, a part of life, is certainly a part of literature, but it is seldom its motive force. Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is not a drama of loss, but of wistfulness. Madame Ranevsky seems to mourn the imminent loss of …
Tofu won’t save the planet
Planning the Christmas lunch yet? If you are vegan you’ve doubtless got tofu in there somewhere, perhaps served up with a sauce made piquant with a tablespoon of smugness. After all, going “plant-based” will save the planet from climate change, …
How we appeased China’s Zero-Covid regime
In the streets of China, people are rising up to reassert their human dignity in the face of the most dehumanising machine of social control in the world today: the Chinese Communist Party’s Zero-Covid terror-state.
For three years, the Chinese …
Museums have always been problematic
In 1906, the New York Times reported on a new exhibition at the monkey house in the Bronx zoo causing a stir among visitors and the press: a human inhabitant. Ota Benga, a 23-year-old Bushman, could be seen in the …
Secularisation is leading Britain astray
In the middle of the night, I am often haunted by the thought of weeds and mould breaking through the parquet floor, of the roof falling in, or the space being populated by pigeons not parishioners. The creeping damp is …
Biden can win on immigration
Inflation, crime, and immigration were the three big issues that were supposed to power a Republican “red wave” in the midterms. That didn’t happen, but these problems remain as real and as urgent as ever. Should they remain unresolved, they …
John Mearsheimer: We’re playing Russian roulette
Until the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Professor John Mearsheimer was mainly known in academic circles as a leading scholar in the “realist” school of foreign policy. That is to say, he takes an unsentimental view of world affairs as being a muscular …
Idleness is the tool of the devil
Idleness is the strangest of Beveridge’s five Giants, an amorphous shapeshifter in comparison with the terrible lumbering colossus Want. It appears last in Beveridge’s sequence, a place usually reserved for the most baleful of adversaries — Death upon its pale …
The forgotten genius of Compton Mackenzie
It was a most fortuitous shipwreck. The S.S. Politician floundered on rocks near the island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides in February 1941, cutting short its journey from Liverpool to the USA. The hull was breached and the ship …
Why do women’s spaces still need defending?
The battle to set up domestic violence refuges for vulnerable women was long and hard. After years of campaigning, feminists finally won it in the early Seventies. A few years later, rape crisis centres followed. Now, more than four decades …
Mermaids’ useful idiots
It’s incredibly easy to criticise Susie Green, the influential and, as of Friday, ex-CEO of Mermaids. But I’d like to say this in her defence: she never lied about who she was.
From her early interviews in 2012, when her …
The birth of the biostate
While each of Beveridge’s “Five Giants” — want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness — remains unslain, one in particular retains the power to cripple entire nations with the stroke of a pen. The past three years have revealed many things, …