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, …
The Tories are fleeing a sinking ship
When necrosis sets in, the living body starts to die. The infected parts lose their integrity, become sore and whither. It starts to spread, with further parts dropping off. If untreated, it is often fatal.
It’s hard to shake the …
Can Wales harness football nationalism?
I watched Wales play the USA in a packed pub in Cardiff last Monday. When the anthem began, everyone stood up and belted it out as loud as they could. No one was self-conscious; no one was embarrassed. Unlike in …
The betrayal of Britain’s seaside towns
It was the first night of Blackpool’s Illuminations, when seven miles of promenade are transformed into a parade of glitter set against the ink-black Irish Sea. The traffic had poured in from across Lancashire to crawl, bumper to bumper, beneath …
Will China’s anti-lockdown protestors succeed?
Less than six weeks after Xi Jinping doubled down on his Zero Covid strategy, a swelling sea of discontent is finally breaking on its rocks. Outside the dining halls of two of the country’s most prestigious campuses, Peking University and …
Glenn Youngkin is the Republican future
Clad in his signature red vest, 6’7” Glenn Youngkin cuts an inoffensive figure. I’ve heard the college-basketball-player-turned-Virginia-governor described as “a stretched-out Brett Kavanaugh”; both men have prep-school roots and friendly-jock demeanours. It’s an aesthetic that shouldn’t be underestimated in explaining …
The Tory immigration failure
The Conservatives have lost control of immigration. Over the past year, according to data released last week, net migration into Britain has soared to 504,000, the highest on record. This means half a million more people are coming into Britain …
Humanism is a heresy
“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.”
This observation on the pretensions of humanity — cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality — was made in the Forties, midway between our own time and the …
How Britain became an American colony
It is difficult to imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoying the World Cup. As the champion of the Transcendentalist movement, the sage of Concord was the embodiment of 19th-century high-mindedness, far more comfortable discussing the beauties of nature and the oneness …
In defence of Harry Kane
Poor Harry Kane, roundly mocked for almost-but-not-quite wearing his One Love rainbow armband in support of lesbian, gay and trans people during England’s first game in Qatar on Monday. Attacked on the one hand by various curmudgeons for “self-serving virtue …