This is something special, obviously. Consider, for a moment, the author’s credentials. Pelé knows a lot about playing football, as does Floyd Mayweather about boxing, but do they have the chops to transfer their instinctive and acquired expertise into the …
When will the Grenfell betrayal end?
At 12.54am on the 14 June 2017, a small fire started in a fridge on the fourth floor of a west London tower block. It quickly spread from the window of the kitchen in which it started, and ignited the …
Can China let go of Zero Covid?
The 11th of the 11th is known as “Singles’ Day” in China. Originally an ironic student celebration of singledom (the digits 1111 resemble sticks, a slang term for bachelors), it has matured into a festival of e-commerce. Online sales are …
How Miami turned red
For the first time since 2002, Miami-Dade County, 70% Hispanic and once considered a Democratic stronghold, went for the Republicans. In a year when Republicans underperformed across most of the country, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won his reelection bid in …
The return of class war
There was a story the Left used to tell in the early 2010s that everyone took for granted. The era, they said, of big labour strikes was over. The Soviet Union had fallen, Thatcher had crushed the miners, the biggest …
Viktor Orbán’s Machiavellian genius
I will always remember the thrill I felt when I read that a group of Hungarian university students and young intellectuals had established an “illegal political organisation” on 8 April 1988. The Federation of Young Democrats (Fidesz) was a courageous, …
The truth about eco-fascism
By now, you have probably heard about the rising threat of “eco-fascism”. If you haven’t, you soon will, because the number of people warning about this new danger to civilisation seems to be growing exponentially. In publications Right and Left …
The World Cup has never been beautiful
James Maddison in. Ben White and Marcus Rashford restored. Kalvin Phillips and Kyle Walker risked despite injury. As the England squad was announced yesterday, the familiar excitement began to kindle. Even if the reported viewing figure for the 2018 final …
Why South Africa is siding with Russia
It was a Russian oligarch’s superyacht scudding towards Cape Town that brought global attention to South Africa’s refusal to condemn Russian aggression. A couple of weeks ago, both Cape Town’s Mayor and the Premier of the Western Cape — members …
American democracy isn’t dead
Democracy didn’t die. Of course it didn’t. The existential angst of the past few weeks seems quaint in retrospect. Was the panic real or was it more a matter of romanticism run amok — of wanting to feel like a …
The real NHS maternity scandal
Watching me treat a pregnant patient with a minor injury in A&E, one of my medical students asked me for some careers advice. She was most interested in obstetrics, she told me, but was worried about the recent controversies that …
John Milton’s free speech crusade
For John Milton, death was not the end of his troubles. He spent his final years blind and disgraced, in continual fear of execution by the state. As a fervent republican who had written tracts defending regicide, the restoration of …
The Democrats’ false victory
For all their cautious optimism yesterday, a mild midterms victory may prove the last thing the Democrats need. If they had performed as predicted, the Democrats and their media adjuncts would now be busily dissecting their defeat. But what has …
Was Kurt Vonnegut a nice man?
In 1999, the director Baz Luhrmann had a novelty hit with “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, a spoken-word litany of whimsical advice for young people: enjoy your youth, keep your old love letters, floss, and so on. The text derived …
A sex war is coming
“Gas prices? They’ll go down. But sure, tell me more about how you want the government to tell me what to do with my body.” So writes one liberal feminist on Twitter, following it up with: “Republicans suck. I don’t …