Consider the last time you fell out with someone: your partner, a friend, or your boss, for instance. Perhaps you argued about a previous event: about who said what to whom, what exactly happened, and whose fault it was. Did …
My apology to Salman Rushdie
Sometime in the early Nineties, I found myself standing next to Salman Rushdie at a urinal. The Groucho, it must have been. We looked away from each other with more than the usual degree of concentration. I didn’t like his …
Does Manchester need the Tories?
“It’s just not something I talk about to people. It’s almost a heresy not to read The Guardian here.” Diane lives in Didsbury, one of Manchester’s most affluent suburbs. But even here, among the neatly pruned hedges, she feels isolated …
Capitalism killed the American West
I spent a long time being told to read Bernard DeVoto before I got around to it. People who loved him often seemed surprised I hadn’t already read his histories. There’s a very specific type of person who tends to …
Histoire de ma lâcheté
Depuis que je suis enfant, j’ai peur d’eux. J’avais cinq ans et ils avaient le visage des ayatollahs iraniens. J’avais quinze ans et ils sévissaient dans l’Algérie voisine. Je me souviens, à la télévision, de leurs visages mangés par des …
The Tory circus must not go on
Belfast
Just as Tolstoy observed that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, so it is with dysfunctional governments. Each is dysfunctional in its own way, though there are certain family resemblances between them — a certain shared …
Virgins get more done
Feminist heroine, Catholic martyr, patron saint of France, LGBTQ icon. During the nearly six centuries since she was burned at the stake, Joan of Arc has been many things to many people. Today is no exception: she’s causing a furore …
The creative power of blackout Britain
Women shiver at their desks, wrapped in quilts. A pub is lit, just about, by candles — not because it’s Valentine’s night, but because the lights don’t work. Actors at London’s Royal Court Theatre, decide that the show must go …
The progressive puritans will fail
Fun has always carried a little bit of danger in its back pocket: there’s something radical, even anarchical, about having too much of it. “We were just having some fun” could be the thing you say to the neighbours who’ve …
Conservatives need some Swedish love
Sweden has long presented a puzzle to foreign observers. The Left tends to extoll the perceived virtues of social solidarity, collectivist values, and the “cradle-to-grave” welfare state. The Right, on the other hand, while largely agreeing with the basic welfare …
America will always fear Caesar
In my own unreliable cultural memory, the age of Hamilton enthusiasm in American life belongs emphatically to Barack Obama’s presidency in its optimistic phase — to the last period of unabashed liberal patriotism and confidence.
In reality, though, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s …
Keir Starmer’s squandered chance
It was supposed to be Keir Starmer’s big gambit: an opportunity to make the political weather, put forward an election-winning economic policy, and slap down “big beast” internal critics. Instead, his long-awaited plan for dealing with the cost-of-living crisis is …
The infidels will not be silenced
Thirty-three years ago, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was a book burner. The year was 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I was seduced by the rising tide of Islamism. I greeted the …
Civil disobedience is coming
Britain may be recovering from a heatwave, but its politicians are already fearful that winter is coming. Only now, more than 170 days since the war broke out, are policymakers realising the potentially catastrophic implications of their gung-ho approach towards …
Jerry Sadowitz is too good to cancel
“Jerry Sadowitz is a nasty piece of work. His venomous tirade is relentless, consisting of unabashed racism, homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, xenophobia, and every other kind of prejudice known to humankind. If it exists, he hates it. The man is a …