Sometimes, when overwhelmed by morbid curiosity, I find myself reading the Wikipedia pages of plane crashes. Thanks to the data recovered from black boxes, especially of cockpit voice recordings, the last moments of a flight can be recreated with vivid …
British Rail must take back control
If Brexit taught us anything, it’s that a sentimental yearning for the past underpins Global Britain’s sense of its own adorable character. And the brilliant thing about Great British Nostalgia is that it belongs to all of us — not …
The cruelty of Biden’s border policy
When it comes to “open borders”, Joe Biden has gone as far as a President can go without actually abolishing them. This June alone, US Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 200,000 people at the southern border, leading Republican …
Bankers have failed us again
A year ago, the governor of the Bank of England tried to downplay growing fears of inflation. Any increase, Andrew Bailey assured us, was understandable given the “bumpy” economic recovery after the pandemic, and he expected “it to come back …
Why the Tavistock won’t talk to me
For my day job, I interview celebrities, and here’s what you do if you want to interview a celebrity: you call up their press officer and pitch the piece you have in mind. The press officer checks if you have …
Will we escape our age of failure?
A little over a year ago, as inflation in the United States spiked to an alarming 5.4%, the nation watched on as President Biden addressed the public’s concerns from a White House lectern. His remarks in response to a reporter’s …
China can’t afford to invade Taiwan
Should Nancy Pelosi have gone to Taiwan? The question might preoccupy America for months ahead of the November mid-term elections. But the truth is her visit did nothing to alter China’s stance towards Taiwan. The Speaker of the House was …
Philip Larkin was a filthy genius
If literary reputations can be likened to a stock market, fluctuating on the tides of taste and time, Philip Larkin crashed in 1991. Until then he had been a strong buy, the unofficial post-war laureate, more synonymous with his time …
The dangers of monkeypox hysteria
They’ve been repeating it ever since the start of the Covid pandemic: “We are entering an ‘age of pandemics’ — this is just the beginning”. And they’ve been true to their word: no sooner had the threat of Covid started …
How Morrissey revived the Union Jack
“Has Morrissey gone too far this time?” It’s a question that could have been asked on any given day in the last 30 years. But this specific occasion is one of the earliest examples of the genre: the NME’s response …
Can depression be cured?
Was depression invented by the American elites in the Nineties? Since Prozac was introduced in 1987, it is true that the “major depressive disorder” — coined in the medical literature of the Eighties as a stop-gap measure — has taken …
The Sandman is coming for you
Letters pages are the secret history of comic books: a contemporary snapshot that’s almost never reprinted. When Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman debuted in November 1988, it immediately attracted ardent fans who wrote poems, floated theories, discussed literary references (Marlowe, Aeschylus, …
America has lost its purpose
With Ayman al-Zawahiri dead, now is time for Washington to abandon the failed counterterrorism policies of the last two decades. Rather than vindicating that approach, as supporters of the Biden administration claim, the al-Qaeda leader’s assassination shows how little it …
How Chinese is Taiwan?
The government in Beijing likes to portray its attitude towards Taiwan as the final resolution of its anti-colonial struggle; the end of its self-described “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers. But the opposite is true. Today, as …
The Lord of the Daily Mail
Lord Northcliffe — founder of the Daily Mail, inventor of tabloid journalism, the most significant media innovator of the early 20th century — ended up in Hell. At least this was where Ezra Pound put him in his Cantos, “broken/ …