In the West Alexander Solzhenitsyn is accorded the status of a secular saint. In 1970 the Nobel committee lauded the “ethical force” of his writings as they awarded him literature’s greatest prize. Soon after, the publication of a French edition …
Populists are losing this war
Back in February, we had a pretty good idea what was going on. Video and satellite imagery had shown the steady increase and massing of Russian troops, tanks, and military supplies around Ukraine’s borders. Vladimir Putin had started wars before …
The dark heart of Russia
Why did Smerdyakov kill cats? Just because. The lackey is one of the most washed-out faces in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He is inconspicuous, elusive, slippery, always hiding, always doing things on the sly. And yet behind this mask of …
How magicians are fighting Putin
Last Wednesday at 3.33am, Moscow time, as the new moon waxed in the sky, the resistance to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine took the form of a mass binding ritual: a spell to frustrate and confound the Russian leader, to be …
South Korea didn’t have an incel election
Have incels been galvanised into political action? Will misogyny become central to democratic elections? These questions were being batted about last week as South Korea’s first “incel election” ended with Yoon Suk-yeol, the “incel candidate” from the conservative People Power …
Putin can’t win a Cold War
When Harry S. Truman rose to his feet before a Joint Session of Congress to deliver the speech that won the Cold War, exactly 75 years ago today, some of his listeners might have been forgiven for wondering what on …
The West must make Putin pay
Only two weeks into Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and we are already at the relentless killing of civilians stage. So far, 34 hospitals, 202 schools, and more than 1,500 residential buildings have been destroyed. Around two million people have …
Why London loved Roman Abramovich
For two decades Roman Abramovich embodied the ambiguity and vulgarity of London’s ties with the Russian élite. In a sense, he was Vladmir Putin’s unofficial, silent, constant ambassador to the city. The one Russian other than the President that anybody …
The failure of Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac, who would have been 100 tomorrow, was the sort of male literary celebrity America doesn’t produce anymore. Shy and sensitive, ambitious to the point of megalomania (he often likened himself to Melville and Shakespeare), and an outrageous drunk, …
How Buffy revamped teen sex
American teenagers were forced to confront a very particular existential terror in 1997. It wasn’t your usual horror film, even though it did star Freddie Prinze, Jr. In Too Soon for Jeff he plays a high school senior who gets …
Putin is perverting Jewish history
I never met my wife’s grandmother, Luba, but she is apparently her double. Born just outside Lviv into a wealthy family, she was 18 when the Nazis invaded in 1941. Within months, both of Luba’s parents had been rounded up …
America has won Europe’s war
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western leaders have gone out of their way to condemn Putin and express their solidarity with the victims of the conflict. And yet, one cannot help but suspect that behind closed doors they are raising …
The taboo trans question
“Sexuality is who you go to bed with, gender is who you go to bed as.” Learn it, remember it, drill it into your brain: this is one of the most important precepts of gender identity activism, and one of …
How Russia’s elite bought Biarritz
“Slava Ukraina”. Glory to Ukraine. So reads an anti-war graffito sprayed on a wall. But not any old wall. It daubs the gateway of Villa Suzanna, avenue des Dunes, outside Biarritz. An extravagant 1927 Art Deco residence facing the Atlantic …
Is this Ukraine’s last chance for peace?
Nearly two weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, observing from a distance, it still feels as if there are two different wars, which barely overlap, taking place.
The first is the war on social media: in this war, a combination …