Before the coronation muted him, Charles, then Prince of Wales, launched several memorable broadsides against modern architects and planners. Addressing the annual dinner of the Corporation of London’s Planning and Communications Committee at the Mansion House in December 1987, he …
The Hollywood liberals who rule America
My father told me that those who work in Hollywood are America’s aristocrats. Everyone else is a civilian. It was a concept that said less about how the world perceived my father than about how he perceived himself. After all, …
Stop flaunting your trauma
With the Edinburgh Fringe well and truly over, countless performers will be counting up how many coveted four- or five-star reviews they garnered. Most, though, won’t have even landed one. I’ve been there and let me tell you, it’s hard …
How Kamala avoided the Clinton trap
Does America care that it is once again on the cusp of voting for its first female president? So confident was Hillary Clinton at the DNC in 2016 that she appeared triumphantly on screen to images of breaking glass. She …
After Chicago, Kamala Harris is now exposed
Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech was so well-written and so well-delivered that it could have won her the Presidency all by itself — if the election were held today. But there are still more than 70 days left until voting closes, …
The sisterhood is a feminist lie
What is the collective noun for female Labour MPs? The question arose anew last week as 13 politicians glammed up for a Vogue article and accompanying photo shoot.
Written in the hagiographic style beloved of women’s glossies, the piece presents …
Eduard Limonov and the death of a bohemian contrarian
A knife-wielding poet, a lover of beautiful women, a political troublemaker, a novelist who predicted his own immortality — Eduard Limonov has long been cast in many roles. To his roster, he can now add the honour of being played …
The ugly conversion of Candace Owens
When Lord Farmer took to X to “put my own views on antisemitism and Israel’s current military campaign on public record” after “public comments from a high-profile member of my family”, I felt the same thrill as if I’d discovered …
We need to talk about violent speech
As the British justice system continues to lock up overzealous keyboard warriors linked to the riots, and as free speech “warriors” respond with dystopian grumblings about an Orwellian police state, we find ourselves in a strange situation. Put to one …
The Conservative Party needs a hero
When the six MPs vying to be Conservative leader were recently asked some quick-fire questions by party HQ, their interrogation was mostly limited to the light-hearted: “What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?” But …
Will we survive the sex war?
Throughout history, the happy convergence of men and women — and their by-product, children — has driven human civilisation. No less than Freud saw this need for family as intrinsic: “Eros and Ananke [love and necessity],” he writes in Civilisation …
Why Ukraine is being blamed for Nord Stream
To understand the truth about the Nord Stream pipeline, one needs to master a certain form of “Kremlinology”. Everything about it is designed to obfuscate, every strand shrouded in prevarication and deceit.
From the start, the investigation was a textbook …
Great power politics is an illusion
Everyone of a certain age who passed through British secondary education will have spent a few months learning about the League of Nations, which, to my knowledge, is not a subject of academic study anywhere else. Created by the Treaty …
The truth about extremist misogyny
“Women have no idea how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). It’s perhaps true that women, at least those who spend time online, have more of an idea than we used to. You don’t …
The ghosts of the Munich air disaster
The book opens with a haunting scene. As the Manchester United team file out onto the pitch, we find that they are not in their usual red strip. “They came out of the tunnel like a ghost train, all in …