The future of the Christian religion in England is not to be found in the southern shires or the former mill towns of the North. Out there, the voice and tenor of the Bible is a thinning force, a hoarse …
Why we shouldn’t eat lamb
I buried Robin Hood in his favourite place, the little paddock beside the Dulas. Across the brook, a blackbird sang requiem. Maid Marian was there, of course. She was, after all, his number-one wife. I shed no tears; I’d done …
JK Rowling and the lunch of secrets
It may have come to your attention over the last few days that there was a lunch. The events of that afternoon have already been covered in detail, and the joyous photographic record shared widely, so I will instead focus …
The future is Marine Le Pen
Whatever happens in the second round of the French election, Marine Le Pen will be able to claim victory. If the polls are correct, as they were in round one, she will receive around 46% of the vote. But while …
The rise of the liberal groomer
Does progress have to mean the sexual liberation of children? Michel Foucault thought so, as did many of the now high-ranking Labour Party members who once supported the Paedophile Information Exchange. Sexual interest in children is hardly unique to the …
Is Obama sabotaging Biden?
Barack Obama has always been good at bringing Americans together, making us feel like we’re on the right track. So his involvement in a new Netflix nature documentary series feels decidedly on-brand: not only does the series celebrate something we …
The PsyOps war comes to Ukraine
Zakarpattia, Ukraine
Far from the war, in Ukraine’s sleepy, western city of Uzhhorod, whose crumbling pastel-coloured Habsburg-era buildings straddle the river Uzh, government officials are concerned about the growing tension with Hungary. Despite Hungary’s voting in favour of EU sanctions …
The only way Boris can survive Partygate
There’s nothing like a political crisis — especially if you’re in Number 10. But when the news broke yesterday that Boris Johnson, Carrie Johnson and Rishi Sunak had all been issued with Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs), one suspects the mood …
America has captured France
France is no longer the country of Notre-Dame, nor the country of De Gaulle, where the Concorde was built and a broad middle-class prospered. To understand this moment of profound transition, you have to look past the results of last …
Why Hispanics gave up on the Left
For just over a month, America’s first Spanish-language conservative radio station has been trying to win over the country’s most-talked about political demographic: increasingly right-leaning Hispanics. It couldn’t have launched at a better time.
When asked about the inspiration behind …
How did Elena Ferrante get away with it?
One might, with a little effort, recall a literary scandal of late 2016. James Wood, a few years earlier, had written a rave review of My Brilliant Friend, the first Neapolitan novel to be published in English. “Elena Ferrante, …
Macron rules over a political desert
Watching Emmanuel Macron hard on the campaign trail in the Northern France rust belt yesterday morning, mere hours after he’d scored a surprisingly decisive top place in the first round of the French presidential election, a question sprang to mind. …
Five rules for fighting transactivism
It will not have escaped the eagle-eyed that something about modern transactivism seems to make otherwise Gillick-competent adults veer towards the infantile. From the EHRC’s recent clarification about the legality of single-sex spaces under the terms of the Equality Act, …
Texas is the future
In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where …
Sweden’s inconvenient Covid victory
When, the summer before last, the results of the first Covid wave began to be tallied in the media, there were different ways of measuring the devastation. One way of looking at the pandemic was to focus on how many …