Right-thinking Americans, until very recently, tended to believe that heated arguments over transgenderism were a peculiarly British phenomenon. While the UK had been inexplicably captured by anti-trans bigots, and the country become a “Terf Island”, Americans had largely accepted that …
Ukraine cannot win this war
Since war broke out in Ukraine, Greek politician and economist Yanis Varoufakis has been accused of being a Putin apologist, a “Westsplainer”, and a conspiracy theorist. But what does he really think about this conflict? Freddie Sayers spoke to him …
Putin is following the Bosnia playbook
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is widely seen as drawing the curtain on the era of Western domination that defined the Nineties. Yet the End of History was not a peaceful time: the conflict now raging in Eastern Europe was …
How philosophy sacrificed the truth
Back when I was a graduate student in the Nineties, first at St Andrews University and then at Leeds, philosophy departments were terrifying places. Seminar rooms often felt like amphitheatres.
Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior …
Why does Boris want to nuke the UK?
Being a wealthy man from a wealthy family, the concept of being forced into debt may be hard for the Chancellor to grasp. But with a looming cost-of-living crisis linked to soaring energy bills threatening to overshadow May’s local elections, …
Novelists are afraid of class
When I teach the writing of fiction, I often start with a topic for discussion. The question is this: if you glimpsed a person for half a second, in passing, what would you know about him or her? If you …
Is Jamie Wallis exploiting his trauma?
The phrase “I’m exhausted” has been nagging at me. You hear it often from woke activists in their twenties or thirties. “I’m a privileged White cis gender woman and *I’m* fucking exhausted by the amount of Trans-hate I encounter daily”, …
France’s demographic civil war
When I was 15, back in the very early Eighties, I spent the best part of a summer is a sleepy corner of “la France profonde”. The family I stayed with were hard-up members of the nobility, trying to earn …
Why we fear dead bodies
It is almost exactly two years ago that we were first asked to stand on our doorsteps to clap for NHS staff. As the weeks went on, the target of our applause was widened: to healthcare workers and emergency services, …
How the Ukraine war saved Orbán
Budapest
In the 12 years of rule that have followed three landslide electoral victories, Viktor Orbán, now Europe’s longest-serving leader, has successfully reshaped Hungary in his own image: too successfully, in the eyes of both the weak and fractured opposition …
Will China rebuild Ukraine?
The readout from the Politburo meeting published by the Xinhua news agency on 28 March 2022 was the shortest in decades: just 100 characters or so. Apart from a statement of condolence for the tragic China Eastern plane crash a …
Why we fell for the con artist
Some people hunger for thrillers. Others feast on true-crime podcasts. My underrated source of tales of mind-boggling malfeasance is the ‘Scams’ section of the Guardian’s money pages, where no gimmicks are required. Here are stories of deception to chill the …
How The Sun won the Falklands War
Pride of place in my breakfast room in my home is a large sculpture that I commissioned to celebrate The Sun’s controversial Gotcha headline which followed the news that we had sunk the Argentine navy’s cruiser the General Belgrano.…
Octopus farms are the future
When the Spanish seafood firm Nueva Pescanova recently announced its plan to open the world’s first octopus farm, many animal rights activists (and the wider public) reacted with horror. Taking intelligent creatures from the wild to exploit them for human …
Does Prince Andrew deserve forgiveness?
The Queen must have known that choosing Prince Andrew to accompany her down the aisle at Westminster Abbey would bring her little but condemnation. “Still a sweaty nonce” was one such response on Twitter, charmingly expressing what many might nonetheless …