If you set off from Kiev and drive east, heading across the flat fields of central Ukraine, after about four hours you’ll come to a city called Poltava. By post-Soviet standards it’s not such a bad place, with a sleepy, …
The Left-wing case against vaccine mandates
The Covid vaccine rollout is seen as one of the success stories of the pandemic. Over 60% of the world’s population has now received one dose of the vaccine. This has coincided with a fall in Covid mortality among the …
Ireland’s elites are rewriting the past
When the Irish government published a video to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, there were a number of glaring absences. The 90-second clip made no mention of its combatants or the bloody crushing of the rebellion …
Inside Germany’s paedophile experiment
Hidden away in a village in northern Germany, Ruby has lived a lonely and tormented existence. Just 25 years old, she has a horrifying secret that, if exposed, could see her ostracised, even killed.
Ruby is a paedophile.
Ruby is …
The cost of sexual liberation
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). Last week, a tall, moustachio’d 25-year-old serial shagger in New York City became Exhibit A for this claim – and also …
Stop saying the UK is transphobic
When it gathered in Strasbourg on Tuesday to condemn “the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people”, the Council of Europe singled out a small collection of the most inhospitable countries. It contained the usual suspects …
The anti-racist who shames the Dutch
When we speak about black history, we tend to conjure up a familiar gallery of intellectuals and freedom fighters. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, CLR James, Frantz Fanon: the legacies of these leaders are celebrated worldwide. Less well …
In defence of Michel Foucault
Blaming French theory for the extremes of the American Left has been a popular line for that last few years. Public intellectual Jordan Peterson has blamed “postmodern neo-Marxism” for the rise of a hypersensitive yet coercive activism, connecting the term …
You can’t cancel poetry
The last copies of England, Poems from a School are piled up on my kitchen table along with heaps of all my other Picador books going back to 1996. Dozens of them — too many to store, but I felt …
Will Australia survive Covid?
It wasn’t so long ago that Australia was lauded globally as a rare success story in the fight against Covid. Its federal and state governments were eager to take credit for this, and Australians were eager to give it to …
How the EU betrayed Ukraine
Cast your mind back to February 2014 — and the dramatic conclusion to the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. Given the choice between alignment with Brussels or Moscow, there was no doubt as to where the crowd’s sympathies lay.
On the …
The importance of Bronze Age Pervert
The radical Right in the United States is discussed far more than it is understood. Anyone to the Right of the Republican Party is generally assumed to be a skinhead, redneck, or Nazi Germany-revivalist. To those who have studied the …
Is it worth vaccinating children?
Like a number of the weird little pressure groups that sprung up over the pandemic, the modus operandi of the Health Advisory & Recovery Team, or HART, is relatively straightforward: cobble together a bunch of people with vaguely academic credentials, …
Why I am an addict
I have never seriously asked myself why I went insane when I was young. It didn’t occur to me to ask because I thought it was fate, and who questions fate? I didn’t like to remember what happened to me; …
Scotland has lost its sense of humour
Growing up in pre-devolution Scotland, I found that deference towards authority was in short supply. The loathing directed at those in power was visceral, the tone caustic and funny. I knew that pursed-lipped, finger-wagging Calvinists were supposed to exist, but …