The Lebanese border with Israel shimmers with shades of yellow and green. The scene is Levantine pastoral: if Monet were Middle Eastern, this is what he would have painted. It was late October, just weeks after Hamas’s atrocities, when I …
The man who defended Orientalism
“As a young man visiting a Sufi shrine in Algeria,” remarks the writer Robert Irwin parenthetically in an otherwise scholarly essay on medieval Arabic literature, “I once encountered a jinni in the form of a cat.” No further elaboration is …
Welcome to the Taxi Driver election
In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle (“You talkin’ to me?”), a disturbed cabbie who plans to shoot presidential candidate Charles Palantine before chance intervenes to steer him away from irrevocable catastrophe. The film serves …
A&E is now a deathtrap
Last Friday night, a young man walked into my A&E department, mid-hallucination, and started to lash out at a crowd of patients. After being wrestled to the ground by my specialist clinical colleagues and security staff, it didn’t take long …
A&E is now a deathtrap
Last Friday night, a young man walked into my A&E department, mid-hallucination, and started to lash out at a crowd of patients. After being wrestled to the ground by my specialist clinical colleagues and security staff, it didn’t take long …
Venezuela has reached its nadir
Yesterday, those Venezuelans who have not yet fled the country received positive proof that their democracy is dead. Exit polls in Sunday’s national election showed a resounding win for the opposition to socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. But in today’s Venezuela, …
How Biden channelled his MAGA spirit
When he walks out of the White House in six months’ time, Joe Biden will leave behind a complicated legacy. He will go down in history as the man who beat Donald Trump, the president who authorised America’s shambolic withdrawal …
The predictive power of dreams
If you happen to be an occultist, as of course I am, one thing you’ll encounter fairly often is people asking you what their dreams mean. I’ve made a habit of shrugging, saying that I have no idea, and for …
Ohio is the battleground for America’s future
Ohio is a startling place for an Englishman. There are flashes of familiarity, of course: the low grey skies, unfashionable cities and place names: London and Portsmouth, Oxford and even Mansfield. Yet the longer you are there, the more you …
Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady
For all the firsts that Kamala Harris represents as a presidential candidate, there’s one part of her identity that seems to both inflame her opponents and energise her supporters like none other. If elected, Harris will be not just the …
Broken Britain needs a tax hike
The recent British election was, by most accounts, a “service-delivery” vote. Appalled at the state of their public services, Britons opted for new management. And while they need no reminding of how bad things have become, the facts are still …
The case for idleness
Oblomov, I imagine, looks like that stonily stoned chap in František Kupka’s The Yellow Scale. It’s a striking painting, a riot of yellows, with Kupka — for this is a self-portrait — staring defiantly at you, propped up in …
Will Kamala have the last laugh?
One thing you often hear said about Vice President Kamala Harris is that she has a terrible laugh. Indeed, if you believe its critics, you’d think her laugh is a big reason why she was such a poor candidate for …
The grizzly truth about the West
The past month of American politics have been utter chaos. Former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt by a matter of millimetres. Joe Biden went to Las Vegas, reportedly got Covid, and disappeared completely from public view. A day …
Labour’s war on free speech
An unspoken maxim looms over the free speech crisis in our universities: it is only ever denied by those whose views fall in line with the current orthodoxy. For all its faults, and there were many, Britain’s previous government recognised …