Theatre and politics have a long history in Taiwan. During the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945), lookouts were posted outside Taiwanese opera performances to warn of approaching police patrols. These raids were part of a Japanisation policy known as kominka, designed …
In defence of showing Nazi art
Slightly bedraggled, a Royal British Legion poppy wreath hangs on the railings outside Museum Arnhem. In the pretty sculpture garden that overlooks the Rhine as it flows into the Netherlands from Germany stands a monument to the soldiers of the …
This year, embrace chaos
Here’s a riddle: Since we live in an uncertain and unpredictable world, and humans have evolved to survive and thrive in it, why do we crave certainty? Wouldn’t we be more successful as a species if our default mode were …
The world should fear 2024
When asked in 2020 to envisage the world after Covid, Michel Houellebecq proclaimed, accurately enough, that “it will be the same, just a bit worse”. As this year slams to a bloody close, it does not take a soothsayer to …
33 concepts to survive the year
As a writer working on a catalogue of humanity’s wisest ideas, I spend my days searching for concepts by which to better understand the world. I find such ideas everywhere and everywhen, from Ancient Greece to Silicon Valley, and periodically …
What is the point of Nato?
It was early September in 1971. My mother had taken me in a taxi to a boutique hotel in a leafy northern Athenian suburb to visit my favourite uncle, her beloved brother. Before we got out the car, she put …
Gen Z’s radical race politics
It’s a dreary day in a provincial English town. A tracksuit-wearing teenage boy affecting an exaggerated version of the “Jafaican”, which has replaced Cockney as the capital’s working-class dialect, asks a similarly dressed individual: “What nationality is the best to …
The year Toryism failed Britain
In early 1960, fresh from another Conservative victory and almost a decade of Tory rule, T.E. Utley wondered what it all was for. “The Tories have shown they can win General Elections,” he wrote. “[But] have they still got a …
Jacques Delors destroyed the European Left
There’s a story European progressives like to tell themselves: that, after the horrors of the Second World War, their governments struck a quasi-utopian compromise between capitalism and socialism — only for it to be corrupted by the import of the …
Is modern medicine making us sick?
Who the hell is Ivan Illich? A philosopher and medieval scholar born in Vienna in 1926, a Catholic priest whose service started out in New York’s toughest neighbourhoods. An educator and a radical. An extreme polyglot, speaker of Italian, Spanish, …
The Oxford kids are alright
Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and …
The Luton estate that made Andrew Tate
Two years before the Tates moved to Marsh Farm, there was a riot — followed by a rave. It was July 1995: a summer of drought, Tory civil war, and three nights of anarchy on an estate in Luton. After …
How the Nineties are haunting millennials
There’s a scene in the new apocalypse thriller Leave the World Behind in which a 27-year-old character describes the show Friends as “almost nostalgic for a time that never existed”. Her lip curls with contempt as she says it, and …
What snobs get wrong about Venice
Venice has a cruel habit of defeating her admirers. Even her most confident suitors, who arrive via water taxi intent on enjoying all her charms and treasures, return home heavy with second-rate vongole and the humiliation of that unseen Titian. …
The betrayal of white working-class men
Cards on the table: I’m a rampant opponent of white, bourgeois, male privilege. Events such as the Coronation, or another Biden-Trump stand-off, pull this lunacy into sharp focus. Yes, these ludicrous and deranged media-driven circuses may have little to do …