“There are too many bloomin’ blacks,” the florist, perched behind her stall on Rochdale’s high street, says without a hint of shame. Her friend interjects: “They sit around here drinking and doing drugs… There are no police about. We need …
The growing RFK Jr coalition
The Camelot myth haunts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He was brought up to believe that he would be the one to pick up the mantle left by Arthur, John F. Kennedy. Even as a precocious 20-year-old — having been hooked …
The barbarians are laughing at us
There are many contenders to be the world’s predominant civilisation in the remainder of the 21st century. In Moscow in March, a group of top clergy and pious entrepreneurs from the Kremlin’s inner circle lauded their country’s role as creators …
The complicated truth about being stalked
The teeth were the detail that stuck with me. A friend had gone to the sentencing of the woman who stalked me — I can’t really call her “my stalker”, because she turned out to have many victims and I …
Will the English ever revolt?
In The Return of the Native, Hardy observes of the mummers’ St George play that the proof it is a genuine folk tradition lies in the sullen joylessness with which it is carried out, “which sets one wondering why …
Kandinsky was betrayed by Left and Right
Expressionism, Nikolaus Pevsner snootily pronounced, was “the art of the ugly, an heroic stylisation of the hideous”. Wassily Kandinsky, its most exemplary adherent, was taxed with the charge of producing “art for art’s sake”. There is, admittedly, some truth to …
Why London is beating America’s cities
As America’s cities continue to decline, as even ardent boosters warn of “an urban doom loop”, how does London remain a global powerhouse? The straightforward answer is that it retains an old advantage: its origins as a former imperial capital.…
The scandals haunting Pope Francis
The cardinals are already meeting to discuss who should be the next pope. Some of the liberal ones, who feel safe because they’re in favour with the ailing Pope Francis, can be seen comparing notes in a bar near the …
Karl Polanyi’s failed revolution
Few 20th-century thinkers have had such a lasting and profound influence as Karl Polanyi. “Some books refuse to go away — they get shot out of the water but surface again and remain afloat,” Charles Kindleberger, the economic historian, remarked …
Columbia’s parody of radical activism
This week, amid widespread US campus protests against the war in Gaza, a video emerged of a confrontation on the Columbia quad. A slender young black man in a keffiyeh and a pair of florid pink Crocs paces through the …
Would Kant really support BLM?
Poor old Immanuel Kant, scourge of many an undergraduate essay crisis, whose 300th birthday fell this week. Was ever any other major intellectual figure put through so much painful contemporary “rethinking”?
According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, …
How civil servants killed the spy
The police were searching the home of a Libyan terror suspect, Abu Anas al-Liby, in Manchester when they came across an al-Qaeda handbook. The year was 2000, and the handbook — later dubbed the “Manchester Manual” — laid out the …
Dungeness is England’s last hope
I spent St George’s Day watching Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. The film is an apocalypse of sorts. It reveals what is to come. More importantly, it reveals what is already here. An opening monologue tries to pin down …
Why the West will refuse to fight
Citizens won’t sacrifice themselvesCitiznsWestern politics is defined by a conflict that is always awkward and sometimes cringe. On the one hand, our leaders are full of loud-mouthed passion, warning that the days of peace are over and that we now …
How Parklife skewered the Nineties
If Damon Albarn was telling the truth, and Saturday’s Coachella performance was Blur’s “last gig”, it was a miserable swansong. A field of influencers (some of whom appeared to not know who Blur are) crowded into the most corporatised festival …