“I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” said Jonathan Glazer about his film, The Zone of Interest, which offers a chillingly clinical, fly-on-the-wall view of the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family as they go about their …
Rape trials are broken. Are juries to blame?
When the man prosecuted for Miss M’s rape was finally brought to trial in 2015, she was determined to face him. “I thought: ‘Why should I have to hide away?’” So, she refused a screen. She also wanted to sit …
Rape trials are broken. Are juries to blame?
When the man charged with Miss M’s rape was finally brought to trial in 2015, she was determined to face him. “I thought: ‘Why should I have to hide away?’” So, she refused a screen. She also wanted to sit …
Rape trials are broken. Are juries to blame?
When the man charged with Miss M’s rape was finally brought to trial in 2015, she was determined to face him. “I thought: ‘Why should I have to hide away?’” So, she refused a screen. She also wanted to sit …
How lads’ mags went soft
“We hired a helicopter, we got hold of a sniper rifle, we shot radioactive wolves…” Writers at loaded magazine used to pride themselves on their wild gonzo journalism and madcap antics. It was, as founding editor James Brown described it, …
Britain is addicted to poverty porn
What’s your deprivation fetish? Does the sight of a single mother pushing a pram with one hand while horsing down a Greggs sausage roll get you going? Perhaps the spectacle of a homeless person punting knocked-off earbuds on a street …
Has HRT propaganda misled women?
The menopause is having a moment. Once only spoken of rarely, and with embarrassment, it is now sensationalised in the media. This has been accompanied by a massive increase in prescriptions for Hormone Replacement Therapy, which have more than doubled …
Welcome to the stagnation nation
Fifteen years after the great financial crisis blew Britain’s economic settlement apart, we’re still scrabbling around for a replacement. The staggering scale of our problems was revealed yesterday in Jeremy Hunt’s thoroughly depressing budget statement. Despite heavy doses of magical …
The hypocrisy of the BBC’s misinformation war
In 1999, Glenn Hoddle, the then England football manager, told The Times’s Matt Dickinson that he thought people with disabilities had done bad things in a previous life. Hoddle had spoken before about his spiritual beliefs, and it was a …
Make Britain Victorian again
In 1946, lorries and diggers rumbled into the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse, then one of England’s grandest mansions. Its manicured lawns, gardens, and parkland stood on a coal seam that neared the surface, and the Labour Party’s Minister for Fuel …
Is Putin opening a second front in Europe?
Could another war be beginning in Europe? The past few weeks in Transnistria are worrying, not least because they are so familiar. The separatist government there is agitating against Moldova, accusing it of destroying the economy, and violating Transnistrian human …
Joe Biden has broken the Union
As he prepares to deliver the final State of the Union speech of his first presidency, Joe Biden must know it might possibly be the last he ever gives. The President’s approval ratings are at a historic low, and they …
The narcissism of wedding photographers
Photographers have long had an uneasy relationship with the sacred. There is the age-old anxiety that a photograph can steal a soul. And last week, more than 900 wedding photographers signed a petition complaining that “problematic vicars” can be “rude, …
How the miners created a new working class
In 1984 I was lending a hand to some miners who were picketing a power station when a police officer kicked me rather viciously in the leg. I suppose he was only doing his job. A few days later I …
The EU’s American Queen
Ask most Europeans what they think about the EU, and they’ll tell you it’s relentlessly dull. It’s all bureaucrats in statement eyewear overseeing arcane regulations about the curvature of cucumbers; impenetrable corridors in the staid outposts of Luxembourg and Strasbourg; …