During their protected wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s leaders and generals could never define victory. Hamas, by contrast, has a clear understanding of what it looks like. Now that the terror group has demonstrated the failure of Israel’s …
California’s aristocracy of lunatics
The standard TV image of a district attorney — or, prosecuting attorney — in the US is of a tough government lawyer passionate about putting bad guys behind bars. Or maybe the “DA” is a cynical, striving politician willing to …
What Pagans can learn from Christianity
“I do not know much about gods,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages, “but I think that the river is a strong brown god.” Eliot was a devout Anglican, but he lived at a time when classical education and …
America’s pop-culture armageddon
When the great American critic HL Mencken wrote his great essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” in 1917, lamenting the absence of high-level American minds equal to those of Europe, especially in the South, he badly missed the mark. America …
Why I am now a Christian
In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South …
Jerusalem is Israel’s future
For a brief moment, when I was younger, I found myself in Jerusalem. By day I studied the Talmud with my teacher, and by night I wandered its streets.
I would veer into the dark alleyways of the Old City, …
The narcissism of the Never Trumpers
The “fascist coup” narrative, a self-regarding genre of literature popular with the “Never Trump” wing of the centre-right, has enjoyed a bumper crop in 2023. Earlier this year, as the legal challenges against Trump mounted and his popularity paradoxically surged, …
French feminism is being corrupted
Five summers ago, in June 2018, a short clip from Arrêt Sur Images, a French talk show, went viral after a balding, bearded male reprimanded the host for calling him a man. “Je ne suis pas un homme, monsieur,” Arnaud …
Berlusconi blinded the Left
In 1994, when Berlusconi launched his political party Forza Italia, I was 12 years old. At the time, the last thing I was interested in was politics, and yet Il Cavaliere, as he was known, soon became a part of …
In defence of Miss France
It seems that things are going to the dogs across the Channel. It’s not just that the French birth rate, educational standards, and the homegrown car industry are all in decline; nor even that the homicide rate, Americanisms, and fast-food …
Anders Tegnell’s lesson for the Covid Inquiry
After thousands of hours of political inquisition and motivated reasoning, the UK Covid Inquiry has finally allowed mention of the single most important control group in the global lockdown experiment: Sweden. A written submission by former State Epidemiologist of Sweden …
PG Wodehouse scoffed at politics
A certain kind of reader is unlikely to accept any kind of argument for P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike. Set in a private, all-boys school, the novel features a main character, the Mike of the title, with few distinguishing traits beyond …
The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut
“The objective for today is to come back alive.” Yevgeny is a young commando from the “Mad Pack”, a special forces unit that has been fighting in Bakhmut since November. His words are familiar — lacquered with that mix of …
The political power of Deano
“Imagine a village consisting of a few shops, a public-house, and a cluster of dirty little houses, all at the base of what looked at first like an active volcano,” wrote JB Priestley after visiting Shotton Colliery in 1933. The …
How the CCP infiltrated Britain
Nearly four years after reports first emerged from Wuhan of a mystery virus filling hospitals with sick patients, we are told of an “unidentified pneumonia” circulating in China. Unlike last time, however, a healthy number of sceptics have been paying …