The Cleveland child abuse scandal did not actually involve that much child abuse. Or so the story goes. In 1987, in the north-east of England, 121 children were removed from their homes and placed in care after medics and social …
Reverend Pilavachi’s irresistible charisma
At the height of their fame, Rev Canon Pilavachi’s Soul Survivor festivals in Somerset drew 30,000 worshippers every summer. As a once-fervent young Baptist who grew up around Britain’s often-overlooked Charismatic Christian movement, I was one of them. The camps …
How the Democrats betrayed the Jews
I grew up in a tiny Jewish enclave on Chicago’s South Side. When I first saw New York, in the Sixties, I was awed as by no subsequent marvel of nature: stretching north from Columbus Circle, up the West Side, …
Bobby Charlton was English football
I cannot remember when I first heard about England winning the World Cup in July 1966, or the Munich air disaster in February 1958. But I knew through my Seventies childhood that the triumph and the earlier tragedy were foundational …
Violence stalks Gaza through history
Where does the story of Gaza begin? In this region, history — or histories, given that here there is no such thing as a singular history — is serially and violently contested. “Anyone who tells a story knows that most …
The millennials behind France’s far-Right youthquake
Marion Maréchal is 33 and Jordan Bardella, as of last month, is 28. These two young people — well-dressed, good-looking, in many ways archetypal millennials — are the leaders of the two main far-Right parties in France: Bardella of Rassemblement …
Jonathan Sumption on Gaza, lockdown and the ECHR
Jonathan Sumption is a difficult man to define: revered historian, esteemed lawyer and one of Britain’s greatest public intellectuals. He came to greatest popular prominence during the Covid pandemic as one of the most lucid opponents of the Government’s lockdown …
Israel is no longer Britain’s war
In the wake of Hamas’s bloody and murderous raid into Israel, as Israeli jets pulverise the Gaza Strip in advance of its looming punitive expedition, the Western discourse surrounding the century-old conflict feels both novel and wearily familiar. Familiar in …
Israel is trapped by Western guilt
“Great wars in history eventually became great wars about history,” wrote the Israeli-American historian Michael Oren in 1999. It’s hard to think of a country for which this is more obviously true than Israel, though Ireland, Ukraine or even today’s …
Terror is exposing France’s failed state
It is characteristic of France’s self-absorption that what started as a national sense of outrage at the latest Islamist killing on our soil soon evolved into a bitter scuffle between present and past tough-talking Home Secretaries. Last Friday, Dominique Bernard, …
What Madonna can teach Taylor Swift
There’s a moment in Taylor Swift’s music video for “Look What You Made Me Do” in which all the ghosts of her past stand in a line as though they’re about to be executed by firing squad — only instead, …
The failed lessons of Libya
On 11 September, massive floods created by Storm Daniel ruptured two dams built in the Seventies to protect Derna in eastern Libya, exposing its denizens to unstoppable torrents of water. The smell of rotting bodies and sewage seeping from busted …
Inside Britain’s new trans clinics
Since its closure was announced last July, Gids — the Gender Identity Development Service at the world-renowned Tavistock and Portman Trust — has become synonymous with mismanagement and medical scandal.
It was supposed to be a haven for young people …
Republican hawks now want a war with Iran
Over the past decade, Republican hawks have looked on in horror as their party drifted away from the interventionist foreign policy of the Cold War years and the War on Terror. Last Friday, in a conference hall tucked inside the …
JG Ballard was not a prophet
J.G. Ballard’s posthumous status verges on the mythological: he’s a prophet, a visionary, who set on paper arcane and obscene predictions that have come unerringly true. Everywhere we look, we discover that we’re now living in Ballard’s world. As I …