For a spy, a job requiring furtive anonymity, James Bond always did have an unusual side-line in mass homicide. Apart from The Man with the Golden Gun, where Bond dispatches only the eponymous Scaramanga, his body count almost always hits …
War didn’t destroy Russian football – Russia did
After Zenit St Petersburg won the Uefa Cup in 2008, beating Rangers in Manchester, the team’s coach Dick Advocaat strode proudly into the press-conference room, only for his phone to start ringing. He looked at the screen, seemingly about to …
What is Judith Butler afraid of?
Worried about doctors giving fertility-destroying drugs to physically healthy teens? Perturbed by the placing of rapist males alongside female prisoners, or the allowing of any male into a woman’s changing room on his say-so? Annoyed by the sight of hulking …
The truth about Jews for Palestine
At London’s weekly anti-Israel protests each Saturday, one can often find a small group of strictly Orthodox Jewish men — always men or boys, never women. Generally no more than a dozen, they hold signs with wording such as “Judaism: …
The most important immigration story of all
“Barbarians at the gates.” That is the phrase has become inextricably associated with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, a description and an explanation. It conjures up an image something like Thomas Cole’s “Destruction” painting from his Course of …
Roberto Unger: Brazil’s philosopher king
In the depths of the Sixties, Charles de Gaulle, perhaps apocryphally, was quoted as stating that “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be”. This backhanded compliment from the then French president was supposed to illustrate the …
The ugly return of homophobia
As a child of the Eighties and Nineties, I remember well that homosexuals were fair game in the mainstream media. One columnist in The Star railed against “Wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers, lezzies — the perverts whose moral sin is …
How RFK could smash the two-party system
The surrender of Nikki Haley — long drawn-out but long expected — has set both of America’s major parties on the same course: a limp coronation, conducted through process of elimination. Donald Trump’s path is clear, competitors fallen away, while …
Britain’s farmers need to revolt
In The Shepherd’s Life, his memoir about following the family tradition of Cumbrian hill farming, James Rebanks highlights the obsession of “modern industrial communities” with the importance of “going somewhere”. “The implication,” he observes, “is an idea I have come …
Is black trauma porn over?
Monk Ellison, a struggling black college professor, writes My Pafology as a prank: the stereotype-laden novel is a clapback at the publishers who equate “Black stories” with tropes of poverty, brutality, and violence.
But the joke, as it turns out, …
The university monopoly must be broken
America has forgotten the point of educationA few months after the fact, the removal of Claudine Gay from the Harvard presidency increasingly looks like a watershed moment. Shortly after Gay’s ousting, the New York Times published a long piece titled …
Why we need genocide cinema
“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 …