“A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of …
The eviction of England’s rural workers
One wouldn’t expect to see a six-metre-tall witch in a quaint South Oxfordshire village. Nor to watch her be carried through the lanes, draped in branches and vines, to be ceremonially burned. This was not a celebration, but a protest …
Australian drug kings have gone global
It wasn’t the flap of a butterfly’s wing that triggered a transformation in transnational crime, but the steady blows of a metal bollard pulverising the head of a bikie gang member. Anthony Zervas was murdered at Sydney Airport in 2009, …
Will the Windsor Framework get Brexit done?
Could something positive have finally happened in Northern Ireland’s never-ending Brexit story? After years of diplomatic failure, yesterday a package of measures was unveiled by Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen which might actually resolve the border dilemma. The …
Questions the Covid Inquiry must ask
Do public inquiries ever deliver public satisfaction? Often, they provide more questions than answers. And rarely in a timely fashion. It took Chilcot seven years to produce his report into the Iraq war, after two previous whitewashes, and the Grenfell …
The empty words of Ron DeSantis
Ron DeSantis is inching closer to announcing his 2024 presidential bid, and is partaking in a hallowed American political tradition: the release of the campaign book. This subgenre is less about presenting an agenda than about giving voters a general …
Coercive men hide in plain sight
“He would wait until I was relaxed, and then start doing things like making me take off his boots and telling me how ugly I was,” Cheryl tells me. Six months ago, she escaped an abusive man who routinely humiliated …
Who will stand against Progress?
These days he would be mobbed as an “eco-fascist”, but Edward Goldsmith would probably have been better described as a traditionalist. The founder of The Ecologist magazine, where he employed me as a naive young writer in the late Nineties, …
How the Tories lost their way
“Is conservatism prepared to supply, in the new era we are entering, the main creative and moulding influence in the national life?” It is a question that the modern Conservative Party — abandoned by the young, flatlining in the polls, …
Ultra-patriots are Putin’s greatest threat
The biggest threat facing Putin today is not from Western-sympathising, anti-war liberals, but Right-wing “ultra-patriots” frustrated by the Russian army’s failures in Ukraine. Earlier this month, the Russian MP Oleg Matveychev warned of a potential coup: “The situation is not …
Why the North needs its Angel
Just as Brooklyn is to Manhattan and Pest is to Buda, the town of Gateshead has long been in the shadow of its grander neighbour across the water. Dr Samuel Johnson, who visited in the eighteenth century, thought the town …
The man who launched the vaccine wars
On a dull morning, 25 years ago, scores of journalists and TV crews gathered at The Royal Free hospital in north London. The occasion was a press conference for a five-page, 4,000-word “paper” in The Lancet medical journal. Thousands of …
Are we prepared for ‘eternal war’ in Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin’s armies launched their fateful attack on Ukraine a year ago today. Tanks and troops poured across the frontier in what most Western governments feared would be a lightning thrust of fratricidal violence that would throttle Ukrainian independence. Then …
The crucifixion of Kate Forbes
Lent began this week with a rehearsal for a crucifixion. On Tuesday, SNP leader hopeful and devout Presbyterian Kate Forbes was faced with something she must have known was coming: a challenge from journalists about her views on gay marriage, …
The threat to Nigeria’s political elite
While there is no indisputably powerful black nation on the global stage today, there is a country striving to become one. Nigeria has the economic potential to become a major world player, and is also projected to become the third-largest …