Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and …
The Luton estate that made Andrew Tate
Two years before the Tates moved to Marsh Farm, there was a riot — followed by a rave. It was July 1995: a summer of drought, Tory civil war, and three nights of anarchy on an estate in Luton. After …
The betrayal of white working-class men
Cards on the table: I’m a rampant opponent of white, bourgeois, male privilege. Events such as the Coronation, or another Biden-Trump stand-off, pull this lunacy into sharp focus. Yes, these ludicrous and deranged media-driven circuses may have little to do …
Why are teachers striking over slavery?
In 2019, my children’s teachers went on strike for higher pay, and I supported it, which was a bit of a surprise. I’d always thought public-sector unions a mockery of the idea of organised labour — not workers bargaining for …
The dark truth about Taylor Swift
The scene at the ship’s bow in Titanic is so iconic it has spawned innumerable homages and pastiches. But would the fictionalised love story between Jack and Rose carry the same iconic power had their relationship not been doomed? Would …
My part in Vice’s downfall
A decade ago, as a young war reporter for Vice News, I had the nagging feeling that one day I’d find my wizened older self, like an old NME journalist droning on about punk, reminiscing about the time when we …
How a chatbot charmed me
If you think it is a strange, perhaps vexing idea to publish a “conversation” between a tech-ignorant writer of fiction and an AI chatbot, you are not alone. When my editor at UnHerd suggested the idea back in March, I …
Nick Cave on Christ and the Devil
Nick Cave’s music is synonymous with emotional intensity and artistic restlessness. But in recent years, in both his blog The Red Hand Files and new book Faith, Hope and Carnage, he has become more outspoken on faith, spirituality, censorship 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 …
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 …
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 …
The Labour Party has a woman problem
Domestic abuse is about control and power and silencing someone. It can take many forms. A text. A glance. A threat disguised as a promise. The idea is to manipulate you; to paralyse you.
I have lived through an abusive …