Leonard, the hero of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, cannot form new memories. This poses something of a problem when you’re trying to find the guy who killed your wife. Her brutal murder is the last thing Leonard remembers, and he has …
Would Kant really support BLM?
Poor old Immanuel Kant, scourge of many an undergraduate essay crisis, whose 300th birthday fell this week. Was ever any other major intellectual figure put through so much painful contemporary “rethinking”?
According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, …
How to spot the next mania
In the late Eighties and Nineties, the psychiatric profession became infatuated with “recovered memory”, which was conceived in the US but also captivated Europe, including Britain. Practitioners claimed that patients sexually abused as children would naturally repress any recollection of …
Australia’s divisive race referendum
When the Australian prime minister invites his countrymen to join him “on the right side of history” later this year, they will almost certainly decline. If the current polls are anything to go by, Anthony Albanese’s referendum on the creation …
Blackadder and the end of history
In the first days of 2014, the then-education secretary, Michael Gove, addressed the forthcoming centenary of the First World War. “It’s important that we don’t succumb to some of the myths which have grown up about the conflict in the …
The true Left is not woke
It is 85 years since the great bluesman Lead Belly coined the phrase “stay woke” in “Scottsboro Boys”, a song dedicated to nine black teenagers whose execution for rapes they never committed was only prevented by years of international protests …
The rise of Archaeologists Anonymous
In a quiet group chat in an obscure part of the internet, a small number of anonymous accounts are swapping references from academic publications and feverishly poring over complex graphs of DNA analysis. These are not your average trolls, but …
Schools shouldn’t fly BLM flags
After more than two years of disruption, American schoolchildren are finally returning to something approaching normal education — in-person, and without masks or social distancing or other “non-pharmaceutical interventions”. But many of these children are returning transformed. Last week, data …
Stop pretending Britain is America
The year was 1927, and Lieutenant-Colonel Reginald Applin, DSO, OBE, was on the warpath. The Conservative MP for Enfield was a man of decidedly robust opinions. In his youth he had served in the North Borneo Armed Constabulary. In middle …
The experts are lying to you
With most of the world’s information only a click away, one would have assumed that ours would be the most enlightened generation in human history. We may have lost the rote-learning skills and depth of knowledge of our grandparents, but …
Why Baltimore didn’t defund the police
In Baltimore the protests that followed the death of George Floyd felt less like an eruption and more like a mellow reprisal of events that had taken place five years earlier. The death of Freddie Gray in police custody had …
The narcissism of America’s race politics
The Romans loved their Saturnalia. For one week, every year, social customs were overturned in the spirit of carnival: gambling was permitted and slaves were treated as kings. The literary critic Northrop Frye was fascinated by this festival, and saw …
Buffalo and the myth of racist America
What connects the tragedies of May 25, 2020, and May 14, 2022? The straightforward answer, at least according to many in the media and on the Left, is systemic racism.
On May 25, 2020, a black man was murdered in …
The white privilege of BLM
For every major metropolis that painted BLACK LIVES MATTER on its streets two years ago, there were huge swathes of America where the whole movement felt like a distant diversion, similar to the current war in Ukraine. You knew it …
Will Leeds atone for David Oluwale?
It was a moment that had been 15 years in the making. As Leeds unveiled its latest blue plaque, the mood at the ceremony was festive. The 200-strong crowd heard music and poetry in memory of David Oluwale. “A British …