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Ruby Murray, one of the most popular musical artists of the Fifties, is remembered today less for her schmaltzy ballads than as Cockney rhyming slang for curry. Now, though, Ruby’s gastronomic legacy has become a battleground.
Dishoom, the restaurant chain …
Feminism 30 years ago was busy raging against the glass ceiling; today it’s more likely to be discussing maternal instincts. Where women were once told they could enjoy hook-up culture for as long as they liked, now they are being …
The heroine of William Gibson’s 2003 near-future novel Pattern Recognition is a professional discerner of emerging trends, so hyper-attuned to semiotic nuance that she experiences physical discomfort if made to wear any item of clothing with recognisable branding. Cayce Pollard …
For almost a decade, the West has been engaged in a deepening conflict. Sometimes it flares up as a political debate; sometimes as a culture war. But whatever form it takes, it is inevitably framed as a disagreement between classes, …
As the media cycle lurches from the promotion of one existential crisis to another, demography continues to dominate. In the UK, low birth rates and ageing populations mean we won’t be able to afford healthcare and pensions; we have too …
The last time China’s population contracted, its citizens were lucky if they could find grass to eat. It was the early Sixties, and Mao’s disastrous and ridiculously named Great Leap Forward had left millions in abject poverty. China is infinitely …
Kristina Ozturk is about as far from the model of Soviet motherhood as can be imagined. A 25-year-old former stripper, she and her husband Galip have been farming out their foetuses to surrogates to allow them to have 22 children …
If you listen to NPR or read The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post, you might think that Indians who live in the US, immigrants and their native-born children, are determined to impose the subcontinent’s caste system …
Royals are not like the rest of us, and never have been. These days it is their public-facing glass-bowl lives which marks them out — as well as their wealth. But in past centuries, with no paparazzi, Britons were more …
When I was researching my first book, which was about demography and ethnic conflict, I met with a well-known Sinn Féin politician in his Stormont office. I wanted to understand whether the elevated Catholic birth rate in Northern Ireland during …
When I was 15, back in the very early Eighties, I spent the best part of a summer is a sleepy corner of “la France profonde”. The family I stayed with were hard-up members of the nobility, trying to earn …