Sometime very early in the morning of 24 June 2016, I woke up, as middle-aged men tend to do. I looked at my phone to see the result. My only thought was: “Fuck, that’s a lot of work.” Then I …
The Marxism of Horrible Histories
Of all historians, living and dead, one has changed the way we think about history more than any other. Yet he remains curiously absent from feuilletons and podcasts. Terry Deary has never been one for self-promotion. So although anniversaries are …
Despotism is a beast of capitalism
As history speeds ahead in the Age of AI, it is also being thrown abruptly into reverse. Authoritarian rule is our current Zeitgeist, spreading across the globe from El Salvador to Myanmar.
This isn’t, in fact, all that surprising. The …
Is Labour already out of ideas?
Last month, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves travelled to the United States to present Labour’s new economic policy strategy, dubbed “securonomics”. If you think it’s strange for a party to unveil its economic manifesto in front of a foreign audience rather …
I was sacked for writing about trans censorship
For a quarter of a century, on and off, Melbourne’s “quality” daily newspaper The Age not only published my words — it was my intellectual home.
I had joined the paper’s staff around the turn of the century as a …
How the identity cult captured America
We live in a time of ideological exhaustion. Our doctrines and ideals lie broken in pieces all around us and never fit into a whole. Jagged bits of Marxism and anarchism, nationalism and liberalism, clutter the landscape, tear at our …
Gareth Southgate’s awkward revolution
Shortly after he got the England job, somebody on Twitter (and, as far as I can tell, nobody remembers who) said that Gareth Southgate resembled “an anteater gradually realising it isn’t supposed to be able to talk”. It’s a description …
The plot to redefine conversion therapy
The majority-Muslim city of Yogyakarta, on the humid southern coast of Java, is rarely associated with progressive politics. While being gay is not illegal there, it is certainly not tolerated: the Indonesian island has a history of shunting homosexual men …
South Africa’s infinite humiliation
Olive Schreiner, the South African author of The Story of an African Farm, surveyed her Edwardian society as an impoverished exile in London in a letter to a lifelong friend, John X Merriman. “A dead pall rests over the whole …
Boris Johnson’s theatre of the absurd
Early one spring morning during the pandemic, I was in the Queen’s private plane on the tarmac of Belfast International Airport watching Boris Johnson frantically searching for the No. 10 mask his team wanted him to wear. He was full …
Mary Gaitskill: 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 …
Starmer will regret purging the Left
On Wednesday evening, when Labour members in North West Durham gathered to choose whom to back as the new mayor for the North East, they were given a strict warning: there should be no mention of Jamie Driscoll. The party …
The battle over breastfeeding
My eldest son is currently in the middle of his GCSEs. I’m not worried about the results, though, because I breastfed him.
Babies who were breastfed “get better GCSE marks” apparently. Get in! I did this for all three of …
The gender wars are not a gift to the Right
As a critic of transactivism, one thing you hear a lot is how you are “propping up” the Right — or even the far-Right. You may think that all you are doing is pointing out some fairly obvious downsides to …
‘I was hounded out of Oxfam over JK Rowling’
It’s hard to imagine a more agreeable place to work than a charity bookshop. Staffed by civic-minded volunteers, the shelves groan with musty old paperbacks, lovingly donated in the hope they’ll find a new home and also raise money for …