A few weeks ago, I saw my two nephews. My mum keeps a big box of our old toys, and the three-year-old loves the kitchen set: he delights in plonking radioactive-looking broccoli florets on plates or, learning from trips to …
The curse of Valentine’s Day
How St Valentine came to be associated with romance is disputed. Some suggest the third-century martyr’s feast “Christianised” a Roman fertility festival — but the first mention of his day in connection with love comes more than 1,000 years after …
Who will fight for Britain?
The year I was born, one of the most famous New Wave songs of all time was released: Elvis Costello’s “Oliver’s Army”. It was written after Costello visited Northern Ireland during the Troubles. There, he described seeing “mere boys walking …
Gen Z’s radical race politics
It’s a dreary day in a provincial English town. A tracksuit-wearing teenage boy affecting an exaggerated version of the “Jafaican”, which has replaced Cockney as the capital’s working-class dialect, asks a similarly dressed individual: “What nationality is the best to …
Why Snoop Dogg should quit weed
Last week, the world awoke to a new status quo, a shifted paradigm, the end of an era. Where getting high was concerned, the Pope had just given up on Catholicism: Snoop Dogg had retired from the smoke. Leaderless, rudderless …
How did Oxford become so lame?
When I was 17, the schoolmaster tasked with overseeing my moral development frowned at my show of indecision about the future direction of my education and, as if letting me into a trade secret, carefully explained: “Look, clever people go …
How not to have sex
The Zoomer Generation is notoriously uninterested in the risk-taking behaviours that were once a rite of passage to adulthood. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, and they’re indifferent to sex — not just to having it, but even, according to …
Gen Z has an Israel problem
It’s almost like a religious ritual. Every Saturday since 7 October, central London has swollen with protestors waving the Palestinian flag and chanting “From the River to the Sea”. For the impartial and curious observer, two facts are immediately striking. …
The real chaos of the ‘new normal’
“Generation gap” is a term that trips neatly off the tongue, often used to describe banal differences between older and younger people in matters of cultural taste, approaches to work, political opinion, and myriad other features of social life. Just …
The greatest generational conflict
Ever since the phrase “the generation gap” was minted — by a headline writer at Look during the youth rebellion of the Sixties — trouble has been brewing. Today, there are two generational conflicts in play around the world: one …
Why Gen Z loves Seinfeld
Long ago, in another age, young people gathered in sitting rooms to watch television. And these moments of fixed attention, and the TV shows that create them, define generations. A quarter of century ago last weekend — slacking on the …
Lady Chatterley isn’t sexy
It is over 90 years since D.H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and 60 since it unleashed our grandparents’ libidos. Now, apparently, the rest of us need to watch it for the same treatment. This at least is the tacit …
What’s wrong with being straight?
As a gay man — I know that awful phrase is usually followed by irrelevant twaddle, but please bear with me. As a gay man, I have always found heterosexuality quite fascinating. I have made something of an unconscious study …
Witchcraft isn’t subversive
Once the bankers have gone home for the night, the City of London becomes a mysterious place. It evinces secrecy and subversion; you can feel the presence of something arcane beneath the day-to-day custom and commerce of the City.
It …
The death of intimacy
The sexual entrepreneur keeps a spreadsheet of every encounter she’s ever had. It’s populated with all kinds of information: how much they talked, the different positions they tried, whether it was the first or second or fifth time, and, of …
