A year ago, as Vladimir Putin launched his so-called “special military operation” to seize the Ukrainian capital, kill Volodymyr Zelenskyy and wipe much of the latter’s country from the map of Europe, who’d have imagined that the third week of …
The Ukraine war is not complicated
A year ago, as Vladimir Putin launched his so-called “special military operation” to seize the Ukrainian capital, kill Volodymyr Zelenskyy and wipe much of the latter’s country from the map of Europe, who’d have imagined that the third week of …
The Ukraine war is not complicated
A year ago, as Vladimir Putin launched his so-called “special military operation” to seize the Ukrainian capital, kill Volodymyr Zelenskyy and wipe much of the latter’s country from the map of Europe, who’d have imagined that the third week of …
Salman Rushdie’s latest blasphemy
“Fictions could be as powerful as histories.” In his new novel Victory City, Salman Rushdie comes as near as he has ever come to issuing a manifesto. His champions see him as a free speech martyr, his detractors as Satan …
Is Liz Truss really the next Barry Goldwater?
When I last interviewed Liz Truss — in early 2022, when she was just Foreign Secretary — I spotted a copy of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf. The book explores the links between the post-war administrations of …
Britain’s food wars
In the 18th century, when William Hogarth wished to highlight Britain’s political and cultural superiority to pre-revolutionary France in immediately appreciable terms, he did so through the medium of food, distinguishing between the Roast Beef of Olde England, and the …
Brexit has galvanised Welsh independence
These days, it is tempting for those of us who voted Remain to be a bit smug about “Bregret”, taking it as evidence that we were right all along. But such smugness was partly what caused Brexit in the first …
Gandhi hasn’t aged well
Gandhi, poor fellow, had his ashes stolen on the 150th anniversary of his birth. “Traitor”, scrawled the Hindu supremacist malcontents on a life-size cut-out of the Mahatma at the mausoleum. That was a couple of years ago, but it’s a …
Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma
There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the …
Is Spain too late to apologise for fascism?
A year ago, I met a man in Madrid who expected to be sued for body-snatching. He gave me the news with a shrug. It was the price, he said, of joining a socialist government that was drafting a new …
What if the USSR hadn’t collapsed?
Even if you care nothing for ballet, the very name of the Bolshoi Theatre carries a romance and glamour unmatched by any other theatre in the world. The company was founded under Catherine the Great, and first held performances in …
Football died after Pelé
In the popular imagination, the 1970 World Cup in Mexico still stands as the apogee of football. Broadcast in colour for the first time, it seemed the height of modernity: even the ball was named Telstar after the satellite that …
Harry Flashman’s imperial morality
I suppose it’s only a matter of time before the times catch up with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books. One can imagine the scene: an earnest young editor picks up a copy of the books, drawn to them by the …
Have yourself a countercultural Christmas
In Lapland, just inside the Arctic Circle, you can visit Santa Claus at any time of year, because that’s where he lives. No doubt this requires a plentiful supply of Santas (I hope nobody under the age of seven is …
Was the sexual revolution a government psy-op?
In the young, online manosphere, there is growing movement to refrain from masturbation as much as possible. This manifests itself every year in No Nut, or NoFap, November, a time for total abstinence from “fapping“, as certain online circles call …