Marriages are supposed to be made in heaven — not in dilapidated local authority registry offices. My wife and I were getting a civil marriage, as our Islamic wedding the previous year, for all its ceremonial pomp, had been a …
Blasphemy laws have returned to Denmark
Towards the end of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine Part Two, our marauding anti-hero burns a copy of the Quran, along with other Islamic books, as a kind of audacious test. “Now, Mahomet,” he cries, “if thou have any power, come …
Free speech is still worth fighting for
Freedom of expression is probably the most widely acknowledged human right in the world. Lip service is paid to it even in totalitarian states. Freedom of expression is not worth much in Russia or North Korea, but their constitutions guarantee …
Liberals have forgotten what free speech means
Away from the horror unfolding in Israel, the past month has provided one long acid test for the West’s commitment to liberal values. What are we to make of middle-class bien pensants asserting that mass murder requires “context”, of the …
Israel and the identity trap
Yascha Mounk is one of the foremost critics of the potent new ideology that has swept the globe — variously labelled the social justice movement, “woke” and identity politics. In his new book, The Identity Trap, he takes on this …
John Gray: liberal civilisation is finished
John Gray recently visited the UnHerd Club. Below is an edited version of his conversation with Freddie Sayers.
Freddie Sayers: Is it your view that liberal civilisation has passed into history?
John Gray: Yes, and it’s not coming back. …
John Gray: liberal civilisation is finished
John Gray recently visited the UnHerd Club. Below is an edited version of his conversation with Freddie Sayers.
Freddie Sayers: Is it your view that liberal civilisation has passed into history?
John Gray: Yes, and it’s not coming back. …
The dismantling of the Chinese mind
When retired spy Peter Wright announced the existence of Spycatcher, his astoundingly indiscreet MI5 expose, in 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s government tried to block its publication in Australia. When that failed, it banned English newspapers from reporting on Wright’s allegations, including …
Beware the new leviathans
Are men and women naturally good? The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought so, though he admits that we began in a state of “savagery” in which moral terms such as good and bad simply didn’t apply. From there, however, the human …
Why Sweden tolerates Quran burning
Sweden has long been a country known for its commitment to tolerance and its embrace of human rights: a “moral superpower” devoted to foreign aid, progressive causes and support of developing nations. All the more surprising, then, that Sweden now …
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
Why we can’t tell the truth
The idea of truth has fallen out of favour in recent years. For one thing, it’s less politically important than it used to be. In the era of the Cold War, what beliefs you held to be true counted for …
Is liberal society making us ill?
As rates of Covid-19 infection started to dwindle, there came signs of a much stranger pandemic: long Covid and its host of long-term complications. You might think that, since men and older people suffer the most complications from the virus, …
The liberal complacency of Martin Amis
English culture has produced a number of cliques and coteries in its day, from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Bloomsbury Group to Macspaunday (otherwise known as the Thirties poets Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis). …
The love life of JS Mill
In our age, Victorians don’t stand a chance. Even the most enlightened of them appear to us either as quaint traditionalists (at best) or unforgivable reactionaries (at worst) — snobs, bigots and misogynists, one and all. There is, however, one …
