Enjoying free speech since 1984. Your daily dose of anti-propaganda!
Like most sane, sensible people, I’ve been following the great news story of the age — the Wagatha Christie trial, in which Rebekah Vardy is suing fellow footballer’s wife Coleen Rooney for libel — with immense interest and attention to …
The first experience is hardly a memory, I can’t quite find the words. There was a veranda, in the shade, by the sunny courtyard (in my childhood memories it’s always sunny). There’s an armchair in the middle of the veranda, …
Close to my home stand two glorious late-Victorian monuments to what the preachers of the age would have called the beauty of holiness. A few minutes’ walk in one direction takes me to St Augustine’s, Kilburn, decorated with exquisite murals …
One might, with a little effort, recall a literary scandal of late 2016. James Wood, a few years earlier, had written a rave review of My Brilliant Friend, the first Neapolitan novel to be published in English. “Elena Ferrante, …
When I teach the writing of fiction, I often start with a topic for discussion. The question is this: if you glimpsed a person for half a second, in passing, what would you know about him or her? If you …
The Nineties were a time of American hegemony and British cockiness. The internet was a utopian idea as opposed to a collective psychological disorder. Climate change, terrorism, autocracy and gross inequality were either not-on-the-radar or assumed to be moving in …
There is a secret pact between the aristocrat and the anarchist. The anarchist dislikes rules, while the aristocrat can afford to ignore them. Kicking over the traces is proof of his authority, not of his criminality. Those who set the …
“I want to influence the world with China’s intellectual property.” This is the great ambition of Tang Jia San Shao, 41, who wants to build the “Disney World of China” — a gigantic theme park inspired by his stories. But …
When people say things like “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”, what do they mean? In my book Material Girls, I suggested that many of them are immersed in a fiction.
Getting …
Some years ago, I taught a course in public writing at the Claremont colleges, the consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California. My students were juniors or seniors, mostly humanities or social science majors, almost all smart, a …
“Long live France anyway.” Even in front of a 12-man firing squad, Robert Brasillach was never lost for words. The author and journalist turned his dying phrase (“Vive la France quand même”) into a sort of “whatever…” quip on 6 …
Jack Kerouac, who would have been 100 tomorrow, was the sort of male literary celebrity America doesn’t produce anymore. Shy and sensitive, ambitious to the point of megalomania (he often likened himself to Melville and Shakespeare), and an outrageous drunk, …
What did the sensitivity readers say? And did I care? Of all the aspects of the recent attempt to cancel my work, the one that seems to fascinate most people is the moment when my publishers sent my Orwell Prize-winning …
By the drowsy standards of the undead American literary world, criticism of Fuccboi, the debut novel of 30-year-old Sean Thor Conroe, has been strangely polarised. The Washington Post hailed it as “its generation’s coming-of-age novel”; Gawker’s review, “More Like Suckboi,” …
By the drowsy standards of the undead American literary world, criticism of Fuccboi, the debut novel of 30-year-old Sean Thor Conroe, has been strangely polarised. The Washington Post hailed it as “its generation’s coming-of-age novel”; Gawker’s review, “More Like Suckboi,” …