The vibes continue to shift. Five minutes ago, “cousin marriage” was the punchline to a highbrow joke about the Hapsburg Jaw, or perhaps a lowbrow one about what counted as Normal for Norfolk. Now all of a sudden, the relative …
Cousin marriage isn’t ‘unspeakable’
The vibes continue to shift. Five minutes ago, “cousin marriage” was the punchline to a highbrow joke about the Hapsburg Jaw, or perhaps a lowbrow one about what counted as Normal for Norfolk. Now all of a sudden, the relative …
Compromise killed off the Habsburgs
Keir Starmer has spoken a lot about how he hopes to bring Britain and the European Union closer together. His wish has been realised quicker than he could have imagined. Recently, he met with the Right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia …
The fantasy of open borders
Before entering today’s torturous immigration debate, we would do well to remember James Baldwin. “Power without morality is no longer power,” he observed. And the border question is fundamentally a moral one.
On one side, there is a growing belief …
How the police lost control of London
Even in supposedly secular and tolerant London, the safety of Jews has recently come to seem an unnervingly fragile thing. Last week, a London police officer was filmed threatening to arrest a man for being “openly Jewish”, and there have …
Why I married a British Asian
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 …
Can pluralism be low-crime?
My small Shires market town reported a handful of crimes a year when we moved here a decade ago. Over the past year or so, every garage on my street has been burgled. Only last week an escaping shoplifter shoved …
France is haunted by civil war
Ranks of men in uniform are bombarded with Molotov cocktails, makeshift mortars, and small arms fire. Commando units prepare to infiltrate a smoke-covered urban fortress. A city burns under the watchful eye of the press, reporting on “a civil war”.…
Vikings need to be tamed
Over the last decade or so, there has been a boomlet in popular culture in dramatic depictions of the Vikings, the modern name for the pre-Christian Norse inhabitants of Scandinavia. They’ve inspired countless recent films and TV shows, from Vikings, …
France’s demographic civil war
When I was 15, back in the very early Eighties, I spent the best part of a summer is a sleepy corner of “la France profonde”. The family I stayed with were hard-up members of the nobility, trying to earn …