New York. London. Paris. Madrid. Over the past three decades, at various times, these cities have been yoked together under a pall of terror that has spread right across the West. It has set populations against each other, leaving everyone …
Macho Christianity is flexing its muscles
Is he the messiah? Or just a very naughty boy? Since Russell Brand found Jesus he hasn’t stopped talking about it, whether on TikTok, or Tucker Carlson’s live show, or while baptising other men in a lake while clad only …
Antisemitism stains the art world
Venice during the opening week of the Biennale is the epicentre of the art world. Dealers rub shoulders with artists, sharing champagne and taking speedboats to after-parties in decaying palazzos. It is, at once, glamorous and intoxicating.
In theory, this …
Female ageing is the ultimate horror story
Contains spoilers.
When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More …
Michel Houellebecq is literature’s Lucifer
According to folklore, somewhere in the Southern Carpathians there’s a university called Scholomance that’s run by the devil. Students are taught how to conjure spells, command the weather and ride dragons. What, though, might be on the devil’s curriculum? What …
Why girls should be tomboys
In my late teens, I went from being very girly to very boyish. After being intensely feminine during high school — skirts, makeup, boy band crushes — I adopted a new identity. I was a tomboy. My hair was buzzed …
How to read like a man
A strange and telling bit of literary trivia is that two of the greatest English-language novelists of the last half-century — Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo — were not big readers when they were boys. Both took up reading as …
William Dalrymple’s colonial complex
There was a time, still hovering on the limits of living memory, when Britain specialised in the manufacture of William Dalrymples. Eton and Harrow squabbled annually over who had produced the most William Dalrymples; Oxbridge was little more than a …
The future belongs to Fabians
In the 3rd century BC, the Roman Empire was on its knees. Hannibal had smashed its armies, and Rome itself seemed within his grasp.
And yet, the Eternal City didn’t fall. Under General Quintus Maximus Fabius, the Romans abandoned their …
Bad omens for Neil Gaiman
“Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box; with art; by listening, and change this world for the …
The cult of kindness
Last June, I walked down to our local public school here in the foothills of Los Angeles to pick up my son from his last day of kindergarten. As we were leaving, I snapped a picture of a sign on …
Why does hot girl summer have to end?
We are all used to hearing about the dire plight of Gen Z. They are addicted to social media. Fragile and over-therapised. Obsessed with identity. Activists without wisdom. Reactive without nuance. That’s how the story goes. But the animal spirit …
What incels get wrong about Fight Club
Everyone knows the famous exchange in The Wild One (1953) even if they haven’t seen the movie — a brassy dame in a blonde beehive asking Marlon Brando “What are you rebelling against?”, a slightly pouty-looking Marlon Brando answering, “Whattaya …
How vanilla is your sexual fantasy?
If you are a child of the Seventies or Eighties, chances are that your formative sexual education was considerably influenced by rifling furtively through a Nancy Friday book. Even today, thanks to well-thumbed titles like My Secret Garden and Forbidden …
The illusion of a pagan West
Inside the Colosseum, in central Rome, stands a giant cross. Erected in 2000 by Pope John Paul II to commemorate the thousands of Christians martyred there, it’s not what you might expect to see on visiting the building once known …