“Kafkaesque” has long been a byword for the distinctive type of tyranny imposed by impersonal bureaucracies. Franz Kafka himself was a petty bureaucrat: he spent his life working in insurance, writing late into the night. But as a tiny cog …
The farmers march on Westminster
I was a teenager when I began to ask my dad difficult questions about our small farm. Questions about whether we made a profit, and if so, what paid best. The sheep? The cattle? The barley or oats we grew?…
The NHS is failing epilepsy patients
Megan Gardiner was 17 weeks pregnant when she died alone one June morning in 2022.
She had experienced her first epileptic seizure 12 years earlier, two days after her thirteenth birthday. “We heard a scream and then a loud bang,” …
I was the target of Guardian misinformation
It was quite the flounce. “This is something we have been considering for a while,” The Guardian intoned with the gravity of an Old Testament prophet as it declared in an editorial that the organisation would no longer be posting …
How universities teach students to shame
Oxford colleges are suffocating places, stuffed to the gunnels with competitive and perfectionistic types, precocious in some ways and very immature in others. Everybody knows everybody else, adolescent hysteria and gossip can travel fast, and an atmosphere dominated by a …
Is Trump a blessing for Starmer?
The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s election victory is a nightmare for Keir Starmer. Trump not only embodies much that Starmer holds in obvious contempt, but his very presence in the White House captures much of Britain’s essential weakness …
Why I gave up on cash
Three or four years ago, I wrote a piece contemplating the end of cash. I wrote it as a mourner, lamenting how I would miss its heft, its solidity, its sheer physicality, in contrast to pinging and flicking invisible funds …
The painful truth about assisted suicide
There is a popular image of assisted suicide: a swift, straightforward procedure, backed by the awesome authority of modern science, sure to send you off in a comfortable doze. Dignity in Dying, for instance, claim that assisted suicide can “guarantee” …
Bring back Birmingham’s oligarchs
Birmingham has suffered low ebbs before. Finding themselves in hock to rail developers, 150 years ago, the town’s fathers carved up working-class areas, while rejecting gifts of land to be kept as parks: they would have been just too expensive …
Why Justin Welby had to go
I can still smell the fog of his disgusting cigars. And the sickly sweet tonic with which he slicked back his hair. I was seven when it started. I am 60 this month. It is more than half a century …
Thomas Mann predicted the New World Order
“What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even fisticuffs.” Near the end of his novel The Magic Mountain, …
Chelsea’s bitches are back
On Tuesday nights, in the boarding houses of my single-sex school, girls crowded around laptops to watch seasoned Sloanes tear each other to bits on catch-up TV. They gawped as the cast of Made in Chelsea shagged each other’s boyfriends, …
America is tortured by demons
The United States is the land of conspiracy theories, not least when it’s busy electing a president. Such theories are a secular version of the idea of a malevolent God, for which the world is a sinister place but at …
Who verifies BBC Verify?
BBC Verify, the new fact-checking service inside the BBC, was launched last year with much fanfare and at great expense. Its verdicts are pushed across all the corporation’s channels. So why is it getting so many things wrong? And where …
What the AfD gets wrong about Bauhaus
What a sorry mess we are in. The other week, plans to celebrate the centenary of the Bauhaus’ arrival in Dessau were met with opposition. Proposing a motion called “The Aberration of Modernity” — which was rejected — in the …