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 …
Kemi Badenoch’s New Toryism
There is something strikingly different about Kemi Badenoch, the newly anointed Conservative Party leader. For a while I thought it might be that she is peculiarly old fashioned — a throwback to an age before the end of history and …
We need to talk about Southport
As additional terror-related charges against the Southport murder suspect Axel Rudakubana were announced on Monday, Merseyside Police was keen to deter us from discussing the case further. “We would strongly advise caution against anyone speculating as to motivation in this …
Labour’s blueprint for decline
If Britain’s cultural production leads the world in anything, it is in the imagining of grim dystopias which are only elaborated versions of contemporary British life: the line from 1984 to Children of Men is drawn through a particular, grudgingly …
Will an Etsy witch find you true love?
Something wicked this way comes. Across the land, jilted maidens are engaging in digital necromancy, wreaking revenge on past lovers and using £5 spells to bewitch Hinge situationships into confessing true love. Welcome to the coven of the Etsy witch. …
Rachel Reeves has no vision
In the Seventies, a Middle Eastern war precipitated a global energy shock and stagflation, and a US president invoked populist pleas to the silent majority against the counterculture. As the gold standard and the post-war Bretton Woods system teetered on …
Why centrist dads love fancy cheese
Forget Donald Trump, the Southport killer, or Tommy Robinson. The lead storyline this week was Centrist Dads’ cheese dream, or perhaps a lost Wallace and Gromit plotline: 950 wheels of artisan cheddar were stolen from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London.…
Obesity will starve the NHS
There’s one thing I’d happily see Rachel Reeves raise taxes on: junk food. Spend a day in my A&E department if you don’t believe me. I’m constantly treating people suffering from chronic conditions — type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, …
Will anyone miss Rishi Sunak?
Rishi Sunak is creeping out of the Tory leadership like a mouse walking past a sleeping cat. This is a shame because his departure is significant, marking the end of a political era that began in the Eighties. Sunak’s hero …
The dangerous martyrdom of Tommy Robinson
Tommy Robinson is a paradox: he is a brave and enormously successful activist-journalist with a mean right hook. At the same time, he’s prone to sentimentality, sensitive to criticism and sees himself as a victim, tethering his own private troubles …