Motherhood is in crisis. And nowhere in the West is this truer than in America, famously bringing up the rear by every measure when it comes to parental leave. (Where Sudan offers eight weeks of statutory maternity pay, the USA …
Our Queen’s sacrifice
It seems that it should be a near spiritual ritual of Britishness to live through the end of the reign of one sovereign and the beginning of another. The emotions around the death of a monarch are, for those who …
Humanism is a heresy
“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.”
This observation on the pretensions of humanity — cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality — was made in the Forties, midway between our own time and the …
How political was Jesus?
Blaise Pascal is right to have jotted in one of his baroque notebooks that Jesus lived “in such obscurity… that historians writing of important matters of state hardly noticed him”. And Erich Auerbach is right to have stressed in a …
Why I broke up with Dua Lipa
What do you want from a pop star? Personally, I don’t want anything too ambitious. I want bright melodic hooks that edge into melancholy, spiky basslines that drill into my brain, and uncomplicated lyrics that speak frankly of love and …
Have yourself a countercultural Christmas
In Lapland, just inside the Arctic Circle, you can visit Santa Claus at any time of year, because that’s where he lives. No doubt this requires a plentiful supply of Santas (I hope nobody under the age of seven is …
Should we all become nomads?
Around 4,000 years ago, a band of roving tribespeople, known as the Hyksos, migrated west from Mesopotamia towards the fertile floodplains of the Nile Valley. They found a region ripe for the picking. Egypt’s pharaohs, complacent after centuries of political …
Boris Johnson broke Britain
Pity the poor columnist attempting to write The Case for Boris: a blank screen sits before him, the cursor blinking helplessly. There simply is no case for Boris, no justification for any continued role in public life. None of the …
CLAP FOR UKRAINE / Hugo Talks
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Christmas is still scarred by Covid
As my daughter grows, ever more of our Christmas tree ornaments originate with her: decorated by her at school or preschool, or little end-of-term gifts from teachers. When we decorate the tree, unwrapping each one comes with a little payload …
Britain is haunted by Dickensian ghosts
In the Celtic fringes of Europe, the idea of “thin places” persists — locations where the boundary between this reality and others is claimed to be at its most fragile, even permeable. Originally, these were seen as portals to the …
Why Occultists don’t believe in progress
Reflecting on his life amid the rising discords of a turbulent era in his poem “All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue” (1920), William Butler Yeats wrote:
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, …
Nick Cave’s divine rebirth
Nick Cave defies rock music’s law of gravity. A few weeks ago I went to see Cave and the Bad Seeds headline All Points East in Victoria Park, London and came away thinking it was the best I’d ever seen …
A Lot Of Sickness Going Around / Hugo Talks #pharmakeia
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All the populist’s men
All The King’s Men is the 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an enormously vulgar, crudely powerful and grossly corrupt Southern politician loosely inspired by Louisiana Democrat Huey P. Long. It is an epic portrait of a demagogue who is, by …