Our response to the nerve gas attack has been an act of self-harm
There was a growling Russian maniac on the BBC’s Today programme last week, an MP from the United Russia party…
Vince Staples is Christian, yet it’s hard to imagine Jesus singing along to GTFOMD
Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record…
Genocide in South Africa: now that’s a black-and-white issue
Last time I was in South Africa I spent two weeks deep in the Karoo, that desiccated wasteland in the…
Italy’s election result shouldn’t be a shock. The populist revolution has just begun
Why aren’t children called Roger any more? I wondered this when reading about the sad death of Sir Roger Bannister.…
Nils Frahm is clever with textures – but it’s the melodies which drag you in
Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has…
The word ‘extremist’ has lost all meaning
A few years ago, in these pages, Matthew Parris defined Ukip as a party of extremists. Perhaps one of his…
Why are businesses like Center Parcs so terrified of a small minority?
I am boycotting Center Parcs. Admittedly, this is not going to have an enormous impact upon my life. It’s a…
Franz Ferdinand take disco and make it rather glorious: Always Ascending reviewed
Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on…
There’s a reason women sell roof tiles in hotpants
I would rather watch flies buzzing around a light bulb for two hours than Formula 1. At least the flies…
Why do sweet, tender young lefties like MGMT love the decade of Reagan and Bush Snr?
Grade: B Horrific memory, flooding back, halfway through the track ‘TSLAMP’ (Time Spent Looking at My Phone). It was the…
Sometimes men deserve to be paid more
It is 100 years since women got the vote and I have been joining in the celebrations, on public transport…
Rod Liddle finds his inner SJW listening to Justin Timberlake
Grade: B– Hey, here comes Justin, the ‘President of Pop’ and ‘one of the greatest all-around entertainers in the history…
Stop trying to make football perfect: it’s the errors that make it fun
They’ve got this new thing in football. It’s called the Video Assistant Referee and it is designed to make the…
Women come last in Labour’s deranged victim hierarchy
I wonder if we are about to see a mass resignation of women from Labour, furious at the party’s collapse…
R&B landfill: Craig David’s The Time is Now reviewed
Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you…
Women’s pay could bankrupt the BBC
I hope you are enjoying the BBC drama series Hard Sun. It is described as pre-apocalyptic science fiction, set in…
Your Twitter history will always haunt you – if you’re on the right
I once asked Michael Gove, when he had just been appointed Education Secretary, if he would mind awfully appointing me…
And now for Graham Norton’s next guest… Adolf Hitler!
Having thoroughly enjoyed Graham Norton’s recent forensic cross-examination of Hillary Clinton on BBC1, I’m thrilled that the corporation intends to…
St Vincent’s Massediction is my album of year (in that I don’t actually hate it yet)
This has not been an appalling year for pop music — it was better than 1984, for example, and 1961.…
If Damian Green lied about looking at porn, I don’t blame him one bit
I first viewed pornography at the age of 12, when a school friend showed me a magazine called, I think,…
Raising awareness for enraged ‘victims’ always ends in lunacy
The deaf are beginning to annoy me. They seem, paradoxically, more voluble than the blind. Perhaps this is because, understandably,…
Why does James Purnell think radio needs to be ‘reinvented’?
Grade: A A dimbo pop reviewer for one of our national newspapers suggested that on this album, her ninth, Björk…
Divorce destroys society. Don’t let’s make it easier
I went to Relate once, the counselling service formerly known as the National Marriage Guidance Council. I wasn’t married at…
Like a Melanie Phillips column set to bad music: Morrissey’s Low in High School reviewed
Grade: B- It is truly painful to criticise someone who greatly enrages the Guardian and the leftie music press, and…
Kevin Spacey is a nasty piece of work but is it right to expunge him from history?
There are many wonderful scenes in the film version of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, but my favourite comes…
