Trans activists don’t help themselves
I’ve tried to stay out of the trans-rights conversation, honestly I have. There are a number of reasons for this,…
The unedifying Yilin Wang vs British Museum row
If you visited the British Museum’s new exhibition China’s Hidden Century a fortnight ago, you’d have seen a substantial section on the revolutionary woman…
Why is it so difficult to find MPs who aren’t useless?
It’s a sign, possibly, of my increasing age and bad temper that I find myself harking back to an imaginary past in…
The idiotic campaign against Elizabeth Gilbert
At the end of the 1920s, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in English as All Quiet…
Is Boris Johnson a great man of history?
Boris Johnson has always been an enthusiastic proponent of the long unfashionable ‘great man’ theory of history. As he argued…
The Schofield story is not a matter of national concern
I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had…
The price others pay for our next-day deliveries
When I was not more than nine or ten years old, I sent off in the post for a free poster…
Martin Amis: 1949-2023
Over the next few days, people will be reaching for certain set phrases about Martin Amis. That he was ‘era-defining’…
Academic publishing is lazy and unethical
Last week witnessed the first tremors of what could be a welcome revolution: the resignation en masse of the 40-strong editorial board of NeuroImage magazine – regarded…
The glumness of King Charles
A detail much noted in the commentary on Saturday‘s coronation was that His Majesty decided against making his first trip…
Why don’t the Tories want to help genuine asylum seekers?
It’s not the genuine asylum seekers that Suella Braverman and her crew are determined to prevent reaching our shores, we are…
‘Everything is going to be turned upside down’
Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing
Letters of love
How I found friendship through online Scrabble
We live in a one-way shame culture
Anyone who has ever published a book and been dismayed by an anonymous review online will have cheered inwardly at…
Is it time to ban second jobs for MPs?
There are some genres of newspaper story that never die. Among them are sightings of Lord Lucan, public moralists discovered…
In praise of the dashcam citizens policing our roads
Jeremy Bentham, thou shouldst be alive and doing a ton through the Mickleham Bends at this hour. Bentham’s great contribution to carceral theory,…
Let’s talk about sex education
Ah, sex education. I remember it like it was yesterday. It would have been 1987. Our entire year assembled in…
Blame, Brexit and the great tomato shortage of 2023
It’s funny how powerful a concrete example of something can be, isn’t it? The thing that brings a situation home to…
The senseless re-editing of Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl was, in many respects, a horrible man. He was a narcissist, a bully, a liar, an anti-Semite, a…
It’s time for ‘reality-based’ politicians to start addressing Brexit
Praise be. A day or two ago, something potentially quite exciting took place in Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. It was a two-day…
Liz Truss, Brexit and the petulant anger at reality
The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but…
Who thought the Prince Andrew sex bath picture was a good idea?
How big does a bath need to be for ‘sex frolicking’ to be a possibility? That’s not, if you’d asked anyone six…
The curious carefulness of Nadhim Zahawi’s ‘carelessness’
The cliché is that it’s scandals about sex that tend to do for Tories, and scandals about money that do…
Goldman Sachs and the culling of the surplus elites
Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched,…
Harry’s complete lack of self-doubt is a problem for the royal family
Watching Prince Harry being interviewed by Tom Bradby, one thing was clear: the man is in deadly earnest. He is…
