Columns
Lockdown’s a treat for curtain-twitchers
Welcome, then, to a country in which the police send drones to humiliate people taking a walk and dried pasta…
We’re anything but safe
Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist…
The spiritual richness of solitude
A psychiatrist once told me that it takes one’s subconscious about three weeks to catch up with a significant life…
Don’t let anyone tell you there’s a war on
‘Shut up — don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Strong hints of that attitude have emerged in recent weeks,…
How will this ‘war’ change us?
In the past ten days we have seen the greatest expansion of state power in British history. The state has…
The world of make-believe is stranger than we realise
Last summer, in the bc era, I took my then three-year-old to a new group play session: ‘Lottie’s Magic Box.’…
Below the crisis, a question floats: ‘Where do we find purpose?’
Perhaps we are at least past the beginning of this crisis. The phase where the hunt for multipacks of loo-rolls…
Lockdown in the little coronavirus café
‘Now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in To saucy doubts and fears.’ Shakespeare got there first, as ever, and…
Apocalypse in East Finchley
I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the…
The stranglehold of the wokerati
At least none of us will have to pretend that we read Woody Allen’s memoirs. This week the publishers Hachette…
Britain has its first punk-rock government
The most surprising thing about the letter from Guardian and Observer journalists moaning about Suzanne Moore’s supposed ‘transphobia’ is that…
The test of the Budget
British politics has not lost its flair for the dramatic. If it was not enough to have Sajid Javid resign…
To the friend who dropped me
I’ve put off sending a private email that’s been ready to go for weeks. Then last Sunday, I read Julie…
I’m getting my coronavirus bunker ready
We have now got past the absurd stage of glaring in a reproachful manner at Chinese people on the tube.…
The unbearable lightness of Boris Johnson
Months ago, not long after Boris Johnson’s 2019 general election triumph, I wrote a Times column of a cautiously hopeful…
The Budget’s corona contagion
When Sajid Javid resigned in a row with No. 10, there was much speculation about what would be in the…
