Features
How not to be a spy
Like our former ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson, I was once vetted by the security services. My brush…
Moldova has been saved from Russian influence, but at what cost?
The European Union, guardian and champion of democracy, rightly takes a dim view when ruling parties ban their opponents, refuse…
Welcome to the age of de-extinction
Colossal, a $10 billion biotech firm with a knack of grabbing headlines, has announced it is on the way to…
My plot to take on the peach-tree thief
Summer is icumen to its end, but my peach tree yielded a fine crop this year, though most of it…
Could a ‘futurehood’ revolution save Britain?
As the collapse of birthrates accelerates across the developed world, even our language is struggling to keep up. Over nine…
Believe it or not, Russia is great
I have been invited to Moscow by the Russian Orthodox patriarchate because the organiser is a fan of my podcast.…
Save our charity shops!
If, like me, your tailor of choice is the British Heart Foundation or Save the Children, it is beginning to…
The Antichrist is back
The monster known as the Antichrist has been stalking Christians for nearly 2,000 years. Mostly it has fed the nightmares…
Don’t cure my autism
I admit that when Donald Trump announced he had found the answer for autism, I was curious. As an autistic…
Hell is a wine list
Wine lists give me the fear. I can still recall the prickle of adrenaline when my father handed me the…
What will love and literature become in the age of the Ring doorbell?
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Well, according to the app it was the Evri man at 10.27, the Yodel man at…
Who does Shabana Mahmood have in her sights?
After a fortnight in which Keir Starmer lost both Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson but also reshaped his cabinet and…
The folly of psychology
A young Chinese girl, at school in an English-speaking country, approached me after I gave a talk at a conference…
Danny Kruger: ‘There’s no going back for the Tory party’
‘The Conservative party is over.’ Until recently, such talk could be dismissed in Westminster as typical Nigel Farage hyperbole. But…
MDMA should be licensed for veterans with PTSD
‘Stuff starts to get real, real quick,’ recalls former US Marine, Tyler Flanigan. An Iraqi sniper had just shot out…
A new era of nuclear weapons is here
The world is moving into a more dangerous age. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, last year set a…
Weimar Britain: lessons from history in radical times
The Ancient Greeks believed the past was in front of us and the future behind. Man could look history in…
The joy of guided walks
‘You should be pointing at things with an umbrella for a living,’ said my brother. He’d come to visit me…
The Oxford Union’s lynch-mob mentality
The case of George Abaraonye, the incoming Oxford Union president who rejoiced in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, has provoked…
Never date a German man
Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married…
‘Like a cockroach, I refuse to die’: a meeting with the Tate brothers
‘I detest lateness,’ texts Tristan Tate, who’s offered to pick me up from a hotel in Bucharest. ‘So I’ll either…
The rise of performative reading
‘To be or not to be’ may be the question but when it comes to eliciting answers, I’ve always preferred…
The cultification of science
My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a…
Fragile China: who’s really in charge?
Xi Jinping effectively vanished in July and the first half of August. Some China watchers speculated that his unexplained absence…
Save our sausages!
Who first thought of grinding up all those little unused odds and sods from an animal carcass and stuffing them…
