Features
Brexit means sovereignty
We know what people voted against,’ say half-clever pundits, ‘but it’s far from clear what they voted for.’ Actually, it’s…
We are not a hateful nation
Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman…
Zero tolerance, zero sanity
THE REAL HATE CRIME SCANDAL For 20 months, I stood accused of a hate crime: homophobically motivated common assault. The…
Clueless in Syria
The other day I was speaking to a Kurdish journalist who was held in Isis captivity for ten months. He…
Blood and soil
A declaration of nationality is a profound statement. To say ‘I am British’ suggests that somehow I am composed of…
My wild success
I’ve just tripped over the damned hedgehog for the second time in as many days. He has retreated into the…
Munich notebook
It has been a strange week in Munich; a week of deceptively cool mornings, afternoons hot enough to fry eggs…
Skye
Glamour. It’s Marcello Mastroianni drinking negronis on the Via Veneto; it’s Audrey Hepburn, George Clooney, Sinatra on the Vegas Strip…
Skye
Glamour. It’s Marcello Mastroianni drinking negronis on the Via Veneto; it’s Audrey Hepburn, George Clooney, Sinatra on the Vegas Strip…
What a shower
The fact that we get sun when we expect hail and hail when we expect sun provides those of us…
Europe’s summer of terror
How is your Merkelsommer going? For now, Britain seems to be missing the worst. True, a couple of men of…
Mass murder
On Tuesday morning, an 85-year-old man was forced to his knees while his throat was slit by Islamic fanatics. The…
Trump ♥ Putin
Spy novels and James Bond movies; post-war Vienna and East Berlin; Manchurian candidates and Third Men. The pop culture of…
My pedigree chum
The backlash has been brutal, unforgiving and, in common with the left’s reactions to so many things, almost hysterical in…
Enemies of history
At the start of the 21st century, no one felt the need to reach for studies of ‘third-period’ communism to…
A few good books
It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever ITV or the BBC decides — the latter usually with charter renewal…
Ice cream
It was a mistake to tell us about the gelati-to-sightseeing ratio. This was the formula my father, his younger sister…
Ice cream
It was a mistake to tell us about the gelati-to-sightseeing ratio. This was the formula my father, his younger sister…
American horror story
Cleveland, Ohio ‘Whatever complicates the world more — I do,’ Donald Trump once said. If you can’t decipher what that…
What Trump is getting right
Almost anyone who has followed the US presidential selection process closely could realise what a brilliant campaign Donald Trump has…
The bust that wasn’t
It has been a month since the UK voted to leave the European Union — but something is missing. Where…
Turkey’s continental drift
In Turkish the word ‘yurt’ has two definitions. It means ‘place’, ‘land’, ‘territory’, ‘homeland’. It could also indicate a round,…
What wasps do for us
Dom Perignon, Pimms, Carling Black Label, Coca-Cola — one’s as good as the other, so far as they’re concerned. Even…
Beat echoes
Laid out flat, running the length of the exhibition, the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road forms the…
Never gonna give EU up
June the 24th was a grim morning for Remain voters, and we’ve been working through the seven stages of grief…
