Features
A lament for the lads’ mags
Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously…
Why is the MoJ making life so hard for prison charities?
For 15 years The Clink charity has run commercial restaurants in prisons, training inmates to cook and teaching them front-of-house…
OnlyFans is giving HMRC what it wants
Fenix International occupies the ninth floor of an innocuous office block on London’s Cheapside. The street’s name comes from the…
A love letter to lonely hearts ads
Published in Britain for at least 330 years, lonely hearts ads are now a rare sight – driven to the…
Assisted suicide could destroy the hospice movement
The hospice movement is one of the great achievements of post-war Britain. Inspired by the doctor Cicely Saunders, who in…
Why I burnt the Quran
My name is Hamit Coskun and I’ve just been convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence. My ‘crime’? Burning…
Why corporate wokery refuses to die
Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras:…
The truth about Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater
In the 2004 film Mean Girls Ms Norbury (Tina Fey) cries to her High School students: ‘Girls! You’ve got to…
Have I unmasked Cambridge’s bike bandit?
The Cambridge bike bandit emerged. I watched the rough, smiling face of the old man who came slowly from his…
Nigel’s army: Reform’s plans for victory
‘I’ve changed my mind!’ It is a year this week since Nigel Farage uttered those fateful words, marking his decision…
Don’t be fooled by the euphemisms around assisted dying
It’s funny the ways we lie to ourselves. The little lies. The white ones. We say we’re exhausted when we…
Spare us from ‘experimental’ novels
Some sorts of books and dramas have very strict rules. We like a lot of things to be absolutely predictable.…
The disposable vape ban has changed nothing
I felt a mixture of annoyance and relief when I bought my first non-disposable Elf Bar last weekend, ahead of…
Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army
Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit…
How to survive a Chinese banquet
When heading to China on a business trip, I was somewhat bemused to be warned about the banquets I would…
End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough
Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march…
The next front in the gender wars
April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that…
Racing is being regulated out of existence
As a parable that sums up the dysfunction of the modern state and the over-regulation of industry, this has it…
Is it ever acceptable to ask to swim in a friend’s pool?
I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the…
We’re losing the ability to read
A recent American study, called ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’, analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at…
Is the Pope a Marxist?
Charleston, South Carolina H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know…
The lost art of getting lost
One of the quietly profound pleasures of travel is renting cars in ‘unusual’ locations. I’ve done it in Azerbaijan, Colombia,…
The BBC’s war on the SAS
The SAS is under fire, not from terrorists or insurgents, but from ill-informed commentators and our state broadcaster. Our Special…
Typos are an unintentional delight
Afriend of mine was once delighted to get a job at the Radio Times, where he ‘corrected’ a golfing picture…
Butlin’s is cashing in on nostalgia
Butlin’s is no longer a holiday ‘camp’. The company has evolved from its postwar heyday and now describes its properties…
