Colonialism
Is the C of E about to say sorry for Christianity?
Is the Church of England going to apologise for Christianity? A report by something called the Oversight Group has declared…
The problem with westerners seeking oriental enlightenment
Those chasing after blissful satori never seem interested in the people who actually live in Asia. They want to float in higher spheres
A treatise on greed: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff reviewed
The American author turns her attention to colonial injustice in a tale about a servant girl who flees a blighted English settlement in 17th-century Jamestown
Our great art institutions have reduced British history to a scrapheap of shame
Calvin Po laments the pious distortions of history at two of Britain’s best-known galleries
Our academics are attacking the whole concept of knowledge
The decolonisers in Britain’s universities are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them, says Doug Stokes
From revolutionary Paris to the moon
Thirlwell’s protagonist Celine flees malicious gossip in revolutionary France to ponder on sisterly solidarity, patriarchal violence, motherhood, colonialism and slavery
Not all Americans are so crass
In the face of American snark about the Queen’s death, many a British newspaper reader was disgusted. With bad tidings…
The lost world of the Karoo
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
We let Hong Kong down: Chris Patten on the end of colonial rule
After 13 years in parliament, rising star Chris Patten had the bad luck to be one of the few Tory…
Travels in time and space: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, reviewed
It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St.…
Were old children’s history books racist?
Are children’s history books racist?
Broken Trust: the crisis at the heart of the National Trust
The National Trust now has the chance to return to its roots
Tony Sewell’s race report critics are guilty of gaslighting
The Sewell Report on Race and Ethnic Disparities is courageous, thoughtful and measured. Its relative optimism has triggered a torrent…
Who volunteers to be lectured by children?
The screenwriter Russell T. Davies has said that only gay actors should be cast in gay parts, believing this leads…
It isn’t always easy to give money away
I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach…
The National Trust’s shameful manifesto
The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic…
Hoping to find happiness: Paris Echo, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon…
Playing it safe
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…
Les Blancs at the Olivier is good-ish, but it won't be a classic
Les Blancs had a troubled birth. In 1965 several unfinished drafts of the play were entrusted by its dying author,…
Charles Moore’s Notes: cheap trickery in the Economist’s assisted dying campaign
Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about…
The greatest surprise about Nigeria at 100 is that it exists at all
A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the…
‘Doorways to the unknown’: Clive James’s Latest Readings
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
The turbulent reign of King Cotton: the dark history of one of the world’s most important commodities
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’
A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a…
