culture wars
The Easter story reminds us of the importance of truth
Live not by lies, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned the West half a century ago, but we have hardly heeded him since.…
The curse of Disney’s Snow White
One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to…
I’m a culture war addict
Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’,…
The funny side of being cancelled
Douglas Is Cancelled, the new drama series on ITV, should come with a trigger warning – for me, anyway. Watching…
New Zealand’s culture wars backlash
I’m in New Zealand on a speaking tour organised by the Kiwi Free Speech Union, and in some ways it’s…
An exclusive look at Graham Linehan’s Father Ted musical
The tree-lined streets of Rotherhithe are an odd place to unveil a West End musical. But this is a suitably…
I hate hate speech laws
I originally intended to observe that American universities’ anti-Israel protestors and Hamas terrorists deserve each other, because they’ve so much…
How the Jilly Cooper Book Club turned toxic
The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book…
It rarely pays to be ahead of your time
Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the…
Could J.K. Rowling be Oxford’s next chancellor?
Among my generation of Oxford graduates – late fifties, early sixties – there is currently a great deal of talk…
The game’s up for ‘anti-racist’ racism
There are only a few rules to column-writing. One of the strictest is never to waste time bouncing off the…
Keep your politics à la carte
It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in…
Prince Charming is cancelled
The only strikes I really enjoy are actors’ strikes. Teachers’ strikes leave me cold. Train strikes get me into a…
How the West plays up to Putin’s caricature
In an outstanding article in the New York Times, Roger Cohen recounted his experience of travelling across Russia for a…
The chromosome-thin line between ensuring civil discourse and policing the opinion corridor
The Australian’s online comments moderation is at the risk of falling into the trap of censorship of ideas and debate…
The problem with being anti-woke
I’m going to do something that will likely annoy you, dear reader: I am going to make an argument about a…
Kemi Badenoch: the curriculum does not need ‘decolonising’
When the government published a report last year by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) into racism in the…
The astonishing stories behind today’s culture wars: Radio 4’s Things Fell Apart reviewed
Martin McNamara, the writer of Mosley Must Fall, a play on Radio 4 this week, must have had a jolt…
I’ve been back one week and the good old US of A has never seemed more depressing
New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot…
America’s campus culture wars come for St Andrews
The University of St Andrews has been keen on American imports for some time. Americans make up 16 per cent…
I loved prison
Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy: all cleaned up and retaining only the good parts. The wife tells…
The economic illiteracy of anti-capitalists
Back in October, World Bank chief economist Carmen Reinhart recommended that countries borrow heavily during the pandemic. ‘First, you worry…
Pimlico Academy and the politicisation of the playground
The strange tale of Pimlico Academy, the central London school roiled by ‘anti-racist’ protests, shows us that the culture war…
The school that made an American century
New York With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the…
Is it time to cancel Sophocles?
Gstaad The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to…
