culture wars
High life
Gstaad The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to…
High life
New York There are times, living in this here dump, when I doubt if anyone’s heard of the word magnanimity.…
My week with the baying mob
Portland, Oregon In the days when you could still watch a nature documentary without feeling as if you were sitting…
High life
New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The…
In defence of wokeness
We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of…
The Spectator’s Notes
One of the most extraordinary features of the ‘cancel culture’ is how well it works. All decent people hate it,…
Dragon’s Din
Why do schools want to erase the past?
Dairy
Reality seems thinner these days. As I walk along the high street, passers-by drift apart as though afraid of crossing…
Oxford has taught the no-platformers a lesson
Three weeks ago Amber Rudd travelled to Christ Church, Oxford, to speak to students about her experiences of being a…
Sordid confessions of a Centrist Dad
I have a shameful secret. I’ve been watching these… videos online. Amazing what you can get in a couple of…
For political discourse to survive, we must be more honest about language
When I was an English literature undergraduate, we were all very careful to avoid what used to be called the…
Don’t blame snowflakes – grown-ups are the idiots
San Francisco must be the virtue capital of the world. (The latest: just across the bay, Berkeley’s city council voted…
Nice men make terrible leaders
The Duke of Marlborough gave a toast last week that brought the house down during a Turning Point dinner for…
Roger Scruton: Should I forgive the journalist who got me fired?
I travel back from London with the St Matthew Passion filling my head, after the moving performance from the Elysian…
Why I hate ‘the n-word’
One of the depressing aspects of writing a column attuned to social hypocrisy is so rarely running short of new…
Free speech is officially dead in British universities
When I first read about plans for a new academic periodical called The Journal of Controversial Ideas, I got the…
Millennials aren’t taking offence. They’re hunting for victims
In a recent column, I vowed to return to a point made in passing. To refresh your memory, the American…
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s transgender superman
Comics aren’t what they used to be. In 1976 I was 11 — the perfect target audience for probably the…
