Society
Virtue signalling is really status signalling
A £19,000-a-year London day school was in the news this week because it has started instructing its pupils about ‘white…
The path to re-enchantment
Most social occasions now seem to kick off with a wasted hour or two. The time is spent discussing Covid:…
The bogus business of stigma-busting
Our society is bristling with social stigmas, we’re told, even in the progressive West, even in London. Life is so…
Is living without risk really living at all?
Taking my life in my hands — as we all do when getting out of bed — I walked along…
The secret excitement that lurks beneath our distress
Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we…
Cameron's sinister purge of the posh
Should employees be judged by their parents’ income?
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…
Hayek was right: you can’t understand society without evolution
In December the controversial satellite TV channel ReallyTV launches its Christmas season with a flagship reality show called From Homs to…
The moral case for gentrification
To gentrify or not to gentrify. That is the question, says Stephen Bayley
Nicky Haslam’s diary: Marie-Anna Berta Felicie Johanna Ghislaine Theodora Huberta Georgina Helene Genoveva and other big names
I was once bundled into a police car in Palm Springs to explain why I didn’t have snow-tyres on my…
Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision
Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…
Owen Jones’s new book should be called The Consensus: And How I Want to Change it
Owen Jones’s first book, Chavs, was a political bestseller. This follow-up skips over the middle classes and goes to the…
Lessons from Tina Brown on the art of failing upwards
Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I…
E.O. Wilson has a new explanation for consciousness, art & religion. Is it credible?
His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work…
