Society
In defence of masculinity
Anyone who has passed through an education in thepast decade will have encountered the term ‘toxic masculinity’. It is one…
The good friend I never knew
I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one…
The rise of the wimps
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have…
Why Russian tactics won’t win the war
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, the war has settled into a largely attritional struggle –…
Sole traders
My strange encounter with the foot fetishists
Why should I be ‘cancelled’ for arguing that biological sex is real?
‘I just get the impression she hates men’, said a wound-licking James Max, on TalkRADIO, after he interviewed me on Wednesday.…
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…
Looking for 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 thrill of apocalypse
Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we…
Purge of the posh
Should employees be judged by their parents’ income?
The Spectator’s notes
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…
City life
To gentrify or not to gentrify. That is the question, says Stephen Bayley
Diary
I was once bundled into a police car in Palm Springs to explain why I didn’t have snow-tyres on my…
Home is where his heart is
Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…
All the usual suspects
Owen Jones’s first book, Chavs, was a political bestseller. This follow-up skips over the middle classes and goes to the…
Keeping up appearances
Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I…
Of ants and men
His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work…
