Could the Middlesbrough crime spree spread?
The first people I spoke to in Middlesbrough told me to fuck off. He was drinking lager and kicking a tennis ball for a cocker spaniel; she was sitting outside…
Could the Middlesbrough crime spree spread?
The first people I spoke to in Middlesbrough told me to fuck off. He was drinking lager and kicking a tennis ball for a cocker spaniel; she was sitting outside…
Britain has a leadership fetish
What is it with Britain and the word “leadership” these days? We have had seven prime ministers in 10 years — four of whom were unelected, one of whom won…
Britain’s common-sense crisis
In her classic 1974 monograph Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, the anthropologist Juliet du Boulay offers a telling vignette. A peasant woman is readying loukoumi, or Turkish delight, before…
Dolly Parton: head of the country class
The mountains spoke to Dolly Parton. Growing up in the deep green forests and dark hollers of East Tennessee, she listened to the rhythmic song of the whippoorwill, the steady…
The invasion of the delivery robots
A walkway is, by definition, a space where machines do not go. It is a hard-won sliver of human-exclusive sanctuary within the treacherous kinetic landscape of urbanized civilization. Bound in…
Will the Gulfies dump Trump?
We know the playbook by now. Donald Trump intermittently bombs Iran, albeit less intensely than when the US and Israel began their war in February. Meanwhile, his threats escalate along…
Eric Hobsbawm’s age of contradictions
For most academics, professional success extends to citations and conference invites. Eric Hobsbawm was different. His towering Ages series of books remains among the most celebrated and widely read works…
Inside the Albanian revolution
On 16 May 2026, a revolution began in Zvërnec, a sleepy village on the Albanian coast where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump planned to build a luxury resort. It spread…
Why I’ve got the hots for localism
In England, we used to moan about rainy gray summers. Now it feels like we are in the meteorological version of a monkey paw story. I’m writing from a horrifically…