Is Burnham too Northern?
Like many post-industrial constituencies in Northern England — areas with predominantly white, working-class, Brexit-voting populations — received wisdom had Makerfield hurtling towards the Right. Britain,…
Keir Starmer’s lethal legacy
A friend tells a blood-curdling anecdote about visiting Moscow for work, in that End of History interregnum, when the West still did business with the Russian bear. Even then, it…
Will France’s banlieues wreck the World Cup?
As France gears up for the World Cup, the French police are preparing for more violence on the streets, whatever the results brought home by the French team. Les Bleus’…
How Britain maimed its military
Britain’s armed forces have undergone a very long recessional. In 1945, the Army alone had some three million men under arms, with millions more in the navy, air force and…
Donald Trump knows how to party
A bloodied UFC fighter is lying flat on his back, arms akimbo. He has just been knocked unconscious by Josh Hokit, who celebrates by draping a playing card of himself…
The rise of Britain’s neo-Nazis
The first thing to understand about Alek Yerbury is that he is not trying to look like Adolf Hitler. He wears a leather overcoat similar to that which the Führer…
Hartley, not Orwell, foresaw today’s tyranny
When I first read L.P. Hartley’s neglected dystopian novel Facial Justice, published in 1960, I found it whimsical and utterly implausible. Rereading it after six decades, I find it one…
The cult of Elon Musk
Elon Musk fans come in many varieties. There are those who love his cars. There are those who love his rockets. There are those who for some reason consider Musk…
The socialist conquest of the Democrats
Here is the uncomfortable truth facing the Democratic Party leading into the midterm elections: an influential Left-wing movement is gaining momentum and increasingly appears capable of pulling the national Democratic…
The queer threat to gay pride
The New York State legislature recently tackled the vital, pressing issue of whether the terms “mother” and “father” are cruel and oppressive. They concluded that these terms are indeed transphobic…
Belfast’s new faultline
Every city is a palimpsest, in the pattern of whose streets and buildings, stories etched in the past remain legible. Even when there has been a careful attempt to forget…