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…
On astonishment and angels
On 28 September 1915, my hero, the Swiss-Scottish author Blaise Cendrars, had his right arm blown off during the Second Battle of Champagne while serving as a corporal in the…
Why Iran is right to be paranoid
For the spiritual head of a militant theocracy, Ali Khamenei was a remarkably prolific poster on social media. At the start of February, as pressure from Washington started to build,…
Alasdair MacIntyre was right all along
“The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed,” wrote Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981). Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant had attempted to justify rationally what…
Can Andy Burnham save my town?
Strategy. It’s a word mystically intoned by self-help influencers, business podcasters and sports pundits alike — often carrying a whiff of bullshit. But good strategy is real. It’s something you…
The joy of Jilly Cooper’s naked snobbery
There’s a form of therapy for dementia sufferers which immerses them in a comfortingly familiar Fifties town, complete with retro-style diner, vintage department store, and bowling alley. Rivals functions a…
How Churchill’s art saved the West
Real history has a habit of confusing those who go to it for comfort or outrage, for simple fairy tales or neat moral fables. From 1928 until the Seventies, Irish…
American hawks are drunk on power
In 2002, when the Israeli government caught wind of America’s intention to invade Iraq, it protested. The real enemy in the Middle East, the Israelis insisted, was Iran. Their arguments…
Elon Musk’s British fever dream
In November 2014, several hundred protesters marched through London’s West End before gathering in front of the old US embassy on Grosvenor Square. They were there to vent anger at…
The joy of Jilly Cooper’s naked snobbery
There’s a form of therapy for dementia sufferers which immerses them in a comfortingly familiar Fifties town, complete with retro-style diner, vintage department store, and bowling alley. Rivals functions a…