Big Furniture, Small Staircases: Making an Apartment Move Work
Moving into or out of an apartment can be complicated even when the furniture is modest. Add an oversized sectional, a solid wood wardrobe, or…
What Charlie Kirk sowed
Tragedy has a way of unifying movements. For the Right, no recent event seemed more likely to generate such a galvanizing effect than the assassination of Charlie Kirk exactly one…
How Goalhanger seduced the bourgeoisie
The Southbank Center has hosted many great cultural events over the years. In 1951, the Festival of Britain almost single-handedly dragged British art out of its postwar slump. In 1958,…
Barbara Cartland: masked masochist
Romance fiction is the genre of masochism: it’s less about love than control, less about pleasure than pain. This is why Matthew Sweet calls his superb new life of Cartland…
Britain’s paramilitary nightmare
George Orwell claimed that a hatred of uniforms was as much an enduring part of English identity as reverence for the law, suet puddings and misty skies. From an English…
MAGA’s Latin-American crime thriller
It was an episode straight out of a hit narconovela (the subgenre of Latin-American telenovelas that feature gangland violence in addition to the usual raunchy romance). Nadia, an expectant mother,…
Who owns the Bayeux Tapestry?
It is remarkable that two of France’s most precious national treasures are not French. The Mona Lisa arrived in France with Leonardo da Vinci in 1516, and has remained there…
Who owns Meghan Markle?
As the King definitively rules out a return to The Firm, Meghan Markle must be more urgently contemplating a return to acting. Cynics might suggest that she never left it.…
Meet the GoFundMe grifters
In Polk County, Georgia, there lived a one-year-old miniature donkey called HeeHaw. He had been raised and bottle-fed by his owner, a woman called Hannah Israel. In the early hours…
America is still fighting the wrong war
The al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon constituted one of the great head fakes of history. As on the sporting field, when…
How to save writing from AI
On Sunday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that artificial general intelligence — a computer that can cogitate like the human mind — is already here with OpenAI’s Astra model. If…