Lionel Shriver

What did Hamas think was going to happen?

4 November 2023 9:00 am

Much misfortune the woebegone couldn’t have seen coming: a raging fire in the house next door that spreads to yours.…

Keep your politics à la carte

21 October 2023 9:00 am

It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in…

I’m leaving Britain – and I feel guilty

7 October 2023 9:00 am

I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by…

Shoplifters need to feel shame

23 September 2023 9:00 am

This is my brother’s story and, like many telling stories, it’s small. Tim lives in Iowa, as our mother’s family…

Children need protection from adult madness

9 September 2023 9:00 am

The Texas Supreme Court just upheld a state law banning so-called gender-affirming care for minors, to explosive consternation from predictable…

Therapy has turned on itself

26 August 2023 9:00 am

Were I to overcome a lifelong scepticism about the healing powers of talk therapy, I imagine languishing on a psychiatrist’s…

How the West plays up to Putin’s caricature

12 August 2023 9:00 am

In an outstanding article in the New York Times, Roger Cohen recounted his experience of travelling across Russia for a…

The problem with the Bibby Stockholm barge

29 July 2023 9:00 am

For British taxpayers perturbed by their £6 million daily bill for housing asylum seekers in hotels, New York City mayor…

Heritable guilt is in vogue

15 July 2023 9:00 am

I made a poor excuse for a Presbyterian even as a kid. I resented religious indoctrination every precious school-free Sunday.…

The unspeakable truth about housing

1 July 2023 9:00 am

Earlier this year I was a panellist for Any Questions, and a young man in the audience asked what could…

The truth about ‘affirmative action’

30 June 2023 6:14 pm

I’ve never cared for the expression ‘affirmative action’, which puts a positive spin on a negative practice: naked, institutionalised racial…

The weather isn’t ‘climate change’

17 June 2023 9:00 am

I was in New York while the smoke from Canadian wildfires filtered over the city for three days last week,…

The case against Ulez – by a cyclist

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Whether you’re more afraid of the forces of order or the forces of chaos is generally a matter of disposition.…

The myths around immigration

20 May 2023 9:00 am

After the media bigged up the expiration of America’s Covid-era Title 42, which enabled the US to block entries into…

I’m a sucker for Tucker Carlson

6 May 2023 9:00 am

I was asked on Tucker Carlson Tonight only once, while in New York about two years ago, and I turned…

How to lose sales and alienate people

22 April 2023 9:00 am

In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’…

Why Democrats want Trump

8 April 2023 9:00 am

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of an even more prominent fat man seems a big win for Donald Trump,…

The high price of low interest rates

25 March 2023 9:00 am

You’ll recall that I’ve railed for years against zero interest rates, which transplanted a cancerous marrow into the very bones…

Despotic social controls cost lives

11 March 2023 9:00 am

Look, I realise you don’t want to read this column. I’m unenthusiastic about writing it. For most of us, any…

My list of banned words

25 February 2023 9:00 am

North America’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project has released yet another list of Bad Say. Scientists are to swap…

The pervasive timorousness of publishing

11 February 2023 9:00 am

After publishing 17 books, I’m no stranger to the publicity campaign. In my no-name days, my publicist would purr that…

The war against words

28 January 2023 9:00 am

The University of Washington technology department has banned the word ‘housekeeping’. Not because the ‘problematic’ noun is overtly ist (ableist,…