Even in New York they’re going nuts over Brexit
At the New Yorker Festival party in mid-October, my astute colleague hardly needed the caution. But you know how at…
Asians are doing too well – they must be stopped
Riddle: when is discrimination against a historically disadvantaged racial minority perfectly legal? Answer: when they do too well. The first…
The world is stuck in a debt trap
I don’t usually get up early just for an appointment at a bank. Yet last Tuesday in New York, I…
Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t
American liberals perceive it as a jarring inconsistency: my opposition to Trump and support for Brexit. Especially outside the UK,…
Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t
American liberals perceive it as a jarring inconsistency: my opposition to Trump and support for Brexit. Especially outside the UK,…
Don’t blame snowflakes – grown-ups are the idiots
San Francisco must be the virtue capital of the world. (The latest: just across the bay, Berkeley’s city council voted…
Contraception is the answer to climate change
When last week’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh.…
All money is dirty – but it can still be used for good
Whitney museum: no space for profiteers of state violence // dismantle patriarchy // warren kanders must go! // supreme injustice…
The best response to hate speech is free speech
There’s a broad mainstream consensus on both sides of the Atlantic: Trump’s tweet telling four hard-left minority Congresswomen to ‘go…
The Democratic debates are proving to be the perfect advert for Trump
I have plenty of shamefaced company in having rashly predicted, as pundits are warned never to do, that Donald Trump…
Where is the Democrat who can take on Trump?
I have plenty of shamefaced company in having rashly predicted, as pundits are warned never to do, that Donald Trump…
When did calorie counting become offensive?
An author of spoofy, light-hearted mysteries, my friend Ruth Dudley Edwards has had unusual difficulty completing her new novel, Death…
No exaggeration: Hyperbole makes words worthless
Saturday night, a guest commentator on Sky News sputtered that Donald Trump has ‘normalised white supremacy’. Once the American President…
Adversity is the new diversity – and it disadvantages everyone
To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this…
Feminism has succeeded – so why don’t we call it quits?
You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female…
We’re all self-haters now
As an American coming of age at the fag end of the 1960s, I celebrated self-loathing. Everything about the United…
Dear Remainer parliament: you won. Now revoke Article 50 – if you dare
Dear Remainer parliament. Although we’re the voters who spurned the petition for this very course of action, we the undersigned…
Imagine the uproar if Remain had won, but MPs then made Britain leave
Sometimes it’s worth addressing what didn’t happen. For one exasperating aspect of appearing on television news is leaving the studio…
If you forgive the IRA, then you must forgive the Parachute Regiment too
In my 2010 short story ‘Prepositions’, a woman has lost her husband not in 9/11 but on 9/11 — when…
Why I hate ‘the n-word’
One of the depressing aspects of writing a column attuned to social hypocrisy is so rarely running short of new…
![Virginia governor Ralph Northam, who is facing calls to resign after admitting he had worn blackface [WIN McNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Ralph_Northam.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Without forgiveness, we’re all doomed
Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was…
Why are we allowing ourselves to be held to ransom by has-been Irish militants?
When politics goes round in circles, the columnist inevitably revisits issues that would have been sorted if only everyone read…
Demography has become the biggest story on the planet
One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too…
Why do authors have to be ‘moral’? Because their publishing contracts tell them so
Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that…
Why flee France?
Pitching your tent for weeks on end in the cold and mud, with no power or plumbing. Running in a…
