It’s time to get real about gang violence in London
Hey, Londoners — been stabbed or shot yet this week? Just thought I’d check as the place seems to resemble,…
Belly, the band responsible for one of my favourite 90s songs, is back
Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town…
The UN’s sent an envoy to examine Brexit racism. And a warm welcome to her
Another new word, this time from the deranged far-right: incel. This means a chap who is involuntarily celibate because women…
The origins of Labour’s racism
Another word which has gained a new meaning in the present decade, along with ‘vulnerable’ and ‘diverse’: survivor. Once it…
Kylie’s latest album is truly appalling: Golden reviewed
Grade: D– Kylie has a place in my heart for having made the second-best single to feature the chorus ‘na…
A joke about Welsh vowels is a hate crime, say the tuppenny panjandrums
It took four days to actually see the pine marten in the flesh. We caught it on a trail cam…
The DPP’s Alison Saunders was never much cop
An interesting development for our police force, then. In future they do not have to believe everything someone tells them,…
Labour, lizards and the problem of anti-Semitism
There’s a very funny moment in Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists, part of which follows the New Age…
Thank you, West Midlands, for the blind alley of heavy metal – blues without rhythm, wit or soul
They’re still alive, then. Chuggedy-chug, grawk, screech screech, chuggedy-chug. First mention of demons — line one, song two. Song one…
Our response to the nerve gas attack has been an act of self-harm
There was a growling Russian maniac on the BBC’s Today programme last week, an MP from the United Russia party…
Vince Staples is Christian, yet it’s hard to imagine Jesus singing along to GTFOMD
Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record…
Genocide in South Africa: now that’s a black-and-white issue
Last time I was in South Africa I spent two weeks deep in the Karoo, that desiccated wasteland in the…
Italy’s election result shouldn’t be a shock. The populist revolution has just begun
Why aren’t children called Roger any more? I wondered this when reading about the sad death of Sir Roger Bannister.…
Nils Frahm is clever with textures – but it’s the melodies which drag you in
Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has…
The word ‘extremist’ has lost all meaning
A few years ago, in these pages, Matthew Parris defined Ukip as a party of extremists. Perhaps one of his…
Why are businesses like Center Parcs so terrified of a small minority?
I am boycotting Center Parcs. Admittedly, this is not going to have an enormous impact upon my life. It’s a…
Franz Ferdinand take disco and make it rather glorious: Always Ascending reviewed
Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on…
There’s a reason women sell roof tiles in hotpants
I would rather watch flies buzzing around a light bulb for two hours than Formula 1. At least the flies…
Why do sweet, tender young lefties like MGMT love the decade of Reagan and Bush Snr?
Grade: B Horrific memory, flooding back, halfway through the track ‘TSLAMP’ (Time Spent Looking at My Phone). It was the…
Sometimes men deserve to be paid more
It is 100 years since women got the vote and I have been joining in the celebrations, on public transport…
Rod Liddle finds his inner SJW listening to Justin Timberlake
Grade: B– Hey, here comes Justin, the ‘President of Pop’ and ‘one of the greatest all-around entertainers in the history…
Stop trying to make football perfect: it’s the errors that make it fun
They’ve got this new thing in football. It’s called the Video Assistant Referee and it is designed to make the…
Women come last in Labour’s deranged victim hierarchy
I wonder if we are about to see a mass resignation of women from Labour, furious at the party’s collapse…
R&B landfill: Craig David’s The Time is Now reviewed
Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you…
Women’s pay could bankrupt the BBC
I hope you are enjoying the BBC drama series Hard Sun. It is described as pre-apocalyptic science fiction, set in…
