culture wars
How the Jilly Cooper Book Club turned toxic
The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book…
It rarely pays to be ahead of your time
Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the…
Could J.K. Rowling be Oxford’s next chancellor?
Among my generation of Oxford graduates – late fifties, early sixties – there is currently a great deal of talk…
The game’s up for ‘anti-racist’ racism
There are only a few rules to column-writing. One of the strictest is never to waste time bouncing off the…
Keep your politics à la carte
It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in…
Prince Charming is cancelled
The only strikes I really enjoy are actors’ strikes. Teachers’ strikes leave me cold. Train strikes get me into a…
How the West plays up to Putin’s caricature
In an outstanding article in the New York Times, Roger Cohen recounted his experience of travelling across Russia for a…
The chromosome-thin line between ensuring civil discourse and policing the opinion corridor
The Australian’s online comments moderation is at the risk of falling into the trap of censorship of ideas and debate…
The problem with being anti-woke
I’m going to do something that will likely annoy you, dear reader: I am going to make an argument about a…
Kemi Badenoch: the curriculum does not need ‘decolonising’
When the government published a report last year by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) into racism in the…
The astonishing stories behind today’s culture wars: Radio 4’s Things Fell Apart reviewed
Martin McNamara, the writer of Mosley Must Fall, a play on Radio 4 this week, must have had a jolt…
I’ve been back one week and the good old US of A has never seemed more depressing
New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot…
America’s campus culture wars come for St Andrews
The University of St Andrews has been keen on American imports for some time. Americans make up 16 per cent…
I loved prison
Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy: all cleaned up and retaining only the good parts. The wife tells…
The economic illiteracy of anti-capitalists
Back in October, World Bank chief economist Carmen Reinhart recommended that countries borrow heavily during the pandemic. ‘First, you worry…
Pimlico Academy and the politicisation of the playground
The strange tale of Pimlico Academy, the central London school roiled by ‘anti-racist’ protests, shows us that the culture war…
The school that made an American century
New York With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the…
Is it time to cancel Sophocles?
Gstaad The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to…
My advice to Trump supporters? Smile and take it
New York There are times, living in this here dump, when I doubt if anyone’s heard of the word magnanimity.…
My week with the baying Antifa mob
Portland, Oregon In the days when you could still watch a nature documentary without feeling as if you were sitting…
New York is a paradise for criminals
New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The…
In defence of wokeness
We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of…
How to beat cancel culture
One of the most extraordinary features of the ‘cancel culture’ is how well it works. All decent people hate it,…
The Dragon school’s bizarre decision to ban Gunga Din
Why do schools want to erase the past?
We are living through a frenzy of conformity
Reality seems thinner these days. As I walk along the high street, passers-by drift apart as though afraid of crossing…
