George Orwell
How two literary magazines boosted morale during the Blitz
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…
How the International Brigades were ‘thrown into the heart of the fire’
During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight…
Is this the end of history?
Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters: ‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill…
Pure poison: BBC1’s Talking Heads reviewed
The big mistake people make with Alan Bennett is to conflate him with his fellow Yorkshireman David Hockney. But whereas…
Society isn’t systemically racist. It is systemically woke
Structural, systemic, systematically — we’re hearing these words a lot at the moment. Racism isn’t individual. It is structural or…
There’s nothing equal about this virus
Filthy germ-laden townsfolk were out and about on the footpaths near my home on Easter Sunday, dragging with them their…
No lockdown, please, we’re Swedish
There’s no lockdown in sight here
Coronavirus shouldn't be used as an excuse to expand the state
Since this is the nearest most of us have ever got to living under the Blitz, I’ve been re-reading George…
Radio 4's new H.P. Lovecraft adaptation will give you the chills
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the……
George Orwell would have been a Brexiteer
I’ve been reading a new biography of George Orwell that’s been published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of his…
What would George Orwell make of Brexit?
In the London Review of Books this month, James Meek wrote a long article about Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ‘curious duality’ in…
The royals should embody virtue – not signal it
ONE should not be censorious if the Duke and Duchess of Sussex fly in private jets to their holidays, though…
Novel explosives of the Cold War
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by…
History holds far fewer lessons for Brexit than both sides think
How we love bringing history into our political debates. It may seem strange in a country where so little history…
China’s surveillance technology is terrifying – and on show in London
I was recently treated to a small taste of the real China. It was in the incongruous setting of a…
Dying buddleias on railway lines are what excite the new nature writer
A parliament of owls. A gaggle of geese. A convocation of eagles. But what is the generic term for the…
Cabbages and kings
The first pastry cook Chaïm Soutine painted came out like a collapsed soufflé. The sitter for ‘The Pastry Cook’ (c.1919)…
Labour must stop feeling repulsed by the idea of Englishness
My party needs to stop being scared of patriotism
Down and Out in Paris and London is a chav safari
Down and Out in Paris and London is a brilliant specimen from a disreputable branch of writing: the chav safari,…
Long may we Brits laugh at our absurd demagogues
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of…
I became a Conservative thanks to a little winged rabbit called Pookie
His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite…
Aphorisms and the arts: from Aristotle to Oscar Wilde
The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and…
Close encounters on the starship Enterprise
For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’…
David Astor: the saintly, tormented man who remade the Observer
Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor…
All washed up: Birmingham after the apocalypse
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
