Conservatives are wrong about free speech
‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s what I think. It says: ‘Here’s what I think, and, you know what? It’s what...
View ArticleEdward Gorey: master of the macabre
‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet in dactylic couplets of the surreal fates visited on a succession of blameless tots, is...
View ArticleMister Miracle, the cheesiest of all superheroes
Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of all costumed super-heroes. Created by Jack Kirby in 1971, he’s a gaudily dressed glint from the last gleaming of the Silver Age. Like the...
View Article‘Come on, cancel me’: An interview with Bret Easton Ellis
‘I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,’ says Bret Easton Ellis. ‘My class was filled with people from Laura Dern to the girls in Little House on the Prairie. And it always seemed a bit...
View ArticleGothic extremes of human cruelty
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal Lecter in it was 1974. So, ‘hotly anticipated’ is probably the phrase. The good news for...
View ArticleCommon sense is the real generation gap – just ask John Cleese
As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being canceled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have...
View ArticleThe baffling oratory of Jared Kushner
The problem of resolving the tangle of conflict in the Middle East is one that has defeated generations of the world’s most experienced statesmen, and resisted the blandishments of its greatest...
View ArticleWhy Trump’s Fourth of July speech was a botch job
To make a great success of a speech you need timing, what the ancient Greeks called kairos, you need an electric connection with your audience, and you need a bit of luck. President Trump, in his damp...
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Words matter: we must be more honest about language
This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. When I was an English literature undergraduate, we were all very careful to avoid what used to be called the ‘intentional...
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Sordid confessions of a Centrist Dad
I have a shameful secret. I’ve been watching these…videos online. Amazing what you can get in a couple of clicks these days. Being what the Corbynistas deride as a Centrist Dad, I have taken to seeking...
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Who are today’s fictional heroes?
What’s a hero? There are probably at least two answers to that. One is that heroism is a moral quality: to do with courage above all but, in its wider connotations, to do with altruism or...
View Article‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’
James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called ‘the demon dog of American letters’ has no hesitation in affirming it when he...
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Oh Nancy, Nancy!
When I was four, I fell in love for the first time. The object of my affections was Jemima the rag-doll from preschool. That was a trial run. I was seven or eight when I got my first serious crush. She...
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The real Calamity Jane was distressingly unlike her legend
‘This is the West, Sir,’ says a reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ This is very much the advice that has applied to Calamity Jane over the...
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Who is he?
This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend, guitarist...
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There’s no sign of apocalypse in North London — yet
I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the coronavirus. It wasn’t the prospect of one person in 50 dying, I said — or not just that. It was...
View ArticleCoronavirus has made amateur mathematicians of us all
‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your life?’ That’s the frequent complaint of my school-age children, laboring over their times tables...
View ArticleThe wisdom of Salman
‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis,’ Sir Salman Rushdie tells me. ‘The implausible has now become everyday.’ Isn’t this a problem for a writer whose books...
View ArticleHeads in the cloud
‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ You hear a lot of that glibly categorical punditry around the COVID-19 outbreak. Already, the progress of a mindless virus through the human population is being...
View ArticleHow do you enforce anarchy?
I had an argument once, in a pub, with an anarchosyndicalist. We’d both been on the same protest march so we started from a position of, at least in some respects, presumed sympathy. I asked him how on...
View ArticleTom Holland on Christianity’s enduring influence
In this week’s Book Club, my guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it...
View ArticleShe was just a damn cat — and I loved her
I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep to dig, and three feet is how deep you have to go if you don’t want foxes to turn a little...
View ArticleIn defense of wokeness
We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favor of it. In fact, the sharpest pens of the right seem to stab at more or less nothing else these...
View ArticleBarack Obama is the centrist dad’s centrist dad
Well, it’s quite the title, isn’t it? It tends to invite comparisons. The first one that occurred to me, though, was that the original Promised Land guy managed to get all the important stuff down on...
View ArticleFeline intelligence: the complicated world of Mary Gaitskill
In the early 1990s, the American novelist Mary Gaitskill suffered an abrupt awakening. ‘I lived in New York, I didn’t have a television, I didn’t listen to the radio. I didn’t even read magazines or...
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The best video games to buy for Christmas
If there is one thing this cursed year of lockdown has been good for, it’s been video games. The right game — in a way that a box set cannot — will give you a sense of steady progress and achievement,...
View ArticleHow to kill the English language
Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a ‘fronted adverbial’ is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional...
View ArticleSalman Rushdie and the incitement of violence
When I met Salman Rushdie in New York a couple of years ago, he told me that the days in which he feared physical attack were long behind him. “It only affects my life when I talk to journalists,” he...
View ArticleSanna Marin and the rise of fake controversy
With an honorable exception for the Beastie Boys, I can’t stand the use of “party” as a verb. It immediately reminds me of “Party, party, party, oikies!” — the war cry of the drunken potbellied...
View ArticleIs Britain’s new prime minister the next Jeremy Corbyn?
Many years ago, when the earth was young and leaving the European Union was a position espoused only by those trying to stay on the right side of Bill Cash at a drinks party, former British MP Ken...
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Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative
Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: “Do you want to reinvent yourself?” Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: “I can’t reinvent...
View ArticlePrince Harry’s clear-eyed conviction makes him a threat
Watching Prince Harry being interviewed by ITV’s Tom Bradby, one thing was clear: the man is in deadly earnest. He is a true believer. And that, I think, makes him very dangerous to the monarchy...
View ArticleGoldman Sachs and the bloodbath of the elites
Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a...
View ArticleThe Roald Dahl panic is nothing new
Roald Dahl was, in many respects, a horrible man. He was a narcissist, a bully, a liar, an antisemite, a tax-dodger, a faithless husband and — if his daughter’s account is to be believed — a cruel and...
View ArticleAnonymous book reviews and one-way shame culture
Anyone who has ever published a book and been dismayed by an anonymous review online will have cheered inwardly at the story of David Wilson. Professor Wilson is a criminologist and historian who has...
View ArticleMichio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing
If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working...
View ArticleInside the academic publishing grift
Last week witnessed the first tremors of what could be a welcome revolution: the resignation en masse of the forty-strong editorial board of NeuroImage magazine — regarded as the leading publication...
View ArticleWhy I left Elon Musk’s Twitter/X
Twitter was a newswire. That, at least at first, was the point of it. Something that came with all the glamour of digital innovation was, as it turned out, immediately recognizable as a version of...
View ArticleHow to be honest about Israel-Palestine
Qui tacet consentire videtur: who keeps silent is seen to consent. That Latin tag haunts the western response to the situation in Israel. We’re already seeing, amid the rage and grief, people being...
View ArticleThe fake passports operation that rescued thousands during the Holocaust
In the summer of 1942, the Polish poet Władysław Szlengel made a detour into light verse with “The Passports:” “I would like to have a Uruguayan passport/ Oh, what a beautiful land it is/ How nice it...
View ArticleAre Amazon’s entrepreneur-publishers messed up?
Alex Kaplo lives, apparently, the life of Riley. The thirty-one-year-old’s website shows him roaring around in a Mercedes, and he boasts of taking “extravagant” vacations and living in a high-end...
View ArticleHow Fitzcarraldo keeps racking up Nobel Prizes
“Hi Jacques,” I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial hair. “Thanks for making the time.” I explain, apologetically but cheerily, that I’m...
View ArticleCan we fight deepfake porn?
The foul-mouthed puppet musical Avenue Q, way back in 2003, caught the spirit of the age to come. “The internet is for porn!/ The internet is for porn!” runs one of its more memorable songs. “Why do...
View ArticleVideo games are an art form
My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with my wife about video...
View ArticleDavid Cameron’s foreign policy lecture to America was hubristic and...
David Cameron, bless him, is back striding the world stage. He wrote an article last week in Washington’s inside-beltway website the Hill, urging Congress to vote for more aid for Ukraine. The UK...
View ArticleAlone in the Dark is the granddaddy of video games
Grade: A- One thing video games are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles… Gamers of my generation will not have...
View ArticleRishi Sunak’s election speech was terrible
Let’s be fair. It wasn’t Rishi Sunak’s fault it was raining. But it was, a bit, his fault that as someone who has “never been prouder to be British,” and so is presumably familiar with the way weather...
View ArticleThe CrowdStrike crash was a modern earthquake
CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the sense of a bolt from the blue, is exactly what the company produced: millions and...
View ArticleVampire Therapist is simultaneously earnest and winningly ridiculous
Looter-shooters, match-three games, dragons and spaceships… Sometimes you despair of video games doing the same thing again and again — and then a lone developer gets a severe bump on the head and...
View ArticleShould we ban boy bands?
It was Oprah Winfrey, I think, who said that “if you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.” I read that to mean that if you get famous when you are young — get famous...
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