Society

I feel a strange sense of schadenfreude mixed with a heavy dose of terror and uncertainty now that the American people have elected someone with no experience whatsoever who tweets things like this: Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 29, 2014 On the plus side: LOLs at liberals in my timeline. On the minus: Potential global upheaval/depression/war. So, swings and roundabouts. The BBC were just now asking about Trump’s famous plan for a wall with Mexico, still presenting it as a hugely

Who’s more hysterical: the Daily Mail for branding three judges ‘enemies of the people’ or the Dailymailphobes who have spent the past three days promiscuously breaking Godwin’s Law and accusing the Mail of being a paper-and-ink reincarnation of Hitler, an aspiring destroyer of judicial independence, and a menace to British civilisation that ought to be boycotted by all decent people and no longer handed out on British Airways flights because it is ‘against democracy and the rule of law’? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s the latter. And that the irony is delicious: the very people accusing the Mail of being unhinged have themselves given new

M&S is to close more than 80 stores as part of a major business overhaul, The Guardian reports. ‘We have now completed a forensic review of our estate both in the UK and in our international markets,’ said M&S chief executive, Steve Rowe. The move means that the high street chain will retreat from owning stores in 10 countries and reduce its reliance on its poorly performing clothing business, Rowe has already promised to lower its clothing prices and pay more attention to its most loyal group of shoppers. Analysts say these 50-something women had been neglected as the store chased younger shoppers. M&S is shutting 30 UK stores but a further 45

This weekend at the Edenbridge bonfire in Kent, near where I live, an effigy of Donald Trump will be burned. Last weekend, at Halloween, people up and down the land went out dressed up as him, or as a woman being groped by him. It is hard to imagine any American doing anything like this in homage to our own least popular political candidate in a generation, Jeremy Corbyn. And that’s caused me to wonder why, exactly — when we’re so turned off by our own politicians — we are so enthralled by the Donald across the pond. Having watched him trash Hillary, followed him on Twitter and listened to

Staring at a brown envelope, my husband said: ‘I’ll deal with that post-breakfast,’ and then laughed as though he had made a joke. In his mind it was a play on words, the unspoken words being post-Brexit. It is true that no one is safe from that phrase these days. As a compound adjective, it’s not so bad: post-Brexit prosperity. As an adverb, it sounds awkward to me: prices rising post-Brexit. The word Brexit itself was established as more than a passing vogue only after the referendum, I think. It had been invented in 2012, on the pattern of the portmanteau word Grexit ‘Greek exit’, and while the prospect of