Society

Sunday

Geoff Norcott Geoff Norcott

Are men really that difficult to buy for?

With Christmas rushing at us like a bull in a Westfield, many blokes of a certain age will have already been told ‘you’re difficult to buy for’. On Christmas Day, while everyone else stacks a nice little pile of desirable things, you often end up the proud owner of some new socks and a 600ml bottle of Peroni (which you aren’t even allowed to drink immediately to numb the disappointment). ‘You’re difficult to buy for’ sails dangerously close to what modern progressives might call ‘victim blaming’. The truth is the present buyer could have given it more thought. They might have looked at what you bought for yourself throughout the

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Don’t cry for Shane MacGowan

Shane MacGowan’s death and his star-studded funeral captured the headlines this week. But the fawning and fanfare felt oddly dissonant to me: was I the only person in the media who never cared for him? I’m used to not holding the same opinions as most people in my profession; this is quite understandable, as only 19 per cent of British journalists were educated at comprehensive schools, as I was, and a minuscule number swerved ‘uni’, as I was blessed to. But I’m sceptical that many of those amongst my people of origin, the English working class, shared the media’s adulation for MacGowan. To us, MacGowan was a phoney: an Irish

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Anti-Semitism is a threat to the West

Down the road from where I live in Islington, the Jewish community put up a menorah in a park on the main shopping street. Islington Green seemed an appropriate spot to mark Hanukkah. It’s the home to the London borough’s memorial to the dead of the second world war who gave their lives to prevent the genocide of European Jewry reaching its conclusion. The menorah was itself destroyed a few days ago in what the local council  a ‘hate crime’ and ‘an anti-Semitic attack’. Does its destruction matter? It is easy to diminish the vandalism, just as it is easy to diminish so much of the aggression Jews have experienced since Hamas massacred Israelis on

Saturday

Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens, Lionel Shriver, Mary Wellesley and more

31 min listen

On this week’s episode, Peter Hitchens remembers a Christmas in Bucharest, Lionel Shriver says people don’t care about Ukraine anymore, Ed West wonders if you can ‘meme’ yourself into believing in God, Mary Wellesley reads her ‘Notes On’ St Nicholas, and Melissa Kite says she had to move to Ireland to escape the EU‘s rules.

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The strange appeal of Integralism

28 min listen

You might imagine that a political project to place modern nation states under the supreme authority of the Catholic Church would stand zero chance of success anywhere in the world, including in traditionally Catholic countries. And you’d be right. Even so, a movement known as Integralism – whose 20th-century incarnations were closely related to fascism – has gripped the imaginations of ultra-conservative Catholics in America, and especially on campuses. The Eastern Orthodox political philosopher Kevin Vallier has written a book, All the Kingdoms of the World, about this bizarre development. It’s thoughtful and fair-minded – but Integralists have not taken kindly to his analysis and Vallier has found himself drawn into

James Heale James Heale

Prince Harry awarded £140,000 in phone hacking case

The High Court has this morning awarded Prince Harry £140,600 in damages after ruling that he was the victim of mobile phone hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN). Mr Justice Fancourt said that the Duke of Sussex’s personal phone was targeted to a ‘modest extent’ by the Mirror papers between 2003 and 2009. However there was ‘extensive’ use of the practice more widely from 2006 to 2011 and ‘even to some extent’ during the Leveson Inquiry into media standards. The court also ruled that Piers Morgan, when he was editor of the Daily Mirror, knew about phone hacking, based on evidence given by Omid Scobie. The Duke of Sussex had

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Hamas is trying to go global

For some years, there has been speculation in security circles about what will replace Islamic State. The terror group was smashed by an American-led coalition five or so years ago – a campaign that incurred, by the way, a heavy civilian death toll but provoked no protests in the west. Although it remains active in Africa and the Middle East, it is no longer the threat that it was. Its absence left a vacuum. The question was what would fill it. Now we may have the answer. Welcome to the era of Hamas International, a period which is likely only beginning. Yesterday, it was revealed that a plot by the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why can’t some Londoners tolerate posters of kidnapped Israelis?

What is it about those images of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas that so infuriates certain sections of the public? Since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October, people have been putting up posters of the hostages in cities across the Western world. And almost everywhere they have been torn down, desecrated, destroyed, binned. The faces of the men, women and children seized by the anti-Semites of Hamas seem to elicit an almost reflexive rage in some passers-by. We’ve seen videos of fuming people clawing at the posters to ensure no part of them survives on our streets. Others have daubed vile and racist insults on them. In Finchley Road in London

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Harry and Meghan named ‘biggest Hollywood losers’

At last, official confirmation that Harry and Meghan are the world’s most unpopular couple – by their local newspaper, no less. This month, Hollywood Reporter has ranked Harry and Meghan among its biggest losers of the year. Still, at least the dynamic duo haven’t sunk completely into irrelevance just yet… Launching a scathing attack on the royal renegades, the magazine speaks for much of LA when it writes that: After a whiny Netflix documentary, a whiny biography (Spare – even the title is a pouty grip) and an inert podcast, the Harry and Meghan brand swelled into a sanctimonious bubble just begging to be popped – and South Park was

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

In search of a second epiphany

When I go home to America next week for Christmas, I’ll go to church – the one my family and I used to attend every Sunday, a few towns over. I visit intermittently throughout the year when I’m back home, but I always go on Christmas Eve. The routine is the same: I sit quietly in the pews, sing along to the carols, and hope to have a second epiphany.   I had my first epiphany – that God exists – when I was a child. This, I’m sure, is the result of having two religious parents who raised me in the church. When I tell my British friends that I

Louise Perry

Alexa, do you love me?

My husband and I got a Peloton bike for the usual reasons: because we were time-poor, money-rich and feeling fat. And we kept using it for the usual reason: because we wanted to please the gorgeous ghosts in the machine. The American fitness brand Peloton employs some of the most beautiful, athletic and charismatic people ever to have lived. Their job is not actually to teach an effective class to the viewers at home on their stationary bikes, or to make their users healthier and slimmer (I have accomplished neither). Rather, it is to give an impression of warmth and intimacy while staring at a silent camera lens in an

Kendall Jenner

How to make an Old Fashioned, by Kendall Jenner

This Old Fashioned is my go-to for the holiday season. The rich and complex flavour of the tequila pairs so well with bitters and orange. It’s made to be savoured and is a classic Old Fashioned with a twist. I made this cocktail with my mom over the summer for National Tequila Day. It has become one of our favourites ever since. Ingredients Preparation Enjoy!

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The literary canon of P.G. Wodehouse

When T.S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, it was seen as a masterpiece of modernism. It was, but it was also a work steeped in cultural tradition. This was made apparent in the ‘Notes on The Waste Land’ with which Eliot supplemented his poem. In them, he glossed its literary echoes – the Upanishads, Dante, Chaucer, Mallory, Shakespeare, etc. Another master of the modern who came to his greatest flourishing between the world wars was P.G. Wodehouse. Though seven years older than Eliot, Wodehouse first achieved real fame at much the same time, after the publication of The Inimitable Jeeves in 1923. Like Eliot’s, his work’s modernity, making

Ian Williams Ian Williams

‘This is a massacre of thoughts’: the exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on his cancellation

This should have been a busy holiday period for the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. His exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery was due to open last month and others were planned in New York, Paris and Berlin. They have all now been cancelled because Ai himself has been cancelled – not by the Chinese Communist party this time, but by the ‘free’ West. Weiwei had posted on X (formerly Twitter) his thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war. However, his comments appeared to more generally attack Jewish influence and power. He wrote: ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world.

Brian Cox

Black holes are changing our understanding of everything

One thing upon which my friend Jeremy Clarke and I always agreed is the value of seeing the world from different points of view. In that sense we partially agreed on everything. This essential skill needs to be learned, and I assert that nature is a wonderful teacher. Perhaps the most surprising and bamboozling example can be found in the study of black holes.   Here are two apparently contradictory properties of black holes. When viewed from the outside, time stops on the event horizon – the boundary that marks the black hole’s edge, beyond which light cannot escape – and anyone attempting to cross into the interior would be seen

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Ivy League universities must be depoliticised

In writing about the RedBird IMI bid for the Telegraph Group and The Spectator, its opponents – your columnist very much included – emphasise the danger that the real buyers, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, could use their purchase to put political or commercial pressure on the British government. But there is also a danger the other way round. If Abu Dhabi owned the titles, I would not put it past any British government (of any party) to put pressure on the Arabs. ‘Look here,’ I can imagine some prime minister saying: ‘Of course, we’d like to sell you a stake in our power stations/electric vehicles/5G networks [or whatever],

Grayson Perry

I’m a Tory trapped in a Labour voter’s body

I’ve been on tour around the UK with my stage show about identity called A Show All About You. In Edinburgh it coincided with the last weekend of my retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy. I dropped in for an hour and sat on a bench so people could come and sit next to me to chat. Someone said on viewing my exhibition, which deals with many social issues, that they could not tell which way I vote. This pleased me. In my stage show I talk a lot about the tense relationship between our conscious intellect and our embodied intuition. I describe myself as a Tory voter trapped in

Yascha Mounk

The case for photo-bombing

A few months ago, I visited Angkor Wat, the majestic temple in present-day Cambodia that once stood at the centre of a vast empire. As the five towers of the palace came into view, I was, despite the intense heat, fully immersed in the beauty of the place. I imagined how excited a visitor from a faraway land in the 12th century, full of anticipation for a meeting at court, would have felt arriving at what was then the largest settlement on Earth. And like that imaginary visitor, I felt propelled forward, impatient to cross the moat that separated me from the edifice, to get a closer look. At that

Nigel Kennedy

Did England lose its mind in the pandemic?

My dog Sonny broke my finger earlier this year. He’s a Chart Polski, which translates as ‘Polish sighthound’, and he’s one of about 700 in the world. I was trying to stop him from going after a deer. Even with a muzzle, he could’ve felled it. Chart Polskis hurl themselves in front of the deer’s legs to trip it with their impossibly strong necks. On this occasion, Sonny, who I named after the boxer Sonny Liston, pulled me down a mountain. Because of my broken finger, I came up with a new temporary playing technique. I figured that if the jazz great Django Reinhardt could play guitar with two fingers, then

Laurie Graham

The hell of putting on a Christmas play

In July, when I was asked to confect ‘another Christmas entertainment’ for my community, I viewed such a distant elephant with equanimity. Like memories of the pain of childbirth, the nightmares of amateur dramatics soon fade. Besides, I’d done this many times and survived to tell the tale. All I needed was to reassemble last year’s cast and then write something for them to perform. A piece of cake.  By October I was seeing things differently. The steepness of the gradient we had to climb was becoming all too clear. Amateur dramatics are held together by string and paperclips. There are no understudies Very few of this year’s cast are