Society

Tuesday

David Abulafia

Why is Netflix pretending that Cleopatra was black?

‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’ So asserts a trailer for a new Netflix ‘docuseries’ looking at the lives of powerful women in history. Alas for the speaker, an American of African descent, her grandmother’s idea of historical truth was highly subjective. It was built on an absurd generalisation about all Africans being black, and the regrettable assumption that skin colour is an important criterion for judging people’s merits. No one denies the awful legacy of slavery among African Americans, and the wish to find female African heroines is understandable – but it is also vital to

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU is alienating eastern Europe

For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders to its vassals, into an organisation based on broad consensus between elected governments, it is likely to find itself side-lined or even facing a continental schism. If you were looking for the most inept way to run an organisation like the EU, this comes close The latest illustration of this arises from a sudden glut

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Why is Just Stop Oil targeting the snooker?

Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed – to glue herself to the other table. Both have been arrested. Meanwhile, enraged snooker fans everywhere are trying to work out what on Earth their sport has got to do with climate change. We could speculate. The tournament is sponsored by online used-car dealer Cazoo, which is perhaps particularly complicit in the defilement of

Debbie Hayton

Has the single sex trans school conundrum finally been resolved?

For too long, some teachers and schools have been making it up as they go along when presented with the challenge of accommodating transgender-identified children. Either that or they have contracted out their thinking to Stonewall or other third-party providers. The promised guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) cannot come soon enough. The latest snippet that has emerged will reassure single-sex schools that they can indeed remain single-sex. The rules around such schools have always allowed for some discretion. A boys’ school, for example, might admit a girl into the sixth form if the local girls’ school doesn’t offer her desired combination of A-Level subjects. But nobody would be under any

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Angela Rayner is the odd one out in Starmer’s top team

Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch ahead in the polls. A recent slight crumbliness in that lead has sparked Labour to produce attack ads which use a formulation I hadn’t seen since reading the walls at my primary school, i.e. – ‘Do you think people should wash under their arms? Janet Figgis doesn’t’ – but even these flavourful communications are all

Robin Ashenden

The Internet Archive’s troubles are bad news for book lovers

The Internet Archive (archive.org), a San Francisco-based virtual lending library, is one of the quiet wonders of the modern world. A digital collection of seven million books and nearly 15 million audio-recordings, it was ambitiously intended by its founder Brewster Kahle – a member of the internet ‘Hall of Fame’ – to be a kind of online ‘Library of Alexandria’. The IA loans out its titles free of charge, the main beneficiaries being those who can’t get to a real ‘brick and mortar’ library – the housebound, those living far from cities, or people in need of rare books their own local library doesn’t stock and can’t get hold of quickly

Monday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What will happen to interest rates once they peak?

As the battle of the economic forecasts rages on, it’s useful to note that (right now, anyway), the predictions aren’t all that different. The more optimistic scenarios, like the one published by EY ITEM Club today, suggest the UK will see minuscule growth this year but avoid technical recession. The pessimistic scenarios, like the IMF’s latest forecast, are being revised upwards but still show the UK economy experiencing a short and shallow contraction.  The good and bad scenarios are, therefore, both largely within the margin of error –  and all are pretty lousy at that (albeit better than previously expected). Regardless of which proves right, this is shaping up to

Matthew Lynn

London’s stock market risks sinking into irrelevance

The chip maker ARM decided against listing its shares in London, despite plenty of arm twisting from the government. The building materials group CRH decided last month that New York was a better place for its equity to be traded, leaving the FTSE for good. The mining giant BHP has moved its listing from London to Sydney, while another materials group, Ferguson, switched from London to New York last year. And now hotel group IHG may make the same journey.  At these rates, no one will need the Prime Minister’s new plan to boost numeracy to count the number of companies still listed on the London market. The fingers of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Grenfell survivors can’t copyright their tragedy

Some survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, it was reported yesterday, have taken grave exception to some new dramatisations of the disaster. It seems to me that historical events belong to history: and that means that they are available to news reporters to write about and dramatists to make art about A petition urging the BBC to drop its projected series Grenfell has had more than 50,000 signatures, and there’s anger too at a play being prepared for the National Theatre by the writer Gillian Slovo. ‘Before you do this sort of thing, you should get our permission, because this is our pain, our story,’ said Maryam Adam, who escaped from the burning tower and

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The trouble with censoring Jeeves and Wooster

It would take longer than I’ve got to comb through copies of Thank you, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, to find out the ways in which they’ve been edited, ‘minimally’, to remove offensive language, but I think we can work out which bits may have fallen foul of the thought police. Penguin Random House have informed readers of the latest edition: ‘Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.’  I can only say that, reading Young Men in

Sunday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Belief in God doesn’t come from a fear of death

When I was a teenager someone asked me if I was scared of dying. No, I said, but I’m a bit scared of living. I want to say the same thing to David Baddiel. In his new book The God Desire he seems to be trying to present himself as a more nuanced sort of atheist, whose Judaism allows him to understand the appeal of religion, even as he decides that he is too intellectually honest to believe. But his central thesis strikes me as the very opposite of nuanced. He argues, in line with generations of middlebrow atheists, that the desire to believe in God comes from the fear

Saturday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

What I got wrong about junior doctors

I recently wrote a column elsewhere about the junior doctors strike. As if often the way with this topic, it resulted in some strong and sometimes vituperative reactions.  It also led to many conversations with people in and around medicine.  Some of them thought I’d got things wrong. That’s a reasonable position to take, and it’s often useful to take criticism seriously. So I had a think about the column again, and concluded that there were indeed a few things I could have done better at.   Retention Of the various ‘you’ve got your facts wrong’ critiques of my column, the one I think that has most weight is that I

John Walsh

How boredom begat James Bond

It is sobering to think that if Ann Rothermere had been a less enthusiastic painter, James Bond might never have existed. In January 1952, Lady Rothermere and Bond’s creator Ian Fleming were on holiday at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. Tension crackled in the air. He and Ann had been lovers since 1939. Her husband, Viscount Rothermere, chairman of Associated Newspapers, had recently divorced her. The news had reached the gossip pages of the Daily Express. The scandalous couple had discussed marriage — with some urgency because Ann was pregnant — but Fleming’s expectations of marital bliss were slim. ‘I can promise you nothing,’ he told her. ‘I have not an

James Esses

Trans surgery and the problem with Channel 4’s Naked Education

When Channel 4’s new programme Naked Education – in which adults strip naked in front of children – was launched, it promised viewers it would be ‘all about body positivity’, and that it had a mission to ‘champion our differences and break down stereotypes’.   In the very first episode one of the participants, Martha, stated: ‘you have to accept yourself before you can love yourself’. Self-acceptance, from a therapeutic perspective, is extremely important.  Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the show, which is aimed at children, has already shown its inconsistent ideology. Entire segments are dedicated to individuals who seemingly did everything they could to change their bodies. The show then portrays them as the epitome of self-acceptance. 

Danny Shaw

We can’t rely on the police to clean up mobile phone theft

A call from my younger son’s secondary school was not what I was expecting at 11.30 a.m., but as soon as I heard the secretary speak I knew what had happened to him. He’d just got himself a pair of Apple AirPods and was keen to use them – why wouldn’t he be? As he stepped off the bus, with his new wireless earphones in place, he was followed up the road to the school by two boys. A strategy which targets crime gangs is more likely to yield results than a drive to investigate every phone theft Suddenly, from behind, they made their move, grabbing him in a headlock. It

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why didn’t Beethoven go to Mass?

38 min listen

Ludwig van Beethoven had a profound faith in God. He was born and raised a Catholic and on his deathbed he asked to receive the Last Rites. He told the priest, ‘I thank you, ghostly sir – you have brought me comfort.’ One of his closest friends, Archduke Rudolf of Austria, was made a cardinal (before being ordained priest and bishop, something inconceivable today). To mark Rudolf’s enthronement as Archbishop of Olomouc in 1819, Beethoven wrote a great Mass, and took such trouble over the setting of the Latin words that he delivered the work three years late. Yet, so far as we know, not once did the adult Beethoven

Alexander Larman

Is King Charles bringing Andrew back into the fold?

I am beginning to wonder if there are, in fact, two incarnations of King Charles that co-exist simultaneously. The first is a remarkably generous-spirited and forgiving man, who responds to insults and slights with Christ-like forbearance and shows nothing but a genuine love for his country and his people. And the second is a more flawed and capricious human being, who displays his temper both publicly and in acts of revenge against members of his family who have displeased him. If Charles really has managed to neutralise the two most troublesome and publicity-hungry members of the Firm, it’s a remarkable achievement These personae may appear to be contradictory, but when

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What’s the truth about long Covid?

How big a deal is long Covid and can it be treated? Opinions range from it being a serious impediment to the health of millions of those who suffered from Covid-19 to a figment in the imagination of the workshy. A study by the University of Oxford of a drug developed by US Pharmaceutical company Axcella Therapeutics may just help to shed some light. The drug, AXA1125, is designed to boost the performance of mitochondria, which generate energy for our cells and control the amount of inflammation in the body. It is believed that long Covid causes fatigue – among other symptoms – by inhibiting the mitochondria.    While a drug to treat

Debbie Hayton

Why Daniel Radcliffe is wrong about children changing gender

Daniel Radcliffe has told a group of young people that adults worried about children changing gender have a ‘slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of like, well, people are young and like… that is a huge decision’. The children in this film are being cruelly misled Yes, Daniel, it is a huge decision, and it is one that we should not be putting in front of children. Never before have children been told that they can choose whether to grow up to be a woman or a man. They can’t, of course. Human beings are male or female, a truth determined not by fantasies of the mind but the facts of

Thursday

Jawad Iqbal

York doesn’t need Unesco world heritage status

The Unesco world heritage status award is a curious kind of international beauty contest in which historic locations vie to be anointed worthy of special recognition by a committee of UN cultural bigwigs. This supposedly brings with it some form of wider symbolic cultural validation through international acclaim. In fact what it really brings — indeed the only meaningful outcome — is mass tourism, often to the detriment of the winning locations as well as the people who live there. It is a mystery why anyone thinks this is something that requires obligatory celebration, no questions asked.  Why should anyone living in this great city, one of the great wonders of