Society

Sir Roger Penrose was at school when he realised that his mind worked in an unusual way. ‘I thought, maybe when I go to university, I’ll find people who think like me,’ he tells me, at the beginning of what was to be a fascinating conversation, stretching long into the afternoon. ‘But it wasn’t like that at all. When I would talk to someone about an idea, I found myself not understanding a word they were saying.’ Just after we spoke, in early December, Penrose received the Nobel Prize in Physics, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he should think a little differently. But, as he explained it to me,

Can the National Trust dumb down any further? Its latest crazed venture, the Colonial Countryside project, is ‘a child-led history and writing project’, working with 100 primary school pupils, 16 historians and ten commissioned writers. The aim is to ensure that ‘robustly researched stories of empire are communicated’. So here comes another highly politicised scheme – in the light of its disastrous LGBTQ campaign, forcing volunteers to wear rainbow badges, and outing the owner of one of its great houses, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, who bequeathed Felbrigg Hall to the Trust. As Charles Moore writes in his Telegraph column this week, the experts on the colonial project are of a predictable,

That the Home Office compiled a report on the political hot potato of child grooming gangs and then actually published it represents progress of a sort. Were you especially charitably disposed towards the department, you could call to mind Dr Johnson talking about the feat of a dog walking on its hind legs: ‘It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ So credit is due to Home Secretary Priti Patel for doggedly battling to ensure that ‘Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation – Characteristics of Offending’ ever saw the light of day. But when it comes to expecting her civil servants to answer the question

Is it possible to ‘deradicalise’ terrorists? Jonathan Hall QC, the government’s terror watchdog, doesn’t think so. He may have a point, but it’s complicated. One of the institutional problems we have is a sort of misplaced arrogance based, in part, on the historic experience of counter-insurgency against violent Irish republicans. Until quite recently, the Ministry of Justice press office referred to our prison deradicalisation processes as ‘world-class.’ Hall himself only recently began looking at our distinctly Heath-Robinson terrorist risk management ‘system’ after London Bridge killer Usman Khan ran rings around it. Having enumerated its many obvious defects, he bizarrely concluded it was pretty much fit for purpose. The IRA were enthusiastic human rights violators — but not even

You could smell the stale popcorn and rancid carpet from the other end of the high street but that unmistakable Odeon odour always set my pulse racing. That was before we lost the vast art deco interior to corporate greed and short sightedness. The carving up of the beautifully ornate auditorium into three miniscule screens ruined the ‘going to the pictures’ experience. It became a sad portent of things to come.  A couple of years after the needless vandalism, not one but two hangar-sized multiplexes landed on the outskirts of town rendering the old inner-city Odeon obsolete. For several years, my beloved fleapit stood like a towering 1930s headstone to

It’s been a beast of a year, hasn’t it? This morning my father-in-law died of Covid in Pristina, and it’s only when it comes right home to you that you’re reminded how real and immediate the threat from that spiteful little virus is. The reason I’m writing about this personal loss is that I worry that the whole Covid situation has been politicised, even while the vaccine is finally coming into play. You don’t get points for being defiant towards Covid-19; it really doesn’t care As lots of people have already observed, it’s turned into a left-right issue, with many liberals wanting to close things down and many conservatives wanting