Society

It seems to have become an unspoken requirement of recent that anyone in charge of promoting or putting on the plays of Shakespeare must first of all hate him and his works. We have long grown accustomed to the Royal Shakespeare Company prefacing his plays with trigger warnings reminding us of what a terrible man he was, that his works contain all manner of bigotry, sexism and racism. So it was no surprise to read yesterday that his birthplace is now being ‘decolonised’, in response to concerns that the playwright is being used to promote ‘white supremacy’. According to the Sunday Telegraph, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns buildings connected

What springs to mind when you think of the Falklands? You might imagine the wild, windswept landscape, sparsely populated by the sheep-farming communities that have made the Islands their home for nearly 200 years. Those of my vintage will recall grainy television images of the war in 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent visit, and grateful islanders speaking to her in accents that sounded like a mixture of West Country and Kiwi. And those fortunate enough to have visited (I’ve had that privilege several times) will recall the sheer Britishness of the place, with a Victorian cathedral that wouldn’t be out of place in rural Somerset, pubs to help weary travellers just

An American influencer called Sam Jones has been roundly denounced after she posted a video of her snatching a wild baby wombat from its distressed mother in Australia. The video, since deleted, showed Jones picking up a joey by the road and running with it to a car, while its poor mother ran after them. A man can be heard laughing callously as he films, saying: ‘Look at the mother, it’s chasing after her!’ Social media users, conservationists, animal rights campaigners, and even Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, have condemned Jones, who has now left Australia voluntarily amid calls for her deportation. It’s easy to see why so many people

‘Success’, Winston Churchill supposedly once remarked, ‘is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ If this is indeed the case, then Meghan Markle’s 2025 thus far represents a remarkable series of triumphs and victories. After her recent Netflix series With Love, Meghan received reviews that ranged from the merely sarcastic and rude to the positively vituperative, it was promptly renewed for a second series. Never mind that the second instalment was commissioned (and filmed) at the same time as the first, or that the ratings for the much-maligned show have been considerably worse than Netflix’s Harry and Meghan, there will be more of the Duchess