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Anyone who has allowed themselves to spend time on TikTok – to say nothing of those who have ever looked at porn on the internet – will have an inkling of the vortex that lurks. Even for those of us who have so far resisted full-blown internet addiction, the ever growing appetite can never be satisfied for more than a second or two. Gen Z, as we know, has been more shaped by these dynamics than anyone else. This has produced well-documented traits such as extreme sensitivity and apparent inability to cope with criticism or challenge; social anxiety leading to a lack of interest in spending time with others in

One of the first articles I wrote for The Spectator back in 2011 described the explosive celebration of Bonfire Night in Lewes, the ancient county town of East Sussex where I then lived. Today, such is the relentless march of purse-lipped Wokedom, it is necessary – in writing about this eccentric folk festival – to defend its very existence as well. The simple survival of ‘Bonfire’ (as it is known to Lewesians) every 5 November is in fact something of a miracle in our painfully politically correct age. In its contemporary form it originated in the 1840s, when the first of the town’s seven Bonfire Societies was founded to ritually

As the S-Bahn tram slid along Bernauer Straße, through its windows I could see tourists posing for photos beside the remains of the Berlin Wall. Everyone fixates on the border that cut through West and East Berlin. We forget that Berlin itself was deep in the GDR and that hundreds of kilometres to the west another border ran down the entire seam of West and East Germany. Observation Post Alpha, the West’s most important military observation post on that border, still stands today as a memorial to the folly of geopolitical games. It was erected to overlook the so-called Fulda Gap, an area of land deemed strategically vital by the