All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number two: Sean Thomas’s piece from May on Karahan Tape. I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon,
When Lionel Messi won the World Cup for Argentina earlier this month, it not only filled the last hole in his trophy cabinet, it also seemed to end the debate over who was the greatest footballer of all time. Football fans have debated for years about whether Messi was equal to Pelé and Diego Maradona,
These days it seems that nobody can ever get through to their doctors’ practice. But one GP surgery left their patients wishing that was still the case this week after accidentally texting them to inform that they had aggressive lung cancer – instead of wishing them a merry Christmas. Askern Medical Practice in Doncaster sent
Is it supposed to be enough for those of us of a culturally and socially conservative persuasion to know that some Tory MPs share our outlook? Are we meant to look back over the radical left’s march through the public realm during these past 12 years of Tory-led governments and think: ‘Well, at least some Conservative MPs
A new year beckons but old habits die hard. So it’s no surprise then that the SNP have opted to begin 2023 by welcoming one of their disgraced brethren back into the fold. Patrick Grady, the party’s former chief whip, has this morning had the SNP whip restored at Westminster – despite being found to
A good history book generates in the mind of its readers a series of visual images of people, places and events, blurry and perhaps not very accurate, but nevertheless the sort of thing that can be held in the memory. Television history challenges this because it provides ready-made versions of many of the visuals, and
And you thought 2021 was crazy. It’s been another remarkable 12 months in British politics: three Prime Ministers, the death of the Queen, a year that began with Covid that ends with a cost of living crisis. Abroad, there’s been Putin’s war in Ukraine, China’s rumblings over Taiwan, the Qatari World Cup and soaring inflation
If you ask a typical member of the Conservative party what they want Britain to look like, you’ll get the usual list: low taxes, high growth, strong borders, low crime, sensible regulation, green countryside. If you ask a Conservative MP how Britain might achieve these things, you’ll get a long list of excuses: it simply can’t be done, it’s
‘Racist’ read the spray-painted epithet on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square following a climate protest in 2020. This brutal assessment of Britain’s wartime leader wasn’t a one-off: ‘Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one,’ says the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. In recent years, a movement to ‘tell
We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number three: Freddy Gray’s piece from September on Meghan and Harry’s return to Britain. We’ve all spent months bracing ourselves for what our leaders assure us will be a dreadful winter. As the weather turns, we can look forward to ruinous
Quit your job, leave the country, move to Australia. This may once have sounded like a hastily-planned midlife crisis, but in 2023 these life plans are more representative of doctors’ across the country. Four in ten junior doctors plan to leave the NHS as soon as they can find another job, a survey by the
I spend a lot of my time fantasising about the death of the Conservative Party. I like to picture election night 2024 and Huw Edwards struggling to keep up with the mounting Tory defeats: ‘Labour gains Chingford from Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of — Wait, I’m being told Labour has also gained Chipping Barnet.
Is there any weather condition which cannot be blamed on anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? No, it seems, judging by the reaction in the US liberal press to the snowstorm which has engulfed much of the US over the past few days. According to Bloomberg it is all down to a loopier-than-normal jet stream, “the kind of
I grew up in a traditional English family, surrounded by cousins, chivvied by aunts, presided over by my grandmother, who insisted on Sunday church. We weren’t religious but Anglicanism (of a 19th-century sort) was in the air. We read the Revd Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and if I thought about Jesus it
If Meghan Markle’s army of digital defenders didn’t exist, we’d have to make them up. Otherwise, the never-ending controversy over Harry & Meghan, the royal-couple-turned-Netflix-show, would not really be controversial — and all the tens of thousands of media articles, such as the one you are now reading, would be not just pointless but defunct.
The political movement that led to Iran’s first constitution in 1906 – which established the country’s first parliament – was underpinned by an intellectual revolution which absorbed and adapted ideas from the European Enlightenment. How these ideas came to influence Iran, given the absence of a print industry in the country, is a question that has long intrigued
The relationship entertained by French elites to their homeland is very different from their English counterparts. ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’, wrote George Orwell in 1945. That derisory sentiment continues today among Britain’s urban elites. French elites by contrast – though they can be highly
They’re tricky things to get right, Christmas specials. Ideally, they should capture in one perfectly judged episode the very essence of everything you found wonderful about your favourite classic sitcom, be it The Royle Family, Father Ted or Peep Show, all dusted with the lightest sprinkle of tinsel, icing sugar and nostalgia. But if they
We have become used to the erosion of academic freedom in the humanities and social sciences. It is no longer surprising to find that a Gender Studies department holds the institutional view that it is racist and colonialist to say that sex is binary, or promotes a student essay which fantasises about holding a knife
Whatever happened to the economic boom that was supposed to follow the Covid pandemic? The 2020s, some argued, would be like the 1920s, with an economy roaring its way out of recession, to be remembered as a time of unprecedented wealth and opportunity. That is not how things have turned out so far. While economic growth
A winter of discontent is underway in Europe. Germany, France and Britain are the biggest economies in Europe: all face a battle to keep the lights on over the coming months. There are warnings of energy rationing, blackouts and the forced closure of factories as the continent weans itself off Russian gas. How did it
We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number four: Sadie Nicholas’s piece from earlier this month on wood-burners. Of all the money we’ve spent on our barn conversion since we moved in 13 years ago, the wood-burner we installed in our living room trumps bathrooms, oak flooring and
There are many annoying things about the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, but none of them grates my gears as much as the media’s obsequiousness towards him. I suspect that his political campaigning is largely a self-serving gimmick to keep the Jamie Oliver brand in the public eye, but that is besides the point. The point
It’s a bit of a late entry for phrase of the year, but the term ‘nepo babies’ has captured attention this week. It was first used in this article in New York magazine to describe the children of celebrities cushioned by their parents’ famous name. Lucy Fisher, chief political commentator for Times Radio, has also
Our naturally centrist and establishment-minded Conservative prime minister trails Labour badly in the polls even though the electorate is at best lukewarm about the leader of the opposition. Former Tory voters are drifting away, outraged about a perceived abandonment of sound Conservative principles and European interference in the immigration system. Economic austerity may have convinced
At New Year 1992, the USSR ceased to exist and Russia and the other Soviet republics became independent states. Western powers pondered how to deal with the new world order. Their immediate concern was to seek reassurance about the safe control of nuclear weaponry. The Russian authorities managed to sedate these worries, and by the
The Top Gun series received generous support from the US Navy because it was such an effective recruitment tool. I wonder if something similar went on between the CIA and Netflix’s new series The Recruit, this time as an exercise in reputation management. ‘There’s nothing sinister or threatening about the Company,’ this bizarre, horribly ill-judged
Is there anything good to be said of British rule over India? The verdict of many politicians, museum curators, TV presenters and even journalists in India is clear: the Raj existed only to exploit and oppress. It caused poverty and famine in the east, and made the western world richer. The writer and politician Shashi
Britain’s ageing health infrastructure comes close to breaking point every winter, but this year something is going to give way. On top of the usual litany of complaints about funding and increasing demand on the NHS from an older population, we can add covid backlogs, waiting times stretching into multiples of nominal targets – and
We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number five: Petronella Wyatt’s piece from earlier this month on Lady Susan Hussey. Lady Susan Hussey resigned from the Royal household yesterday after 60 years of loyal service to King and Country. Lady Susan, who is 83, has survived world crises,
Almost as soon as the war in Ukraine began, strange things started to happen in Russia. Buildings connected to the country’s military and its war effort caught fire, saboteurs were suspected – and occasionally caught, according to state TV – and recently, air bases quite far away from Ukraine have started to blow up. All
The Tories are finally coming to see what has long been plain to the rest of us: Rishi Sunak is a dud. He’s not a walking catastrophe like Liz Truss but he’s hopelessly out of touch, helplessly out of his depth and has no plan for turning things around. His conversation with a homeless man
Boxing Day: a time for gifts, shopping and fox hunting – traditionally on horse back, unless you’re Jolyon Maugham KC. These days of course, the actual hunt is nothing more than trail hunting, with hounds following a scent-based trail rather than live animals. But for some in Keir Starmer’s new-fangled Labour party, even that goes
Few people in Britain know that Boxing Day is kept by the Christian churches as the feast of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. But if they do know, it is not because they have a great familiarity with the church calendar. Many today do not even know, after all, what Christians commemorate at Easter, let
