Some crimes are so horrific that our instinct is to look away. And there can be few as appalling as those perpetrated by the rape gangs whose activities Dame Louise Casey reported on this week. Girls as young as ten were beaten and sexually abused. They were tortured with baseball bats, knives and meat cleavers.
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs (which he had previously opposed) on the recommendation of Baroness Casey of Blackstock, who had been asked to audit the matter. His announcement came after four men born in Pakistan and three Rochdale-born taxi drivers of Asian descent were
Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more
Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill has generated much talk about the ethics of suicide. As far as the ancients were concerned, it was only in life that you could make your mark. The Christian passion for embracing, even rejoicing at, death made no sense to them. Ancient thinkers generally did not fear an afterlife. Although
Sole survivors A 40-year-old British man, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was the sole survivor of the crash of an Air India jet shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad en route to Gatwick. A surprising number of aircraft disasters have had a sole survivor – at least five others where more than 100 were killed. — On 16
Bad lads Sir: The articles on Britain’s relationship with porn were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. Fascinating in that Louise Perry and Michael Simmons’s contributions (‘Devices and desires’ and ‘Dirty money’, 14 June) provided a thought-provoking analysis of the extraordinary growth of the industry. Frustrating in the juxtaposition of these pieces with Sean Thomas’s
