There has seldom been a time when responsible, intelligent people were less interested in serious politics. The main opposition, gripped by some Freudian delusion because reality is too hard to bear, behaves as if it were still the government and so cannot oppose or even think about doing so. The discourse of the mainstream parties
The chances are that if you’re nearing 30, you have begun to feel the itch of dissatisfaction. You’ve struggled to find the perfect profession, job, partner and home, but have failed in at least one respect, and are suffering from a sense of existential disgruntlement that is becoming known as the quarter-life crisis. But however
If there is a crisis in a remote place, and governments, newspapers and aid agencies start to agitate for ‘action’, you naturally begin to suspect that much of the information you are being fed is false. When Tony Blair starts talking about intervention, your suspicion turns into virtual certainty. This is not necessarily because journalists,
The world is, we are told day after day, week after week, going to hell in a handcart. After the most brutal, catastrophic and inhuman century in history, the new millennium has kicked off in the way it clearly intends to go on. War, famine and pestilence stalk the savannahs and forests of Africa. The
Mummies have exerted a strange fascination over Westerners ever since the first tomb was rifled and its contents transported to Europe. At one point, the unwrapping of mummified bodies became fashionable events to which came fee-paying audiences of the rich. Lord Londesborough’s At Home card, for Monday, 10 June 1850, was a numbered invitation to
Young men are being bullied into examining themselves for testicular cancer. It’s not very dignified, says Brendan O’Neill, and may do more harm than good Why is New Britain so obsessed with its young men’s testicles? If, like me, you are aged between 15 and 34 you will almost certainly have been advised by a
Ross Clark says that if the government were to mount a real fight, we could defeat the animal rights terrorists — and prevent unnecessary suffering in the laboratories Besides the hefty clunk of The Spectator on your doormat this week, you will shortly be receiving HMG’s advice on how citizens should cope with a terrorist
Much as I sympathise with those caught up in petty local government bureaucracy, every so often there emerges a sob story which somehow fails to tug the heartstrings. Last week in the Daily Mail, cancer fundraiser Ipek Williamson was moaning that Cotswold District Council had wiped out the profit from a garden party she had
Rachel Johnson on why so many children’s books are about sex (or ‘shagging’) and hard-core social issues ‘I sit on the toilet, pushing it all into my hand, and then I paint the walls brown. Brown to wash out the white of my anger. Brown to make them hate me. Oh, how they hate me.
There’s no plot, says Anthony Browne: Islam really does want to conquer the world. That’s because Muslims, unlike many Christians, actually believe they are right, and that their religion is the path to salvation for all A year ago I had lunch with an eminent figure who asked if I thought she was mad. ‘No,’
Last year nearly 400 people died waiting for a transplant, says Candida Moss. ‘Presumed consent’ could have saved their lives I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease in August 1996, when I was 17. Twenty minutes before the diagnosis I was on top of the world: I had just passed my A-levels and was looking
Pictures are more powerful than principles. A few weeks ago, newspapers published photographs of a 12-week-old male foetus. It was not a blob of tissue but a proto-human. Yet for a further 12 weeks after the pictures were taken it would have been legal to kill this pre-baby in the womb. Other stories appeared. A
It is curious sometimes how life comes full circle. Exactly a year ago I was sitting in an office at the BBC, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. As I write this, I am sitting in an office at the BBC, waiting to be interviewed, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. Their task
If you were to wander round the Luc Tuymans exhibition at Tate Modern (until 26 September) without any previous knowledge of the artist (and with a disinclination to read the information panels), you might come away with the impression that here was a rather traditional painter, eclectic as to subject matter, with a distinctively pale,
Brendan O’Neill says that America’s first gift to Iraq has been the compensation culture and a flood of personal injury claims Whatever you think about democracy and human rights, the Coalition successfully imported one thing from the West into post-Saddam Iraq — the compensation culture. Iraq has become a hotbed of legal claims and counterclaims,
Michael Crick and Martin Rosenbaum reveal the lengths to which some people will go to record their names in Britain’s foremost work of biographical reference One of Britain’s most secretive and mysterious intelligence-gathering operations is based inside a small, nondescript office block in St Anne’s Court, a short passageway in Soho. The predominantly female staff
A blog by Melanie Phillips posted on 28 January 2011 reported an allegation that Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, had been expelled from Israel and dismissed for misconduct from Government service or the EU after threatening a journalist whose email he had unlawfully intercepted. We accept that this allegation is completely false and we
It’s not good enough for the Tories to pinch Labour policies, says Simon Heffer. They must appeal to the people on the economy, education, drugs, immigration and Europe A shadow minister said to me last week, ‘We might have a more credible leader now, but we have less credible policies.’ We were talking after the
Charles Clover says that there’s only one way to beat the celebrity chefs who are wiping out every endangered fish in the sea: take a trip to McDonald’s In a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans, comparable to what Stone Age man did to the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger,
Mark Glazebrook on a magnificent exhibition of work by ‘Big George’ in Vienna Giorgione! A name to conjure with. Other names such as Vasari, Byron and Walter Pater have conjured with the Zorzi, Zorzo or Zorzon of contemporary documents, the exceptionally talented painter who died in his early thirties in 1510, the legendary Big George,