Society
Why I admire the Church of England
The Algerian government’s official tourist guide describes ‘the walled town of Beni Isguen — normally closed to foreigners — where…
Did my father predict the populist revolts of the last year?
I’ve just made a programme for Radio 4 about the populist revolts that swept Britain and America last year. Were…
Cameron's sinister purge of the posh
Should employees be judged by their parents’ income?
Charles Moore’s Notes: cheap trickery in the Economist’s assisted dying campaign
Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about…
Hayek was right: you can’t understand society without evolution
In December the controversial satellite TV channel ReallyTV launches its Christmas season with a flagship reality show called From Homs to…
The moral case for gentrification
To gentrify or not to gentrify. That is the question, says Stephen Bayley
Nicky Haslam’s diary: Marie-Anna Berta Felicie Johanna Ghislaine Theodora Huberta Georgina Helene Genoveva and other big names
I was once bundled into a police car in Palm Springs to explain why I didn’t have snow-tyres on my…
Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision
Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…
Owen Jones’s new book should be called The Consensus: And How I Want to Change it
Owen Jones’s first book, Chavs, was a political bestseller. This follow-up skips over the middle classes and goes to the…
Lessons from Tina Brown on the art of failing upwards
Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I…
E.O. Wilson has a new explanation for consciousness, art & religion. Is it credible?
His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work…
The unfair sex - how feminism created a new class divide
The rise of working women has created a new – and far less equal – world
They’re all in it together
Ferdinand Mount is right to be shocked by the inequalities of modern British society; but his remedies are not brutal enough, says Polly Toynbee
The frontiers of freedom
The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read…
A time to moan and weep
Ferdinand Mount recalls the crisis years of the early 1970s, when Britain was pronounced ‘ungovernable’
Physical and spiritual decay
The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’ susceptibility to physical decay.
An ideal banker
At last, thirty years after his death, we have a proper biography of the enigmatic but inspirational banker Siegmund Warburg, extensively researched and beautifully written.
Whither America?
At the beginning of The Ask, Horace sits with Burke and proclaims that America is a ‘run down and demented pimp’.
Odd men out
The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future.
Golden youth or electric eel?
Patrick Shaw-Stewart was the cleverest and the most ambitious of the gilded gang of young men who swam in the wake of the not-so-young but perennially youthful Raymond Asquith.
Blood relatives
The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy.
Genetics, God and antlers
‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ Oren Harman uses this quote from Immanuel Kant to open one of the chapters of The Price of Altruism, and it’s an observation that — after the steady reflection on moral law that Harman’s book invites and encourages — only seems more true by the end.
Low dishonest dealings
The strange, unsettled decades between the wars form the backdrop of much of D. J. Taylor’s recent work, including his novel, Ask Alice, and his social history, Bright Young Things. At the Chime of a City Clock is set in 1931, with a financial crisis rumbling in the background.
Anything for a quiet life
Jim, Crace’s latest novel, All That Follows, marks a deliberate change from past form.
The spaced-out years
Barry Miles came to London in the Sixties to escape the horsey torpor of the Cotswolds in which he grew up.
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