Freddy Gray

So England are out the World Cup; the Three Lions rolled over – and we can expect plenty more gloomy Anglo introspection about failings over the coming days. But Alex Salmond must be even more gutted than anyone south of the Border. Over at SNP HQ, they would have been cheering England’s boys on like

How will history remember this week? Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was seized by ISIS, an army of fanatics who like crucifying people, among other activities, and who reportedly have British Muslims among their ranks. This was more evidence that Iraq — far from flowering into a beautiful democracy after the allied invasion of 2003

Statins are in the news – again. A few weeks ago, reports appeared across the media suggesting that statins truly were the wonder-drug of our time – and that the alleged adverse side-effects associated with their consumption had been greatly exaggerated. This backed up the latest research from the National Institute for Health and Care

Liberal secularists don’t like faith schools. Obviously. When confronted with stories of Islamists overtaking state schools in Birmingham, they have no difficulty diagnosing the problem. It’s not an Islam issue, or an extremism issue — it’s faith schools. Faith schooling is where the rot starts, even if these Islamified academies are not actually faith schools.

Summer is a difficult time for serious investments — it’s hard to be rational when hot — so why not try betting on the football world cup instead? Thanks to technology, sports gambling can feel a lot like investing these days. Internet betting exchanges are not bookmakers, but trading platforms. Any adult can buy or

Are the advocates of abortion going mad? Look at Emily Letts, a 25-year-old abortion counsellor, who decided to film her own ‘procedure’ to show what a wonderful life-affirming experience getting rid of your unwanted pregnancy can be. Cosmopolitan magazine has published the film online along with an article by Letts, who says ‘every time I

How do you sound clever and au courant in 2014? Easy. You talk knowingly about Capital in the 21st Century, the seminal, magisterial, definitive, landmark, pick-your-coverblurb-adjective book by French academic Thomas Piketty. It’s all about the growing gap between rich and poor, you see, and inequality is all the rage. No wonder: it’s fun to

These online crypto-currencies have made the financial world more fun. It’s all so gloriously bonkers. First there was Bitcoin, the ‘peer-to-peer’ online payment system founded in 2009. Almost nobody understood how it worked or what a Bitcoin actually was — something to do with chains of code, computer ‘mining’, and a ledger system — but

Poor David Moyes, sacked before the season ends. Living up to the standards set by Sir Alex Ferguson was always an impossible task, especially since Fergie left Manchester United in a shoddy state. Moyes inherited a squad stuffed with arrogant past-its like Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Young. It’s testament to Ferguson’s terrifying force of personality

How do you solve a problem like revenge porn? It’s a strange new social evil. More and more men are getting back at women who dump them by posting sex videos and/or photos of them online, along with their name and contact details for all to see. It’s not just a nasty man thing, either

The digital-age male is a pathetic creature. Shorn of all his old manly attributes, he has to puff himself up. He does this, as Clive Martin on Vice magazine pointed out recently, by ingesting large amounts creatine, lifting weights, thinking about his clothes (sorry, look), and calling everyone a legend, because if everyone is a

Politicians like to insinuate that they have a ‘cultural hinterland’ — a range of interesting interests beyond Westminster. Take Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, who describes herself as an ‘Indie Kid’. This morning she read a Telegraph post by Peter Oborne about modern politicians being too inexperienced and dull. ‘Think of Healey; Crossman; Crosland;

Cheers today from the Tory ranks for the Chancellor’s decision to raise taxes on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals to 25 per cent. Nobody in the political and media elite likes these digital-age one-arm bandits, as I wrote in the magazine last month, because they exploit ‘the most vulnerable’ in society and because they have effectively

Yesterday I took part in an interesting discussion at The Catholic Herald’s offices on the subject of Pope Francis’s first year. The question was, as it seemed to be for the BBC this morning, whether his ‘revolution’ has been one of substance or style. The answer, I reckon, is a bit of both – and