These green and printed lands
How William Caxton developed Englishness, and how his Englishness is breaking down
The value of social value
Social value requirements have made public procurement more expensive, more bureaucratic and harder for smaller firms to compete
Bring back literary vendettas
Grub Street thrived when
there was an “establishment”,
movements and feuds
A garden reborn
a garden reborn
The ankle tag and the ballot box
The courts convicted Marine Le Pen, but left her political fate to French voters
Lessons on being a rule-taker
The EU reset undermines Brexit and Britain
The (in)justice of the Equality Act
Far from guaranteeing equal treatment, the Equality Act has transformed Britain’s understanding of equality from individual rights to group identity
RIP New Labour?
Keir Starmer’s failure should mark a decisive break with a failed consensus
Night of the big bins
How Count Binface changed the face of Britain forever
Taylor’s Version of feminism
Taylor Swift’s marriage is less a retreat from feminism than its logical conclusion
How to be a populist in the art world
A recent conference on populism exposed the extent to which the art world talks around actually existing people
The end of encrypted Europe
Europe’s latest Chat Control may see child protection become a pretext for wider surveillance.
A load of Bolls
Citizen Vigilante is artless MAGA slop
Sex, success and failure
Sarah Ditum talks with songwriter Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy
A police school for scandal
Is it any wonder there’s a two-tier policing controversy when officer training is focused on political correctness?
David Lean
The cinematic genius admired by today’s directors
Ancient bones of contention
The burgeoning and irregulated market for dinosaur skeletons
Breaking the mould
The closure of the Denby pottery factor is an example of short-term political thinking
Rage against the dying of the night
The loss of the soft-lit splendour of London after dark
Lord’s and ladies
The first women’s Test is a welcome step forward
The wonders of Whistler
A new exhibition offers calm stillness — mostly
Equality of opportunity, and other bedtime stories
Britain cannot make progress if equality is its highest goal
Hector Savage
How to account for this sudden access of celebrity?
The intractable problems pulling modern Britain apart
When does upholding free speech become an act of self-sabotage?
Rendering the word of God in English
500 years ago, William Tyndale published his groundbreaking New Testament translation
Vera, the doctor who defied Rasputin
A female surgeon in the chaos of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
Murders for July
Your summer holiday reading is sorted here
When art took on fascism (and lost)
Abstract activist concerns have overshadowed aesthetic production
Not mad for it
I Puritani, Royal Opera, Covent Garden
Sweeter the second time around
There’s a real weight to some lyrics once you’re nearer the end than the beginning
Let there be lightness
Black Comedy is best viewed as a breathtakingly accomplished technical exercise
Lebanon’s finest
Henry Jeffreys savours some reds and whites from the Bekaa valley
The summer chill
Cool soups for hot days
The praises of a neglected vegetable
Summer calls for cold cucumbers
Rewatching a TV show from a lost world
In River Cottage, a chef escaped to Dorset from London in search of the good life