The lost art of the Christmas single
The great Christmas singles came from the broken remains of a country that had forgotten how to be itself
Reclaiming Becket
London’s great saint needs a reboot
Billy Liar was fiction’s first OCD hero, yet nobody noticed
Rev Steve Morris revisits Keith Waterhouse’s forgotten classic
A heavenly perspective
Thoughts on the plague with St Pauls’ greatest dean, John Donne
Shrunken heads, shrinking horizons
Alexander Larman talks to the controversial director of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum
Beware of Bad Ideas
The democratic state has a duty to act as an ideological gate keeper to protect society
Between war and empire
Jeremy Black weighs in on two recent historiographical offerings
Knights to remember
This must not be read within 2 metres of another sketch, unless you are in a bubble with John Crace
Perhaps Black Lives Matter was right about the nuclear family
James Jeffrey explains why he won’t be signing up for a BLM-mandated commune anytime soon
Dickens derailed
Tom Chesshyre recounts Dickens’s troubled history with trains
Could there be a dark end to America’s constitutional crisis?
Coup talk, whether or not it is admitted as such, is plainly in the air at both ends of the spectrum
Bad law in a good cause
Who should determine Britain is trading with a genocidal regime – international judges? British judges? Or the British government?
What the Protocol border inside the UK is doing
What Jeffrey Donaldson thinks the government should do about that
Donald Trump’s likeliest path to staying in office
A contingent election would provide at least a patina of respectable constitutionalism