Features
Betjeman the beat poet
Recalling a thrilling collaboration between the poet and a group of oddball musicians
Keeping it in the family
The Succession problems of family-run firms
The ghosts of Norwich
The callous destruction of an ancient city in the name of efficiency, modernity and a failed utopian vision of “the Good Life”
Simon Gray: seriously funny artist of angst
An author of seriously funny plays
An off-kilter visionary
Henry Green had a strange and distinctive talent
The roots of school rage
The closure of grammar schools entrenched privilege
Who watches the Wikipedia editors?
The curious case of a carefully-tended article about a controversial academic
When the balloon goes up…
Can history teach us anything about growing Sino-American tension?
Have we lost our minds?
Our shallow and insincere public discourse pales by comparison to the bitter, but profound, politics of the Edwardian era
The keyboard secret army
The paranoid war on “disinformation” at the heart of the Government’s pandemic response
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The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
Stop ignoring the Islamisation of our democracy
The British state is bending to Islamism, not attempting to defeat it
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
Rewatching a TV show from a lost world
In River Cottage, a chef escaped to Dorset from London in search of the good life
Fair vs free elections
The grey zone between interference and counter-interference is becoming Europe’s new political frontier
Britain should have voted against reparations
The moral and historical arguments for “reparatory justice” are bogus
Zurbarán on Freud’s couch
An acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures
Countryside counter-attack
A ban on trail hunting reveals a government more interested in cultural punishment than rural survival
The missing variable in the masculinity crisis
The literature on masculinity ignores the most obvious factor of all: a steady, civilisational fall in testosterone
Auntie’s autumn
Rather than wage war on the Beeb, a Reform government should strip it of its monopoly and force British broadcasting to compete again
A step forward for academic freedom
It is time to take the fight to censoriousness in higher education
Restoration romps
Purcell, The Musical, OSO Arts Centre, Barnes
Jolly boating weather
The Gondoliers, English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire
Sexy sisters and holy hotties
Less Sister Simper, more Attila the Nun