Issue: December/January 2025
Liberal myths of the “good old ways”
Donald Trump’s foreign policy is not so very different from the Democrats’ imagined golden age of American leadership
Subscribe to save the BBC
A radical new solution to the problem of the BBC’s outmoded licence fee that could ensure more high-quality programming
Scruton and the roots of modern conservatism
Roger Scruton’s path from sophisticated soirées to a squalid Fleet Street pub
So many voters got it wrong
The ignorant masses have betrayed democracy
Writing lives
The life story of the biography, from Victorian glorification to Bloomsbury boldness to contemporary obliquity
Enjoy some old Baileys
Few literary activities could give quite so much pleasure as reading the work of this brilliant but overlooked novelist
The Bard at Christmas
It is impossible to appreciate Shakespeare without acknowledging his Christian foundations
How the Navy built Britain
Culmination of a magisterial work that entwines the story of the Royal Navy with the scientific, cultural and social history of our nation
Farewell, knights errant of the road
Once one of London’s most distinctive tribes, cycle messengers are a dying breed
William Warham
A champion of the English Church unfairly eclipsed by his great rivals Wolsey, Cranmer and Cromwell
Most Read
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
Out with the old?
Reform seems to be thriving, and Labour seems to be losing, but what can actually change?
Whip smart
Threatening the whipping system would be alarmingly stupid
The party of retailers
Labour’s drift from its union roots reveals the party no longer knows what — or who — it is for
What makes an American?
What characterises a US citizen in the 21st century, beyond abiding by the country’s laws and supporting its constitution?
Vapid slogans for the hard of thinking
Every modern university, it seems, needs a “mission statement”
A country at war with itself
Washington politics can
best be understood through the history
of bitter factional in-fi ghting within both
the Democratic and Republican parties
Why people smuggling means profits
People smuggling is one of the few functioning markets left in the UK
Critical briefing: home ownership headaches
Why more homes are not always good news for the ordinary buyer
Hyperventilating vexillology
Once councils flew the symbols of the realm; now they proclaim the enthusiasms of the age
The Muslim modernisers
Muslim reformers do not innovate; they renew by seeking to mend what is broken
Murders for April
Make sure it is the cruellest month with this detective fiction