Issue: February 2023
I regret to inform you …
An Admissions Don at a major British university lays bare the quota-driven process of student selection and imagines what honest acceptance and rejection letters may look like
Unholy influences
The weird and not so wonderful world of influencers, and an open invitation to Theodore Dalrymple to get inked
Back in Vogue?
Nova is dreaming of fame and Rishi is trying to get out of the doghouse
Family troubles
Frecknall’s Streetcar is a commendable, if not stellar outing
The great international student scandal
With an ever-higher number of foreign postgraduates not even turning up for their courses, some universities are not selling an education, but a visa
A college in tune with the times
How music colleges need to adjust to the twenty-first century
How to manage up with Emery
How Unai Emery will turn Villa’s chances around
Death by degrees
The dream of the university is being killed by greed, dogma and bureaucracy
February: Letters to the Editor
Funny handshakes, BBC cover-ups, fortifying wines and the Bank of England
Bring back the traitors
To abandon the crime of treason is to move towards a post-national future
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
No gods, no monsters
We should stop projecting our neuroses onto foreign leaders
The great betrayal
MAGA will always be Trump’s, but how much is an ever-shrinking coalition actually worth?
Labour’s toxic medicine
The more they treat the symptoms of decline, the worse things get
Vapid slogans for the hard of thinking
Every modern university, it seems, needs a “mission statement”
The forlorn hope of growth
Voters are struggling economically but wrongly believe the country to be rich
Save our green and pleasant land
It’s time to stop ruining Britain’s countryside with drab, identikit houses and instead build real places with focus, heart and purpose
Paris cinema
There are no songs or movies about Paris in the winter
A Laboured response
Keir Starmer and his advocates are all out of ideas
The enduring fascination of Richard Nixon
Why America’s most contradictory president still exerts a strange grip on the political imagination.
Publishing has an AI problem
From reviews to actual books, creativity is being outsourced to machines
Keir Starmer is causing trouble over the Troubles
The government should stop caving in over Northern Ireland legacy issues