Issue: June 2024
Slaying gay culture
How trans activists took over the once worthy gay rights struggle
The secret war of a wolf in chic clothing
Dudley Clarke had his fingers in many of the most interesting pies of covert operations in World War II
Ulster’s deadly web
What if one of the most useful British agents inside the IRA was also a mass murderer?
A labour of love
We are all historians of our own here and now
Godfather of the Reformation
Cranach’s impact on the Reformation would have been impossible without his earlier success as a secular artist
The beginning and end of conversation
A catholic sift through humankind’s advent and our eventual, formative babbling and beyond.
Can jokes in terrible taste ever be funny?
Wisecracks is clearly the work of an academic philosopher adept at teasing out fine distinctions between “offenses” and “harms”
Beyond the boundary
Can art reflect a nation’s spirit through its depictions of one of its favourite games?
Diversion, disruption and distinction
Being memorable and sticky guarantees a novel a long and healthy life
Just show me the money
A body that collects authors’ revenues is going off-book and asking about their gender
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
The right does need religion
Christianity is politically valuable as well as, you know, true
The dog that failed to bark
Jeremy Corbyn hoped the local
elections would be a launch pad for
his new party. Instead, Your Party
has mostly been arguing with itself
Keeping the faith
Brexit triumphalists can’t understand how other people living in the UK in 2026 do not share their enthusiasm
The thin blue line must be thicker
The police are nothing without a presence in communities
Dumbed-down democracy
“Public opinion” is useless when the public is largely ignorant
Britain lacks a party of the young
Britain’s alienated young are drifting leftwards because no serious movement on the right is speaking to their interests
Won over by a stately Italian saga
A fictional Italian president and a cinema spin-off
The American chaos machine
The United States’s current aggressive expansionism and domestic strife are an intrinsic part of its national character
The price is right
Stories about outrageously profligate eating have the appeal of scandal
Iran has been fatally misunderstood
The US and Israel were foolish to imagine that the Iranians would crumble
Literature amid lies
Leonardo Sciascia sought justice in the face of cynicism