Books
A forgotten British great: Smelfungus
Now languishing in undeserved obscurity, Tobias Smollett should be remembered
The elegant extremist
Ian McEwan has always tempered his shocking stories with polished prose
Paradise dimmed
John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest poem in the English language, yet it seems to be fading slowly from public view. Who could write a new national epic?
An island to admire
A new book takes a valuable tour of the Isle of Man
Playing it by the book
Are books as physical objects already obsolescent?
Feminism’s dangerous false utopia
The modern battle for women’s rights has now fallen prey to a self-defeating brand of power politics
Not going to be ignored (w/ Victoria Smith)
On the demonisation of middle-aged women
Keep physical books
We have to protect cultural history
The new establishment
Who will subvert today’s anti-establishment?
Read for pleasure
Against the functionalist approach to literature
Carole Cadwalladr’s conspiracy theory
The feverish paranoia obscures valid questions
A Soviet revelation
David Oistrakh: The Warner Remastered Edition (58CDs, 3DVDs)
Hot desking
We, the special advisers of the Labour Party, seek justice!
The idea of the countryside
English rural life in theory and practice
The sorry strategy
Reparations are a deeply dangerous strategy in the carnivorous world of geopolitics
Italy is right to extend its ban on surrogacy
It is good for women and it is good for children
Too many silences in this book about music
The hazy treatment of what “music” even entails falls flat
What is behind the ECHR debate?
We should stop pretending that moral disagreements can be reduced to technical debates
The first victim of empire
England is an ongoing casualty of the British imperial project
The shame of the Oxford Union
A debate on Israel and Palestine was a disgrace
Afrocentrism with a Labour twist
Dawn Butler’s Black History Month video was disturbing as well as weird
