Celebrity
David Bowie was a political shapeshifter
The pop enigma veered between the far right and the right on
The left don’t need Big John
Political movements embarrass themselves by trying to recruit unlikely spokespeople
Bernard-Henri Lévy
France’s celebrity philosopher, war reporter and professional pessimist
Remembering troublesome women
In death and in life
What’s in a nym?
How and why writers conceal their true selves
The madding crowd
Drunks, dames and Dahl
My perfect castaway
Robin Ashenden whiled away a forced sojourn in Georgia by feasting on the back catalogue of Desert Island Discs and compiling a list of his favourite guests
Cross questioning
The travails of ageing actors
Why Khan’t our media do its job?
Piers Morgan shouldn’t have been soft on the former Pakistan PM
The Internet is real life
There is no firm divide between the mainstream and the online
Most Read
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
Soft competition
There are participation prizes to everyone at the Venice Biennale
British comedy: a post-mortem
British comedy has become safe, stale and contrived
Our new five-party system
First-past-the-post no longer means
an electoral carve-up between the
Tories and Labour, allowing “fringe”
parties real political influence
Woke politics was never trivial
Wokeness was a lot more, and a lot worse, than a passing online fad
I don’t trust the British state
British institutions simply are not functioning in the interests of the people they are meant to serve
Albion’s re-enactors
Beneath Restore Britain’s rhetoric lies an impulse to retreat from history itself
Truth and consequences for ministers
Former Ministers should be hauled back before MPs to justify their poor decisions
Literature amid lies
Leonardo Sciascia sought justice in the face of cynicism
Why tradition, not utopia, protects expression
Free expression thrives on human frailty, debate, and tradition — not on utopian zeal or moral legislation
Dear Prudence
A reflection on the Tory Party’s historic suspicion of interventionism
Amazing Grace? Meh, it was OK
If there is a reason to see this play, it is Ralph Fiennes