Christmas
Valuable life lessons
How to upset a “socialist” friend
God wake ye, Merry England
The decadence and excess of the city is of a piece with puritanical restraint
The Government stole Christmas
For small businesses, Sunak’s billion is a pimple patch on a sucking chest wound
Why we need Christmas
Our need of the Nativity of our Lord has not decreased as the centuries have passed
The catalogues of Christmas past
The great London department store Gamages was the British Amazon of its day
The myth of the Victorian Christmas
Our values today are of consumerism and instant gratification, inherited from our Victorian forebears
Ghosts at the feast
Christmas ghost stories are meditations on darkness at the darkest point of the year
The Revolution in the stable
We abandon the incarnation at our peril
Merry race-baiting
Black Lives Matter is dreaming of a black Christmas
London gossip, Dickensian Christmasses and experimental castles
The Critic Narrated: Episode Seven, with Robert Thicknesse, Alexander Larman and Charles Saumarez Smith
War destroys everything
Alex Garland’s Civil War is filled with terror and horror
Cricket’s triple threat
Some have the granddaddy knack
Tragicomedy at the UN
The limp United Nations cannot be trusted to support the victims of tyranny
The grand tour
Sex and the cities
Of course women support women
Men are angry about where women’s money is going? What’s new?
Where has all the money gone?
Even Booker Prize-winning novelists struggle to make a living from writing
What are universities for?
The battle for British universities is not yet lost
The sculptor’s funeral
The death of Imogen Stuart represents the passing of an Ireland that built, rather than destroyed
Disposable women?
Middle-aged women are routinely ignored and dismissed by society — it is time for that to change
A great conductor leaves the stage
No conductor from China or Japan ever commanded world orchestras before Seiji Ozawa, and none has since matched his impact
Rishi goes a-wooin’
The Prime Minister was an extremely nervous suitor trying to impress some very sceptical rural in-laws
