Rhetoric
Free speech is a waste of breath
Free speech is not our cause, and it gets us nowhere anyway
Of course the culture wars matter
It is people who trivialise them who are not taking politics seriously
Dissent is not hatred
We must resist the idea that disagreement with modish beliefs is reducible to ill-feeling
On the deceptive use of words
We must be very careful with redefinitions of commonly understood words
Attack is the best form of defence
The right cannot always be fighting a rearguard action in the culture wars
Cognition porn and discursive dehumanisation
Cultural and political discourse can follow the reductive yet seductive logic of pornography
A moral panic about moral panics?
We are in danger of making unhinged generalisations about unhinged generalisers
Who exactly is “far right”?
If it is a threat then it has to be defined
Marginalising the majority
Progressive rhetoric has a projection problem
It’s not happening, and that’s why it’s good
The case for not Having A Normal One
Long story short
Movie length seems to have become a way for directors to tell us what serious people they are
We must escape Subtopia
As Ian Nairn warned, British town planning has had a grim levelling effect on our urban and rural spaces
Ukraine cannot avoid partition
Ukraine must not capitulate and demilitarise, but de-facto partition is now an inevitability
Fat lot of use
One cannot approve of so lazy a gimmick as a fat suit in reality-obsessed 2024
Great Lives — great, The Essay — awful
Radio 3 maintains its course towards self-destruction
Newsnight and the rapist
The BBC should be embarrassed by its careless coverage of a man who has now been convicted of rape
Not everyone has a novel in them
Literature is the only art in which, it seems, every neophyte is convinced they can succeed
“Moral debt” is classic watermelon politics
Do left-wing economists believe that there is anything to which wealth redistribution is not the answer?
Where is so much gender confusion coming from?
The scope of inquiry into gender and young people should be expanded to schools
Winning sinner
That 1999 Tour needed Armstrong quite as much as he needed it
Jam, Jute, journalism, Japanese design
There is a lot more to see and enjoy in Dundee than London reviewers suggested
