Writers
Gregory Halting
Procrastinator extraordinaire
Self’s the man
Will Self can be absurd and obnoxious — but also highly entertaining and insightful
Was Shakespeare really a black woman?
Too many intellectuals still cannot let Shakespeare be Shakespeare
Against literary safetyism
Writing, and reading, is about taking risks
Kids, critics and the courage of Kate Clanchy
Writers have to be able to take risks, even if that means angering or upsetting people
The hollow horseman
Wole Soyinka’s postcolonial pride offers no answers to Nigeria’s Christian deaths
Elegy for a lost world
Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer
Go substack yourself!
I’ve had it up to here with your nonsense!
The bourgeois chronicler of multicultural England
Colin MacInnes tended to deify black foreigners and demonise native whites
Balancing the books
My disappointing dealings with Unbound, a publisher that collapsed owing authors money
Most Read
The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
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
Can Russell T Davies write “terfs”?
In Tip Toe, Russell T Davies is more nuanced than one might expect — much to the dismay of gender ideologues
Peston’s Inbox
Keir has my complete backing – Wes
Reform’s reality gap
Behind the rhetoric of mass deportations, Reform UK’s numbers and logistics don’t yet add up
Migrant hotels are not the real problem
The real problem with illegal immigration is at the border
A love-hate affair
Finger-lingering over hideous fluffy lilac footwear
Crushing the real progressives
The Islamic Republic of Iran, now under fire from the demonic West, is the most progressive society on earth
Exile and exaltation
Bohuslav Martinu: The Symphonies (Deutsche Grammophon)
Green eggs and flam
A fine way to make herbes omelette
The government must curb its appetite for junk policy
The “junk food advertising ban” is indigestible nonsense
A frozen war?
The US should put stubbornness aside and end the conflict with Iran
By the by-elections
Do not expect major surprises or lasting change as a result of the latest Scottish by-elections
Life for petty theft?
IPP sentences are a shocking stain on the criminal justice system that the Prime Minister would do well to kill off