The most atrocious bores, recounting stories of their children, their holidays, or their dreams, present you with a precious and...

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes from the perspective of an experienced devil addressing his young nephew on the most...

The range of responses to the April protests against lockdown from what we might now call the media-political complex has been...

The new fundamentalism that has made an idol of a virus is based on two great lies. The first is that those who worship the blessed virus...

How do you know you’re not mad? If not mad, exactly, how do you know that you are not being deeply unreasonable, stupid, or resistant to...

More than a thousand years ago, a Chinese Emperor of the Southern Tang, the state that later gave its name to a popular brand of barbecue...

Things, the Labour Party theme song assured the public in 1997, can only get better. This optimism is misplaced. The elastic of...

In 1881, Oscar Wilde was due to make his West End debut with a play about a gang of Russian nihilists assassinating the Tsar. In March of...

It is not yet clear whether David Cameron is a criminal. What is perfectly obvious is that he is an oily, money-grubbing, conniving...

Among the many failures of the media during the course of the pandemic, perhaps the most striking has been the astonishingly easy ride...

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to give a novel I had written to a distinguished literary critic for review. When I asked her, some...

If you ever find yourself thinking that the British government, while astonishingly stupid, is not actively malicious, try spending ten...

In his novel, Galápagos, Kurt Vonnegut points out what a nuisance it is to be intelligent. The oversized human brain, he says, is a...

David Lammy has received widespread praise this week for his response to a woman who called in to the Leninist Broadcasting Company to...

There was an Internet meme a few years ago, presumably intended to promote study of the liberal arts, which featured a white-coated...

“You know what I haven’t done for a while?” I asked a long-suffering friend the other day, “Inveighed against the collapse of Western...

Having decided long ago that literature is vastly superior to life, I occasionally have to disillusion my students by pointing out that...

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoombe has suggested the imposition of a 6:00pm curfew for men, as a novel solution to the problem of violence...

George Orwell once asked readers of his column in Tribune whether they had any good reason for believing that the earth was round. His...

Although the pubs are closed, in the town where I live at least, some of the cafés have been allowed to stay open in a limited fashion....