The enigma of Englishness
The English have debated their national nature for centuries
This England
We should celebrate the glorious wartime cinematic masterpiece that Churchill wanted to ban
Addressing misogyny must include addressing trans activism
Against the wokewashing of sexual objectification
A monumental work on British buildings
Gavin Stamp’s posthumous book is a magnificent tour d’horizon, a bible of the styles available to architects between the wars
Parliamentary sovereignty (extreme edition)
Rwanda is safe. How do we know? Because we said so.
Ridiculous research and irate academics (w/ Charlotte Gill)
Do we have the right to debate where our taxes are going?
Don’t ban anti-Israel marches
Principled and pragmatic arguments for prohibition are weak
The Foreign Office should be rooted in the past
Who and what is it for, if not the British people, and our history and culture?
The original error of educationalists
Universities are not teaching students to be able to think for themselves
The Grand Migrant Hotel Rwanda
All are welcome at Kagame’s eccentric migrant hostelry, and don’t worry about the roving deathsquads: they’re harmless
Free speech freeze-up
Reactions in Britain to the attempted suppression of NatCon suggest a bleak future for freedom of speech and thought
Liz Truss was right but naive
She grasped the scale of Britain’s plight but misunderstood the nature of power
The Met is watching you
We are passively accepting the development of a society of hyper-surveillance
Chasing votes on foreign soil
Viktor Orbán has created a pipeline of support for his Fidesz political project by granting full citizenship to thousands of ethnic Hungarians in Romania
How to lose an empire
The rise and fall of the Sassoon family, whose yearning for social acceptance brought titles at the cost of success
Let there be love
Filmmakers have fallen out of love with romantic movies, but it’s time to bring back passion to the picture house
Keystones of Britain’s history
Far too many young people are woefully ignorant of the splendour and meaning of our rich ecclesiastical architecture
W.S. Gilbert
A wildly funny and slyly subversive comic genius who deftly skewered the mores of Victorian England
What makes a gentleman tick?
Of course, there are watches and there are watches, and then there are watches
Why the goal glut?
Football — never boring, even when Italy is defending a 1–0 lead — has only grown more exciting
A decade of economic disaster
Only one verdict is possible: Conservative rule has been a comprehensive failure
Weak, flawed, limited; an opportunity missed
Sanghera really should have devoted more attention to the pre-Western history in Empireworld
The fixtures that forged a nation
Even if you loathed sport, you could enjoy this book — which is why it can both delight and frustrate
Why Labour has the best history books
Labour continues to blunder down that long blind Blairite alleyway, unable to turn back or find an exit
Off with the fairies
Unsurprisingly, the most brilliant of all English music-theatre pieces are mostly overlooked
Poor old Carmen
This update of a classic from the Royal Opera House is a reminder of why messing with great pieces is so risky
The untalented Mx. Ripley
In a story of a fiendishly successful performance, Eliot Sumner proved an extremely unconvincing man
Too much disinformation
Mariana Spring is back, with another series to set the songbirds a-twitter
Dial S for screen time
These middle-class tweens being forbidden phones have had iPads since they were six
The big bang
On the ecological repercussions and economic contributions of big shoots
Out with the old and in with the new
People are asking why the classic art market has declined — and will it recover?
Good for the sole
April calls for a recipe that combines the incoming and departing treats