“Should I read Wuthering Heights?” asked my 17-year-old son last week, a rhetorical question, you’d think, given the book-pushing nature of our relationship. Despite being published almost 180 years ...

When Sir Jim Ratcliffe, billionaire founder of Ineos, resident of Monaco and co-owner of Manchester United, told Sky News last week that the UK had been “colonised by immigrants”, he tapped into a ...

There is no British cultural event that bears reasonable comparison to the annual Super Bowl halftime performance. No Glastonbury headline slot, Last Night of the Proms or Jools Holland Hootenanny can ...

In 2021, the British government promised to “explore options for a wider civilian reserve” who could be activated in a crisis. The exploration happened (I was part of it), but the reserve did not.

In 1604, the painter Karel van Mander called it the “Bible for artists”; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epic retelling of the mythical contortions and tussles between mortals and the gods, has proven ...

It’s mid-morning at Hadrian’s Wall and the Romans have already lost again. Not to the Picts this time, or to the weather, or even to the slow grind of history. But to Lee Anderson. “Now this is what a ...

It didn’t take much. In one corner, a charismatic, manipulative paedophile. In the other corner, two ancient and barnacled pillars of the British state. The House of Lords and the monarchy are still ...

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci’s words, written in prison near Bari almost 100 years ago, ring out to us now. The ...

The “Wagatha Christie” case requires at least three things to be explained. The first is how, in legal and practical terms, Colleen Rooney won and Rebekah Vardy lost. And to understand this, we can ...

Unless you have a mind open to paradox, Jesus was a sissy. It’s taken a lot of effort over the years to claim him as a man’s man. Jesus, in the gospels, is not what we, or for that matter, the ancient ...

“Less Holocaust, more Anne Frank,” was the advice Michael Grunwald received from the CEO of a publishing house who opted not to bid for his latest book, We Are Eating the Earth. Grunwald took notice.

British politicians have been attempting an impossible magic trick. Decked out in the proverbial top hat and cape, with gleaming smile and arched brow, they have tried to saw political debate in half.