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Harry Potter is for infantilised millennials
Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning ‘homecoming’, and algos, meaning ‘pain’. Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalising two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.
The first thing you notice is simply how bad everything looks. Shows seem to have an obsession nowadays with making everything as dark as possible, so that you are constantly trying to adjust the light settings of your screen to see what’s actually happening. Even the colours of the recent Wicked films – an emerald-saturated dreamland that changed the possibilities of film forever – are as dull and dreary as dishwater.
The colour grading of Harry Potter the television series looks similarly awful. Everything looks sterile, washed-out, muted, as if we are watching a depressing crime documentary. Where is the colour, the whimsy, the mischief? Where is, well, the magic?
What made the original films so special was how each one matured cinematically, virtually in rhythm with the performers and the audience: the films looked more gloomy as the material became more serious. There is no potential for development here: Harry already looks like he could be on the set of an anti-drug advert or a new series of Adolescence. The darkness of it all – both literally and metaphorically – proves that the show is really for infantilised adults who can’t move on (sorry, magic-loving millennials) rather than actual children. And if it is not trying to appeal to a new audience, then what really is the point?
The show is also clearly caught in a creative chokehold. The series can’t deviate from the original film’s aesthetics or details because they are so deeply embedded into the Harry Potter merchandising machine: even the set designs are shackled to the look of the Harry Potter theme parks. The whole thing therefore becomes very uncanny valley: it’s like watching a shot-for-shot video game remake where where they couldn’t get the rights to the original actors’ likenesses. It’s weirdly unsettling – why does Mr Dursley look like Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon? It’s also deeply depressing because it hammers home just how unoriginal everything we watch in Hollywood (or at home) really is.
Risk-averse studios assume that familiarity breeds anything but contempt and so we are now force-fed a comfort-food diet of reboots, remakes, sequels, spin-offs and live-action adaptations. Studios are not just mining existing intellectual property but scraping the bottom of the barrel: this year alone we can expect 60 new additions to existing franchises, including a live-action Moana (there was a sequel only two years ago), Toy Story 5, a remake of The Mummy, another Scary Movie and a new Hunger Games prequel.
Harry already looks like he could be on the set of an anti-drug advert or a new series of Adolescence
Of course, there is a financial logic in recycling already successful products, stories, and styles: in the 15 top-grossing films of all time, only two non-sequels make the list (Titanic and Avatar). Disney’s sludgy, creatively-lazy ‘live action’ remakes of animated classics are both shockingly expensive and shockingly profitable: The Lion King (2019) cost more than $250 million to make but has since made more than $1.6 billion at the Box Office.
The Harry Potter television series will probably follow a similar trajectory. It may set a new record for being the most expensive television production ever (it is rumoured to be spending more than $100 million per episode, so you would think they could afford some better lighting) but I am sure it will make billions, no matter how creatively bereft it is. After all, the teaser racked up over 32 million views on Instagram within four hours.
The question is why this continuous (re)manufacture of memory works so well. Is it because audiences are desperate for escape, comfort and familiarity because of the dire state of the world beyond the cinema? Would a therapist say that in our anxious times, people are looking for a sense of control and emotional regulation? Is it because we want to try and recapture what it felt like to live in a more innocent, pre-smartphone era – as well as introduce that to our children?
Whatever the reason, the brand is so strong, and the Harry Potter following so devout, that the show could be AI slop and it would still go viral. The teaser tells you everything that is wrong about our current cultural moment, but also why it will still be a stonking success anyway – after all, who cares if it’s good, as long as it’s familiar?
My daughter’s living my football dream
Next door to Jeremy Clarkson’s farm, behind spiked steel fencing and overlooked by edge-of-town bungalows, are the grounds of my daughter’s football team, the Chipping Norton Swifts Under-15 Girls.
On cold, leaden Saturdays, I stand and watch. The clubhouse does cups of instant coffee for a pound but they take only cash. I don’t bring it because the urge to drink the coffee has never yet found me. What does find me, as I watch the girls’ match, is the urge to play. To run the length of the pitch and make the sliding tackle that stops a goal; to open up the midfield with a perfectly weighted pass; to make an attack of sudden, liquid grace that weaves past three defenders and brings the goalie charging out towards me – before selflessly knocking the ball across for a team-mate to tap in. Such, such were the joys.
Except that I wasn’t any good. I had no happy childhood on the echoing green. My parents didn’t play sport – didn’t approve of me playing it – so I never learned. I could join in with a kickabout at school but no one in their right mind would pass to me. If the ball ever did come to my feet I kicked it away immediately.
Which is why it feels so poignant to watch my daughter play now. She (unlike me) hasn’t been coached to feel fear of the ball. She’s grown up in the glow of the England Lionesses and the TV glamour of Ted Lasso whose fourth series will focus on the Beautiful Women’s Game. In other words, her childhood has been spent on a pitch which for years would have been cordoned off to women. Which, indeed, was cordoned off to me.
My own childhood experience was of falling in Tarmac playgrounds, sprinkled with enough gravel to work into grazed knees. ‘Druin is afraid of the big ball,’ read a report from my primary reception class – one which I remember because my late mother, a woman whose many fine qualities sat alongside a snobbish distaste for team sport, would quote it with proud amusement. By the time I got to the cold playing fields of my secondary, where we were made to assemble in our thin shorts, nobody showed any interest in teaching sports to a kid with no experience, no talent and no appetite. PE teachers, in their warm tracksuits, watched us shiver. If they noticed the kids who weren’t any good, it seemed it was only to relish seeing them flinch.
My own childhood experience was of falling in Tarmac playgrounds, sprinkled with enough gravel to work into grazed knees
Eventually, I fell in love with sport – with rowing and with boxing. Both were used to welcoming adult novices, both had coaches who noticed who you were and showed you who you could be. In my 20s I competed at a decent level and experienced what Evelyn Waugh gives the middle-aged Guy Crouchback in his Sword of Honour trilogy when Crouchback joins the military: a belatedly happy adolescence.
I tried to indoctrinate my son into sport earlier, teaching him to swim or ‘dunk the chunk’ as his aunt termed it not long after he was born. After some natural terror, he found a natural joy. I remember an instructor yelling at him when he was eight or nine to stay above the water and listen to her. Swimming off the Italian coast in his teens, he spurned a snorkel but spent hours diving down amongst the fish, as comfortable beneath the waves as I was when I admired them from a beachfront restaurant. A fine sight, seeing anyone take joy in physical grace; finer still, seeing it in your son.
My daughter benefited from going to football lessons with him when they were small, and from the experience – sibling rivalry is fiercer by affection – of competing with a brother three years older. So now I watch her, remembering red-faced my own childhood deficiencies. The shame of being the boy who is afraid of the big ball will never cease being part of me. But nor will pride in my daughter on the darkening green who calls for the ball.
Why the General Strike of 1926 could never succeed
Although it may be in bad taste to have a favourite story about the General Strike of May 1926, one served up by David Torrance in his superb The Edge of Revolution is probably unbeatable. He quotes an anecdote told by Walter Citrine, the 39-year-old acting secretary of the TUC, who recalled a man ‘with rather sharp, hawk-like features’ turning up at the Congress’s London headquarters in Eccleston Square, near Victoria Station, and offering, in return for £1,000, to solve the unions’ problems. He announced:
I want 100 trusted men and if you cannot find them, I can. I will arm them, take them along to Downing Street, shoot the members of the cabinet and hold Princess Mary’s children as hostages.
Oddly, the trades unionists declined the offer, with one of their leading panjandrums, Arthur Pugh, rebuffing the maniac with this excellent statement: ‘But we don’t do these things in the British trade union movement.’ Once the man had gone, Pugh and Citrine agreed they would not tell the police, presumably since they thought him a lunatic. He was, in fact, according to Torrance, ‘a fraudster, drug addict and former felon’, who a few weeks later was arrested for obtaining money under false pretences. Perhaps somebody else had given him the £1,000.
These two books about the same highly significant event, published for the centenary this May, tell the story in rather different ways, one more satisfactorily than the other. The winner is Torrance, who in 2024 published a well-researched, highly readable account of the first Labour government. The Edge of Revolution is its codicil, with many of the same dramatis personae, its story told with equal verve and authority.
That is not to say that Jonathan Schneer’s Nine Days in May is a poor relation, but its earnestness drips off every page. The author is an American academic, two words that indicate there may be turgidity ahead. He has done his research; he has been into every imaginable archive during various visiting fellowships in this country, and has faithfully reproduced much of what he found. But he gets overwhelmed by an avalanche of detail and of context.
He gives us a vast backstory to the strike – which is almost as if one were to read a book about the Great War that began by discussing the Congress of Vienna. One senses, however, that the context is as much for his benefit as ours. Despite being published by Oxford University Press, the book has not been edited well, both in allowing such a slow-paced narrative and also in retaining the occasional Americanism. Someone at OUP ought to know that the participle ‘gotten’ went to America with the Pilgrim Fathers and stayed there.
But there are two other overriding problems with Schneer’s approach. First, whereas Torrance often sees the foolishness of the situation, to Schneer the thing is a grand tragedy. He has fallen almost completely for the romantic tosh about the glories of the spirit of the industrial working class – the sort that Harold Macmillan used to spout when he wanted to thumb his nose at Margaret Thatcher – and made little effort to imagine that there might have been two sides to the story.
Torrance quotes Lord Birkenhead’s magnificent remark: ‘It would be possible to say without exaggeration of the miners’ leaders that they were the stupidest men in England if we had not had frequent occasion to meet the owners.’ But the miners, whose fight with their masters provoked the sympathy strike that caused the mass walk-out on 4 May, were fighting against economic reality. Demand for coal had nosedived in the preceding years and many pits were uneconomic. Nobody would dispute that there were often appalling working conditions; but many miners, especially during the slump after 1931, went elsewhere in England to look for different work. This seems not to have been considered a possibility in 1926, when, if the owners were not prepared to pay miners uneconomic wages, they wanted the government to nationalise the pits and provide a subsidy instead.
The second big problem with Schneer’s book is that you sense he does not have an intimate understanding of the history of the period or of its leading players. He gives this away when writing about ‘Alfred Duff Cooper’ and ‘Howard Kingsley Wood’, as Duff Cooper and Kingsley Wood were not known. By contrast, Torrance has a superb conception both of the political figures, such as Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and the warmongering Winston Churchill (given the British Gazette to run to keep him out of trouble), and of the union men, notably A.J. Cook, the ur-Arthur Scargill. It was Cook’s fanaticism that largely caused the strike and kept the miners out until the autumn of 1926, when they were effectively starved back to work. And there is Ernest Bevin, who did more than most to make sense prevail and end the strike. The divisions in the movement between pragmatists such as Bevin, Citrine and the railwaymen’s Jimmy Thomas, and the hardliners in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, meant that the strike could never succeed. Indeed, that it lasted as long as nine days was surprising.
Society ladies managed the food depot in Hyde Park, while peers acted as porters at Paddington
Torrance also supplies superb cameos of George V and John Reith (who read out the announcement of the end of the strike himself), and drops in commentaries from those arch-snobs Beatrice Webb and Virginia Woolf. There is familiar stuff about Cambridge undergraduates unloading ships at Dover and riding on the footplate of the odd train; of society ladies managing the food and milk depot in Hyde Park; of earls and viscounts doing the porterage at Paddington; and strikers and police playing football and cricket matches against each other.
Torrance is also better than Schneer at conveying the idea that even the union men thought the whole exercise was doomed. He instinctively understands how hard it was going to be to get the public on the side of the working-class movement, even those members who were working class themselves. But then – and this must be fundamental to a comparison of the two books – Torrance has a deep understanding of the British temper, whereas one never feels Schneer does.
Schneer focuses much more than Torrance on the threat of communism – or, as they would have called it at the time, Bolshevism – and its underpinning of attitudes to the strike. Cook was undoubtedly a revolutionary; but hardly anyone else in the Labour movement was, whether politicians or union men. MacDonald, as the Labour leader, wanted nothing to do with it. There was unquestionably a threat to democratic parliamentary rule from the strike. The country was being held to ransom, with fuel and food supplies in peril and getting to work problematic. Many middle- and upper-middle-class volunteer strikebreakers feared for their privileges if Bolshevism broke out in Britain. But, as with the threatened Chartist uprising of 1848, this was never going to happen. Most Britons were perfectly content with their lot, and therefore could not be mobilised in the name of revolution. Baldwin, in refusing to negotiate with the unions and daring them to strike, asked a question that Ted Heath would repeat almost half a century later: who governs? In Baldwin’s case, the British public supported the idea that the British government did; and so he, and the settled order, survived.
Expect toddlers and parlour games at today’s dinner parties
When I was in my twenties and giving dinner parties every week, I came up with a couple of money-saving devices. First, no snacks. This also ensures that, by the time dinner is served, your guests are so hungry they’ll mistake almost anything for a masterclass. Second, invite people on a Monday evening, so they won’t stay too late. As my millionaire cousin likes to say: ka-ching!
I mention all this because one reason people don’t give more dinner parties is that they think they’re too expensive. Another is that they’re afraid of being judged. I remember being taken aback when a guest of mine said she would never dare to give a dinner party. Jago Rackham has friends who have said something similar to him – which, by his own account, is what prompted him to write this manual, which is a terrific step-by-step guide to convening a handful of people at your home to eat, drink, and talk about this and that.
Invite people to dinner on a Monday evening, so they won’t stay too late
It’s not easy to pull this kind of book off without falling into Polonius-like platitudes. (Don’t invite too many people; but then again, don’t invite too few.) Rackham, who writes often in the Observer, is too smart an operator to make this mistake. Like a practiced dinner party host, he writes with a simultaneously casual and solicitous tone. It greets you at the door, hands you the drink you were hoping for and then ushers you into a comfortable chair, while assuring you that you won’t have to wait too long before being called to the table.
The author is an East End hipster with an artist girlfriend, but there’s nothing try-hard about his debut. The book’s design is lovely, with charmingly retro illustrations by Faye Wei Wei and a cover the colour of a late summer evening. Crucially, the prose he serves up is at ease with itself: a blend of mouth-watering recipes, short lyrical reminiscences and simple practical advice.
Example one. Make it clear to friends who have children that they’re welcome to bring them. The reason it’s hard to keep dinner parties going after a certain age is that children get in the way. There’s the cost of babysitters and the hassle of booking them. So let your friends turn up en famille, and either have their children join you at the table or, if they prefer, let them lurk in another room, and watch ‘a film you loved when you were little’. For toddlers, I recommend the 1979 animated version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
Example two. If you want to impress someone – someone you have a crush on, perhaps – don’t cook anything more complicated than you normally would. In fact, Rackham suggests this as a decent rule of thumb for dinner parties generally. He also counsels producing food that communicates your personality. ‘If you are a neat person, able to concentrate for hours on making perfect dumplings or ravioli, then make that.’ But if, as with him, ‘anything fiddly comes out looking like the efforts of a not quite clever child, make something rustic and easy’.
Rustic and easy are the watchwords of his recipes here, some of which I have taken the trouble to try. When my uncle Winslow came to stay, for instance, my wife prepared Rackham’s favoured version of homely chicken soup and his sticky toffee pudding. Both were big hits. More recently, I invited a beloved friend and his effervescent new girlfriend over, and, following Rackham’s instructions, slow-cooked a shoulder of lamb in honey and wine with apples and prunes. It was a revelation.
After dinner, we played one of Rackham’s endearingly hokey party games. Called ‘Find the Glasses’, it involves everyone covering their eyes, while someone stashes their glasses in plain view but in an unexpected place. I propped mine, just visible, in a ceiling-light fitting, then watched as the others wandered around, clueless – until it occurred to someone to glance up. For me, this was surprisingly hilarious, partly because I spend most of my time searching for my glasses. For my wife, it was less so, because she spends most of her time finding them.
The author occasionally lets his personal philosophical views peep through. He’s not a fan of organised religion. As for the aristocracy, he would like to ‘destroy’ everything about them, except one thing: ‘the comfort they have in their preferences.’ This is also, of course, one of the keynotes of To Entertain, as it must be of any good how-to book. I found the experience of reading it so convincing – not only as a guide to giving dinner parties but as a defence of their existence – that by the end I felt as if I’d had a long-lost pair of glasses restored to me.
Who wants to bring back the Neanderthals?
In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible.
Among their inventions were GPUs (graphical processing units), electrical circuits which enabled extraordinary visual innovation through multiple simultaneous mathematical tasks. These GPUs are the same technology which underpins the ‘neural network’ architecture of AIs such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini. And advanced AI, in combination with gene editing and genome synthesis, promises to shake biology to its core.
Its possibilities include sentient synthetic materials, giving us the ability to grow houses and clothing; the invention of entirely new species; the eradication of ‘monogenic’ diseases (those controlled by only one gene); and, most ethically dicey, the capacity to tweak the human genome to control factors such as height, weight and intelligence, or the wholesale ‘de-extinction’ of vanished human species such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.
That, at least, is the argument of Adrian Woolfson’s fascinating, frustrating On the Future of Species. The author, a British scientist educated at Oxford and Cambridge but now based in California, is the co-founder of Genyro, a start-up specialising in genome design and construction. His key idea is that we’re not far off the moment when AIs, working in concert with gene editing tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, can build us whole new species or map every possible genome.
Life, after all, is constructed of only four chemical bases. DNA is a far simpler toolkit than the 26 letters in the English language, and AIs have no trouble spitting out seamless prose answering cues as diverse as ‘What should I feed my dog?’ and ‘What’s my purpose in life?’. Mastering DNA manipulation, by contrast, should be a doddle. ‘A new age of synthetic biology’ is almost upon us, Woolfson writes. Artificial Biological Intelligence will leapfrog Darwinian evolution and ‘shape the future of our species’ as we ‘learn how to speak the language of life’.
In theory, anyway. But, as he points out, the challenges are considerable. In 2003, the Human Genome Project published its findings. It had successfully sequenced the three billion base pairs of the entire human genome, taking 13 years and costing $5 billion. It was an extraordinary achievement; but from the perspective of gene-editing technologies, it showed just how far we have to go. The human genome, it found, was not a neat sequence of DNA instructions, actions and results. Rather, it was a happenstance ‘spaghetti’ code, developed over four billion years of evolution, full of repetition, redundancies and genetic cul-du-sacs. Depending on where you come from, up to 4 per cent of your DNA may be Neanderthal. And nearly 10 per cent of our genes are dead viruses, remnants of the infections which afflicted prehistoric man. Nature is a bodge-jobber: it loves to reuse, recycle and make do. Stripping out these cobblings-together and making life run in a predictable, machine-like manner – ‘orthogonal’, in the jargon – is a formidable task.
So, too, is working out exactly which gene does what. Genes are co-opted across species, often with radically different results. For instance, the same gene which is responsible for cell adherence in sea urchins – ESRP – is responsible in human beings for the development of tissues such as lungs, inner ears and lips. Added to this is the difficulty that every life contains multitudes of other lives – viruses, bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms – which interact with genes in unexpected ways. For instance, wolves infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii are bolder and more likely to be pack leaders. In human beings, even diseases such as sickle cell anaemia aren’t clear cut. As a hereditary illness which results in severe pain and chronic organ damage and is caused by the mutation of a single gene, it would seem an excellent candidate for gene-editing therapy. Yet some studies suggest the mutated gene, common in those of African, Caribbean and Middle Eastern ancestry, confers greater protection against malaria. We are more than the sum of our genes, and any degree of tinkering may cause unfortunate, unlooked-for results down the line.
Advanced AI in combination with gene editing promises to shake biology to its core
Would we want to do any of this in the first place? This is where Woolfson’s book promises most – and proves most unsatisfying. To some extent, the future is already here. In 2019, scientists announced the creation of an artificial genome of a bacterium, E. coli. Human gene editing is also now possible. In theory, we could – with enough money and ethical flexibility – edit for factors such as eye or hair colour. Might future authoritarian states control for intangibles such as free will, creativity or obedience as well?
Woolfson raises these questions, only to bat them away with vagaries about protecting nature, ‘regulatory frameworks’, ‘international consensus’ and ‘ethical debate’. He is a scientist, and so perhaps it’s unfair to hold him too much to account on this. But I found myself hankering for a philosopher of, say, John Gray’s calibre to wrestle with these knotty moral complexities. The writing, too, is uneven, skipping from wide-angle analogies to hardcore scientific verbalese without warning.
Woolfson is an evangelist. And, like any good prophet, he is certain of his paradise. Artificial Biological Intelligence will allow us to ‘gain control over life itself’, he concludes in his final chapter, ‘A Manifesto for Life’. I’m not so sure. There is something unappealing about this totemic certainty, its vision of pristine scientific achievement. I prefer the modesty of Bertrand Russell, who wrote: ‘Life is a brief, small and transitory phenomenon. Not at all the sort of thing one would make a fuss about if one were not personally concerned.’
Tradecraft secrets: a choice of crime fiction
If it takes one to know one, this may explain why spy fiction is enjoying such a renaissance, since among the best new titles are those written by former intelligence operatives. I.S. Berry and David McCloskey are both former CIA officers who happily acknowledge how much their novels rely on their past careers. Equally impressive is the work of ex-MI6 officer James Wolff, whose use of a pseudonym puts him at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to promoting his books, but whose Spies and Other Gods (Baskerville, £20) places him in the top tier of today’s spy writers.
A young ex-academic, Aphra McQueen, is sent by a parliamentary oversight committee to investigate a whistleblower’s complaint about MI6. All over Europe an assassin codenamed CASPIAN has been murdering Iranian dissidents. The anonymous sender of the complaint suggests that in the frantic efforts to catch the killer, gross negligence has been committed by the service.
Aphra is greeted with suspicion by the denizens of MI6’s Vauxhall headquarters, who are unaccustomed to this kind of exposure. A long-term employee, assigned to shadow her in the building, entraps her by planting a classified document which is found when her bag is searched as she leaves. She is barred from any further work on the case.
But Aphra has seen enough to pursue the matter on her own. Her research takes her to Birmingham and then to Paris, where the nephew of CASPIAN is based. Her motivation for continuing off-piste is initially unclear, but the reverberations of it are profound and draw the attention of the MI6 head, Sir William Rentoul. Aware of his cognitive decline, he is eager to handle the hunt for Aphra himself as a kind of last hurrah.
There’s a cameo appearance by Kim Philby talking openly about his treasonous work for Moscow
The novel is told largely through the eyes of Aphra and Sir William, though there is an overall knowing narrator who is never identified but who functions as the objective voice of MI6 itself. The chase elements are well paced and, as always with Wolff, the writing is clear and evocative: a character turns ‘his face toward the lemony sun, pale as a boiled sweet in a tin of powdered sugar’. The tradecraft involves sophisticated surveillance and high-tech methods of eavesdropping, showcasing the author’s intelligence background. But Wolff’s greatest strength lies in his imaginative language and clever exploration of his characters. Like John le Carré, he is first and foremost a writer of fiction who happens to have been a spy.
In A Stranger in Corfu, by Alex Preston (Canongate, £18.99), we are introduced to the tiny Greek island of Vidos, part of the Corfu group. It functions as a sort of foreign version of Mick Herron’s Slough House, where retired British intelligence agents are put out to pasture and younger damaged ones are sent to recuperate. Nina Wolf, the daughter of two spies, is a new arrival, recovering after horrendous experiences on a botched mission in Srebrenica where she was taken prisoner, tortured and repeatedly raped by her captors.
When a resident of the island mysteriously drowns, Nina finds herself exploring what has happened. It gradually emerges that many of the retired MI6 officers living on Vidos had been double agents, working secretly for the Russians. All are linked by Oxford, where they were recruited as a kind of group –a conceit explored more realistically in Charles Beaumont’s excellent thriller A Spy Alone. Preston’s network seems more fanciful, even verging on the preposterous – with a cameo appearance by Kim Philby talking openly and implausibly to the Oxford clique about his own treasonous work for Moscow.
But realism is not where the novel’s strengths lie. The characters are sharply drawn, especially the troubled Nina, who takes no pleasure in her new surroundings:
It was as if she lived now in a gallery from which the paintings had been removed, leaving only patches of discoloration on the walls, reminders of the love that had once been there.
Descriptions of Vidos are often beautiful while also persuasively claustrophobic. The former spies are effectively prisoners, carefully watched and only rarely allowed to leave the island. Preston is especially good at conveying the tension underlying the residents’ idle days.
The Cut Up (Canongate, £16.99) is the third in a series of thrillers by Louise Welsh that has attracted critical praise and a rapidly growing number of readers. The books feature Rilke, a gay auctioneer with a healthy sideline in trouble. This latest novel is busy from the start, as Rilke stumbles upon the still-warm corpse of a client of the auction house he works for. The writing is immediately arresting – the victim, a jewellery dealer named Mandy Manderson, ‘was obnoxious when sober; unpleasant when drunk, but I would not have thought him important enough for murder’.
It’s an especially gruesome killing (Manderson has been stabbed through the eye) and sets the tone for the dark story that unfolds. Rilke is Philip Marlowe-like, though less aggressive, and the mix of mobsters and antiques mavens, with a supplementary policeman as Rilke’s boss’s boyfriend, makes for an entertaining romp. But there is grimness as well, particularly in the relentless brutality of Glasgow gangster life, which makes Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh seem positively insipid. Readers who are new to the series will almost certainly want to go back and read the first two novels.
If he is remembered at all today, Duff Cooper is known for the eponymous non-fiction prize given each year in his honour; or as the husband of the magnificent if slightly kooky Lady Diana Cooper; or even as the target of Evelyn Waugh’s vituperative appraisal. A politician and diplomat (rewarded by Churchill with the plum post of ambassador in Paris), he was also a highly competent author of histories and biographies as well as a novel, Operation Heartbreak, involving a risky secret mission, now reissued by Penguin Classics (£9.99). It is a remarkable book, beautifully written, suspenseful and a pleasure from beginning to end.
Willie Maryngton is an Englishman, orphaned from an early age. His mother dies giving birth to him and his father is killed at the beginning of the first world war. Willie is raised by the widow of a fellow officer of his father, and even as a child he is determined to become a soldier. Despite his keenness, he finds his ambition to see combat perpetually frustrated – being too young for the first world war and too old for the second. He spends some of the interwar years in India and Egypt – military postings that are pleasant enough but unsatisfying.
His emotional life is similarly problematic. Engaged in India to the daughter of his regiment’s commander, a flighty young woman who shares his love of horses, he looks forward to having a family – only for his fiancée to run off with a louche, older officer. Back in England, Willie falls deeply, helplessly in love with the daughter of the woman who has raised him, but he finds that her reciprocal avowals of love do not include a willingness to marry him.
Eventually, leaving the army, he sets up a training stable, while retaining his reserve status and hoping, as always, for war. Enough happens (with a glorious final twist) to keep thriller addicts happily engaged. Reading Operation Heartbreak certainly makes one wish that Cooper had written more fiction.
The dilemmas and difficulties of artists through the ages
Walter Neurath, refugee from Nazism, public educator and the founder of Thames & Hudson, would have loved this book. In Lachlan Goudie the publisher has found a born guide, a painter himself and the son of a painter, perfectly equipped to explain how artists have created their masterpieces, from the cave paintings of Chauvet to the machine-learned extravaganzas of AI.
Some ten years ago Goudie’s television series The Story of Scottish Art introduced viewers to a similarly broad sweep of art history, and if this book doesn’t make it to the screen then it ought to. Here, too, Goudie uses his own practice to convey the dilemmas and difficulties that artists of every era have confronted in the mastery of their materials. Of his attempt at painting an Egyptian funerary portrait, he writes:
The wax dries so quickly. You have to move the brush without hesitation from the molten mixture straight onto the surface of the painting. You need to keep a separate brush for each colour, and after every stroke quickly wipe off the paint to prevent the brush fibres from congealing and implements from becoming sticky… Avoid letting the temperature of the melted wax exceed 90°, at which point the fumes become toxic.
His resulting image, blotchy and awkward next to the sophistication of the original, brings the point home. This is just one illustration among a handful of Goudie’s own works scattered through the text, and whether technical experiment or tribute they serve both as reminders of the challenges that faced some of our greatest artists and of the inimitable stamp of genius.
Rock, spit and a finger were all that the Neolithic artist needed to make an image, and nothing in essence has changed. Something to paint on, something to paint with and some means of applying it: support, pigment, binder, applicator. Until the electronic age, and even beyond, Goudie argues, these elements fundamentally underlie every painting and – throw in talent – drive the trajectory and development of art.
Rockface, plaster, wooden panel, stretched canvas, touchscreen; ground minerals, oil paint, colour blocks, synthetic colours, tin tubes, acrylic paint; squirrel hair, kitten whiskers, swan’s feather, metal ferrule, digital stylus – these, and the artists who pioneered their use, are the pegs on which Goudie hangs his 35,000-year trawl through mankind’s engagement with paint. Some of the usual suspects under the microscope are here – Van Eyck and oil paint, Titian and canvas, Turner and watercolour blocks – and some less familiar. Berthe Morisot’s use of the portable easel in a rowing boat in the Bois de Boulogne at daybreak is beautifully done.
Rock, spit and a finger were all that the Neolithic artist needed
Because he is an artist, Goudie is good on the feel of being one. It hurts your back when you bend over a work being made on the floor – this is as true of Ogata Korin painting his iris screen in 1701 as it is of Jackson Pollock 250 years later. He is also good on the studio as the nerve centre of creativity – hierarchical and organised in Song dynasty China or Mughal India; smelly and messy in 17th-century Amsterdam; or plain alarming in the case of Anselm Kiefer:
As he works in the studio, wearing flowing linen clothes and sandals, handling comically large ladles of magmatic lead, he appears to be tempting fate itself. The artist moves prophet-like around the building, unconcerned by toxic smoke, skirting molten obstacles and installations of artfully smashed glass while surrounded by assistants decked out in protective clothing.
There is something almost forensic in Goudie’s fascination with every detail of the way in which his 20 chosen works of art were actually made. Like Reynolds chopping through the layers of Rembrandt’s paint to see how he did it, Goudie examines each masterpiece from ground to finishing touch. Were the colours mixed or kept separate? Did each layer have to dry before being covered? Would the painting last or was it designed to decay? With the aid of infrared reflectography he notes decisions made in underpainting and alterations in composition. With the naked eye he catalogues the order of brushstrokes and the accumulation of paint. He’s not interested in the academic language of art historians; in fact he goes out of his way (too far sometimes) to reject it. Beautifully illustrated, wearing its learning lightly, this is a work that reveals the secrets of art in a book that anyone who loves painting will enjoy.
Looking back in anguish: Good Good Loving, by Yvvette Edwards, reviewed
Ellen is at the end of her life and is frankly waiting to die while her extended family surrounds her, discussing her shortcomings:
It felt very unfair to be so completely mentally alert while she was lying there on her hospital bed trying to await a peaceful passing. Her hearing was perfectly intact, and as a consequence she was forced to endure the never-ending discussions about the mass of her failings.
This is the first novel from Yvvette Edwards for a decade. Her debut, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011), longlisted for the Booker, was inspired by a friend showing her a newspaper cutting about her former partner being convicted of the murder of his next girlfriend. The Mother (2016) was about a woman whose son is murdered. The violence in this latest novel, however, is largely of the emotional kind.
Ellen had been married for 49 years to handsome, womanising Clyde, who smelt of ‘minty-spliff’ (a combination of marijuana and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum). The only sex education she had received was from her uncaring mother in Montserrat, who gnomically told her that in relationships ‘make sure you walk the straight road’. She and Clyde consequently had three children in quick succession. There followed two more children, one of whom was born as the result of Clyde’s affair with another woman.
The novel is told backwards – the first chapter set in 2020 and the last, before the epilogue, in 1972. This structure takes a while to make sense – as does the reason why Ellen’s children feel such loyalty to their father. There is use of patois, which some readers will be unfamiliar with – but it’s not hard to guess what is meant by a character’s lack of ‘broughtupsy’, for example.
Edwards tackles serious themes of displacement, racial bias in medical treatment and bereavement, but with a lightness of touch. The novel has been endorsed by both Bernadine Evaristo and Diana Evans. It’s not for me to guess whether Edwards’s intentions are similar to Evans’s, who has said that she wants to create ‘visibility and truthful representations for people of colour’, but that certainly seems to be what Good Good Loving achieves.
With no coherent strategy, Britain seems perpetually adrift in the world
Peter Pomerantsev has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The British state seems perpetually befuddled. Every international crisis catches it in its sudden glare like so many headlights trained on a nervous rabbit hopping hopelessly around a motorway. One moment Russia is invading Ukraine, then Hamas attacks Israel, Israel flattens Gaza, America knocks out Venezuela, then attacks Iran, while all the time China leers over Taiwan. Each new event leaves us spinning. Whose side are we on? What do we want? How do we get it?
We use grand words to navigate our way in the confusion: ‘the special relationship’; ‘the national interest’; ‘the rules-based order’. But if these once signified some grand story we could all relate to they now feel empty and confusing. Jack Watling’s Statecraft sees something systemic in our inability to deal with these non-stop crises – and offers us a way to fix it.
It’s not that democracies can’t make strategy; it’s just that we’ve forgotten how
The trouble for Britain is that since the Cold War it took where the world was headed and its role in it for granted. Stability would be rooted in an international system propped up by America. Economic integration would guarantee peace and prosperity. Our democratic values would make us successful and significant. Different government departments could deal with discrete crises – an economic shock here, a distant war there – but these unfortunate events were the exception rather than the norm.
Now that model of the world has gone. Crises rather than order are the norm. And we have been left at sixes and sevens. Our economic policy says ‘Go do deals with China’ when our security policy screams caution. Our values trumpet openness –which creates opportunities for adversaries to manipulate us at home. We espouse the rules-based order, but our main ally, the US, is trashing it. Even when we have excellent intelligence, as in the run up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we struggle to mobilise our resources to act on it swiftly. The way democratic power changes every few years means it is impossible to plan long-term.
That didn’t matter so much when there was a strategy spanning generations. But now that we need to rethink our role in the world, the constant switches become problematic. It’s something we share with other democracies. American aims have become utterly erratic, often seeming to spin on a dime (or perhaps for a dime). Different departments in DC appear to be running different foreign policies. Some prioritise China; a few yearn for isolationism; others forge a bruderschaft of dictatorships. All these collide with one another and drag Britain into the pile-up.
Watling, who works for Rusi (Senior Research Fellow, Land Warfare – Military Sciences), is darkly amusing on how ‘strategy’ documents are written. Grandly titled, they are passed around departments where each revises it in their own direction, until you have a grand statement with little originality and which is made redundant when the next crisis comes.
The bad news is that dictatorships are rather good at strategy. Consider China, which can bring economic, military, diplomatic and information policy towards one greater aim, such as taking control of Taiwan by 2049. China harnesses long-term investments to secure geopolitical influence. Russia is more of a spoiler state, but it, too, can unite its different tools for a larger strategy. For decades, the Kremlin has used its energy companies as ways both of reaping profit and controlling Europe.
The point is not that democracies can’t make strategy; it’s that we’ve forgotten how. Consider the start of the Cold War. In 1948, a National Security Council resolution announced that the US was adopting a policy of ‘total Cold War’ against the Soviet Union. This included a combination of economic, diplomatic, military and cultural fronts. Over the Cold War, the ‘West’ combined a grand narrative about political freedoms, artistic freedoms and economic freedoms together with foreign policy to support independence movements in central Europe into a greater whole.
Statecraft is punctuated with colourful scenes of Watling’s adventures along the front lines in Ukraine. In one, he takes apart a Russian missile head with Ukrainian forces, only to find it stuffed full of western components. The moment becomes emblematic of our current kerfuffle. Our economic policy prioritises global trade –but that has led to our adversaries using our technology to wage war against our interests, and makes sanctions feel, says Watling, like ‘putting a hand over a colander’.
One can imagine a different approach that would align economics and security. Democracies would ensure our supply chains were ‘friend-shored’ and that we had a domestic defence industry to satisfy our companies, and this policy would be built up regardless of what happens each election. Meanwhile, our economic warfare tools would surgically subvert Russian supply chains at their choke points. Our visa policy would turn engineers off working on any part of military industry by banning them from entering any allied country in perpetuity.
While Statecraft is a detailed, often surgical, book, its overall effect is therapeutic. Reading it one can start to imagine a road map through the crazy car crashes of the post-rules-based world, and how we can unite the disparate tools we still possess to truly take back control.
Riddled with contradictions: the enigma of Jan Morris
Jan Morris was driven by almost super-human levels of energy and ambition, producing more than 40 books as well as news and travel articles, introductions, interviews, reviews and essays, travelling incessantly and taking on every job that was offered. That’s as far as I can go without a pronoun, because of course Morris’s life is divided into two parts. For the first half he was James, for the second she was Jan.
James Morris was born in 1926, aware from early on that she was female, trapped in a male body. The transition to Jan, made in the early 1970s, remains at the heart of our fascination with Morris. Sara Wheeler handles it with grace and compassion, while never losing her grasp on a character riddled with contradictions – a deeply conservative trans pioneer; a writer both superficial and profound; a self-made woman who remained obstinately masculine; and an admirer of empire who was a passionate Welsh nationalist. Well researched and beautifully written, this is a superb biography that puts Morris into the context of her time and makes a solid case for the enduring significance of her work.
Imagine being a cat in the body of a dog. Every move would feel wrong
Morris was already writing pieces for the local press from school at Lancing, where sex with boys was fun but ‘nothing fitted’. He joined up for the last year of the war and served in a cavalry regiment until 1947, which gave him a passion for travel. His tutor at Oxford described him as ‘confident, vigorous and [with] a dangerous facility with pen and typewriter’.
By then he was married to Elizabeth Tuckniss, the fixed point all through Morris’s life. Elizabeth shared his secret, but not much else. As a successful journalist, James was travelling for weeks at a time, while she was left to manage pregnancies, children, schools, house moves and their precarious finances. When James was home, clacking away on the typewriter or planning the next journey, he was not to be disturbed. ‘Her understanding,’ as he, and later she, would often say, ‘was fathomless.’ He found a job on the Times and talked his way on to Sir John Hunt’s Everest expedition in the spring of 1953. The news that the summit had been conquered on 29 May only reached Morris, 8,000 feet below at Camp 4, early the following afternoon. After a bone-battering scramble down the icefall to Base Camp, he thumped out a coded message – which, passed on by a bicycle-operated radio station at Namche Bazaar, eventually reached the Times, which announced the news on 2 June, Coronation Day.
Morris stayed on with the paper, but was increasingly frustrated by its refusal to let him write a book about the Everest expedition – or indeed any other global event he was sent to cover. In 1956 he left and joined the less restrictive Manchester Guardian, while Faber & Faber published a swift succession of books on his travels, including Everest.
Yet he was still trapped in the wrong body, and the experience was not about sex but identity. Imagine being a cat in the body of a dog. Every move would feel wrong. Ceaseless activity dulled the anguish, but Morris knew he had to address it or die. From the late 1950s, with Elizabeth’s support, he began to take feminisation hormones. He felt ill much of the time, but never stopped working.
Then came Venice (1961). Having planned it as an objective dispatch, Morris found that the book came out as a ‘highly subjective, romantic, impressionist picture less of a city than an experience’. Venice is a place where past and present co-exist and, in responding to its reflections, Morris found his voice – funny, sharply observant, touched with sadness, using concrete sights and sounds to evoke what was just out of reach. Some critics huffed about the sloppy history and over-indulgent prose, but readers loved it. The book sold thousands of copies and stayed in the bestseller lists for weeks.
Morris left the Guardian to go freelance. The torrent of articles and books continued, and the family moved to Wales. Wherever he went, and especially in India, Morris was fascinated by the juxtaposition of old and new and how the past infiltrates the present.
The three volumes of Pax Britannica were published between 1968 and 1978, covering the period from Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965. Morris presents the Raj in a dramatic progression of brilliantly choreographed set pieces and adventures that, in Wheeler’s words, ‘sweep butchery and appropriation aside to the tune of a bugle reveille’. In the late 1960s, academics were beginning to raise awkward questions about the British Empire; but its retired colonels and civil servants were still living out their days in Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells. The Raj was not yet a cause for perpetual apology.
As a writer, Morris never claimed to be a historian, and only described the British version of India. The horrors are usually seen as the consequences of ‘bad apples’ in command rather than any inherent cruelty in colonialism itself. There is no attempt to explore the Indian experience of British rule, nor its failures, nor its legacy – which was collapsing in blood and sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland as the trilogy appeared. Wheeler observes that Edward Gibbon, with whom Morris was often compared in contemporary reviews,
saw empire as inherently unstable and unproductive, whereas Morris perceives it… as a development agency. Decline and Fall is not an elegy for empire. In many ways, Pax Britannica is.
The first volume of the trilogy, Climax of Empire, was the last book to be published by James Morris, since hormone therapy had almost completed the transition to Jan. She began to wear women’s clothes among trusted friends, one of whom was my father, John Julius Norwich. They had bonded over Venice, and when he invited Morris to dinner, she replied she would come as a woman – leaving my mother in a quandary. Was Jan to be included in the gathering of ladies withdrawing to ‘powder their noses’ after the last course? In the end, wearing a broderie anglaise blouse and a long red kilt, she stayed in animated conversation with the men while we ‘girls’ (I was one, aged 17) trooped upstairs to gasp over her five o’clock shadow and big hands.
In the summer of 1972, Jan’s eldest son Mark drove her to Heathrow to catch a flight to Casablanca for the main operation. When it was over, Jan wrote to tell Elizabeth that at last she was free of her obsession and hoped to make up for ‘all the torments I’ve plagued you with over so many years’. Elizabeth, who died four years after Jan, in 2024, never shared her experience of being married to a high-functioning narcissist with gender dysphoria, so her torments remain unexpressed. But Wheeler has talked to three of her four surviving children, who bear the emotional scars. ‘My father wasn’t a parent,’ says Mark, ‘and Elizabeth couldn’t be a parent because Jan made the rules.’
After transition, Jan may have felt feminine, but she was as demanding and domineering as ever
While the advance for Conundrum, Jan’s memoir on her transition, was generous, the book was a disappointment – no gory details, no struggles with pain or practicalities. Germaine Greer wrote that Morris seemed like ‘a man who had eaten a great many pills’, an opinion shared by many. Jan may have felt feminine, but she remained as demanding and domineering as ever.
The book did bring comfort to many who had lived their lives in terror of revealing their true natures. Now a well-known writer had told her story, and in hundreds of letters readers thanked her for giving them hope and begged her for advice and addresses. To their disappointment, Jan had no interest in her trans fans. Having established her womanhood, she became an ardent Welsh nationalist – celebrating its language and culture, that is, not campaigning for Plaid Cymru.
She never stopped writing. But an unspoken dissatisfaction arose as the years wore on – a sense of something missing. Among the best of her later works are the fictional Last Letters from Hav (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985) and Trieste: The Meaning of Nowhere (2001). Of the imaginary city of Hav, Jan admitted that Trieste ‘lurked between every line’. Trieste, haunted by refugees and disillusioned romantics, was the urban distillation of the mood that haunted Jan’s last years – a restless search for what never did and never could exist.
Israel needs to rethink its relationship with Christians
Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre yesterday, which was Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The story quickly gained momentum and drew criticism of Israel from top clerics and world leaders.
The Israeli side of the story is that this was a case of overzealous policing by officers who interpreted the wartime restrictions too stringently. Religious sites such as the Holy Sepulchre cannot be brimming with worshippers given the grave risk to life should Iran land a direct hit, but a few prelates entering the building to recite prayers should not have met with the response it did. While Israel-averse Catholics on the left and right have read more sinister significance into the incident, the swiftness of the remedial action taken and the seniority of the government personnel involved points to a genuine case of plod cock-up rather than a planned and deliberate slight.
The Times of Israel reports that, following late-night interventions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, arrangements have been made for the Catholic Church to celebrate Mass and arrange prayers throughout Holy Week, with services livestreamed for Israeli and Palestinian Catholics to follow at home. The emphatic nature of Netanyahu’s order – he instructed the police to grant the Cardinal ‘full and immediate access’ to Holy Sepulchre – is an indication that the government realises the seriousness of this as a diplomatic incident.
In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen Israelis on social media allege that that His Eminence is a pro-Palestinian partisan, pointing for example to his wearing of the keffiyeh on occasions. As a lowly member of the faithful, it is not for me to question how a prince of the Church goes about his ministry. Wearing a keffiyeh during public appearances might well bond the cardinal with his Palestinian flock, though it must be stressed that this is no mere garment. The keffiyeh is a highly politicised symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israel. It is analogous to a priest who ministers to gays and lesbians wearing a Pride flag over his clerical clothing. Even if intended as a gesture of empathy or solidarity, it would nonetheless signify sympathy for, or at least a willingness to be associated with, a contentious ideology.
Yet none of this alters the profound misjudgement of the Israeli police officers in barring the Cardinal from the church, and on the first day of Holy Week no less. Israel is the Jewish state, but it is also a state of all its citizens – including Catholics. While the Church has bristled at the restrictions on wartime gatherings, it complied with limits during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Mass is the most perfect communion with the Almighty this side of death. Every day that the faithful are denied the opportunity to celebrate the sacred mysteries is a separation from Christ felt as keenly as sin itself. Forbidding physical attendance at Mass can only be justified when doing otherwise would put human life in likely and severe danger. When the state is at war and its capital a key target for the enemy, this condition is surely met.
Nevertheless, this incident should serve as a wake-up call for Israel to improve its relations with the Catholic church and other Christian denominations. There is already enough of a wedge between the Jewish state and the ecclesiastical leaders of its Christian citizens, whether Christian anti-Semitism (of which the Catholic Church has more than its fair share), attacks on Christians by Jewish extremists (which are on the rise), or the generally pro-Palestinian stance on the Middle East conflict taken by the non-evangelical churches. There is no need to push people further apart and cause unnecessary pain, upset or insult. Something as simple as better education on Christian beliefs, customs and obligations would greatly improve the services rendered by state employees such as police officers.
In truth, though, Israel needs a new strategic approach to relations with Christians, one that goes beyond forging alliances with born-again evangelicals in the United States and impersonally managing potential communal flashpoints inside the country itself. Of course Jerusalem has objections to the pronouncements of some Christian churches which seem to focus on denouncing Israel and only occasionally tossing in a passing reference to Hamas to give the appearance of even-handedness. Wise leadership and nuanced diplomacy exist to navigate such concerns. In its relations with the Church, as in so much else, that is what is lacking in Israel: leadership.
AI didn’t write my book
It’s been a rather unusual month. In the last four weeks, I’ve gone from being renamed ‘Matt Badloss’, after finishing behind the Greens at the Gorton and Denton by-election, to ‘MattGPT’, on the basis, my many critics claim, that parts of my new book were written not by me but artificial intelligence.
Many of my critics, I genuinely believe, have seized on a few minor imperfections to try and stigmatise a major argument about how demographic change is destroying Britain
While even I accept that my new moniker of MattGPT is amusing – prompting even my own mother to call and ask ‘what’s ChatGPT?’, unfortunately for my critics the underlying claim is categorically untrue.
Let me explain what really happened and how this book ended up being the most controversial, and best-selling, of all my books, having now rocketed to number two on the Amazon bestseller list – behind a children’s book about an Easter fluffy chick.
On March 17, I released a trailer for my book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which was soon watched by half-a-million people. The title is a deliberate reference to Arthur Koestler’s Suicide of a Nation, a collection of left-wing essays, published in 1963, and the subtitle of Douglas Murray’s excellent book The Strange Death of Europe, published a decade or so ago.
The book, helped largely by my 94,000 Substack subscribers and appearances on the podcast circuit, began to climb slowly in the rankings. People began to talk about my argument – that we are losing our country. That by 2063, according to my projections, white British people will be a minority in this country; by the 2070s the foreign-born will be a majority, and by 2100 the share of people following Islam will go from one in 17 to one in four.
At this point, the only criticism, ironically, came from the ultra-right-wing, where an assortment of increasingly extreme young men began to criticise the book for being ‘too soft’. This was strange, I thought, given that I use the book to call for an immediate end to mass immigration, an exit from the European Convention on Human Rights, the deportation of illegal migrants and foreign criminals and a reversal of the ‘Boriswave’, which brought millions of low-wage, non-European migrants into Britain with no democratic consent whatsoever.
But then all hell broke loose. At the other end of the political spectrum, a largely unknown left-wing activist named Andy Twelves cobbled together online a list of what he said were factual inaccuracies in my book, along with misquotes, typos and limited footnotes. Taken together, this led him to claim that large parts of the book were written by artificial intelligence.
This quickly went viral, the amusing moniker MattGPT was born, and Twelve’s claims were uncritically accepted by countless onlookers – even though more than a few of them are either misleading or simply wrong.
There is no doubt the book contains a few errors and typos – which I regret and are currently being corrected. It is one of the potential perils of deliberately choosing to publish a book outside the woke publishing industry.
For instance, I do, mistakenly, describe Boris Johnson as being ‘in opposition’ when he promised the British people, in 2019, that he would ‘lower the overall number’ of immigrants. In reality, he was already prime minister.
Some of my historical quotations are also imperfect. For instance, in the book I write that the great Roman orator Cicero said: ‘The state should begin with those who are closest to us.’ As a ‘world expert’ on Cicero confirmed to the Times a few days ago, what Cicero said was: ‘The supreme duty of the state is to protect its own citizens’.
I also misquote Sir Roger Scruton as having said: ‘A society that cannot distinguish its friends from its enemies or that extends hospitality to those who despise its way of life, is a society that has lost the instinct for survival.’
Having checked my notes, this is clearly a misquote from Scruton’s The Need for Nations, in which he warned of the distinction between ‘those who are entitled to the benefit of the sacrifices that my membership calls from me, from those who are interloping.’ But I got it wrong.
My critics also quibble with things such as a reference to a report from Bradford which claimed that ‘only four of 28 students’ in one school spoke English as their first language, which I attributed to the BBC. In reality, this comes from a piece in the Times Educational Supplement and the Daily Mail, which noted ‘only four out of 417 children spoke English as their main language’ at a Bradford primary school. You get the drift.
Unfortunately, these claims about ChatGPT were also fuelled by my inclusion of references to ChatGPT in the footnotes, regarding data on how immigration is rapidly changing classrooms in England.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think twice about it. Every major academic, journalist and data analyst uses artificial intelligence to interrogate data and if they claim they are not using it then they are lying. It has become a crucial tool and so long as you are cross-checking the data with official datasets, as I did, then you are on solid ground.
But there is an enormous difference between using AI as a research tool and claiming it has been used to write a book. It’s like saying if you use a calculator, you are not doing maths, which is obviously ridiculous. So, I stand by all the numbers and (peer reviewed) demographic projections in this book.
On Friday, I took part in a GB News debate with Andy Twelves and he asked me to name the leading demographers who reviewed my projections regarding Britain’s future population. I could not tell him this because peer review is by its nature anonymous. Twelves would have known this had he ever written a book or conducted a major academic study. He has done neither. My anonymous reviewers know who they are and I thank them.
There are also many things my critics get wrong. For example, Twelves criticises my claim that ‘In Leicester, Luton, Slough, and virtually all of London, most primary school pupils’ main language is no longer English’, accusing me of ‘statistical illiteracy’.
I’ve gone back to check the numbers from the Department for Education. The percentage of primary school pupils who do not speak English as their first language is 53 per cent in Luton, 59 per cent in Leicester and Slough, 65 per cent in Tower Hamlets and 72 per cent in Newham.
While the left might not think this is a problem, I do. Either way, it’s a matter of opinion, not something that can be shut down because the left doesn’t want to talk about it.
Similarly, my critics claim that my argument that teachers struggle with the reality of mass immigration in the classroom is nonsense. Even the Bell Foundation, in evidence to parliament, notes the problems and challenges many teachers report when dealing with multiple languages in the classroom.
The left want us to pretend everything is fine; but I don’t think it is. The British people, for example, have been forced to spend £243 million in recent years on translation services in the NHS. How is this right, or fair? If you come to England you should learn and speak English.
The key point, I think, is that we should be able to debate what is happening to Britain, whereas many of my critics, I genuinely believe, have seized on a few minor imperfections to try and stigmatise a major argument about how demographic change is destroying Britain.
While I could have asked my long-suffering family and friends who watched me write Suicide of a Nation for four months to vouch for me, ahead of the debate with Andy Twelves on GB News, just for fun, I asked artificial intelligence detection software what it thought.
One, called GPTZero, said: ‘We are highly confident this text is entirely human’, estimating just 3 per cent of the text was AI generated. Given that AI detection programmes are notoriously unreliable because they tend to overstate the influence of AI this is quite something.
Another, ironically, pointed to human error and typos as one reason why the book could not have been written by artificial intelligence, alongside its use of ‘a consistent overarching thesis’, ‘clear ideological positioning’, ‘emotional language’, ‘polemical voice’, ‘repetition in a deliberately rhetorical way’, and as having a ‘personally recognisable style consistent with your previous work which AI cannot replicate over an entire manuscript.’
My critics, of course, will never believe me. But I really don’t care. Because what I also suspect is that millions of other people can quietly see what is going on.
Suicide of a Nation, as I say, has already risen to number two in the Amazon charts, sitting alongside the likes of Jamie Oliver and Harry and Meghan. It is, by far, my biggest selling book and is clearly connecting with thousands of people.
It’s sold somewhere around 12,000 copies in just one week and I’m now taking it on tour around Britain. Were it not for a book about an Easter fluffy chick it would currently be the best-selling book on Amazon. Although as another amusing critic replied: ‘You must be getting rather used to finishing in second place by now’.
Is HBO’s Harry Potter series a worthwhile gamble?
The actor Andrew Garfield attracted some controversy recently when, promoting his new family film The Magic Faraway Tree, he revealed that he had seen the Harry Potter series for the first time. “I know it’s controversial and we shouldn’t be putting money in the pocket of inhumane legislation right now, through she that shall remain nameless,” Garfield said. “There are so many beautiful artists that worked on those films. I have a newfound appreciation for all of the artists, and Daniel is great.”
While Garfield’s appreciation of Daniel Radcliffe’s modest acting abilities as Potter might be greater than that of other viewers, his cautious decision to liken the films’ ultimate creator J.K. Rowling to her villainous character Lord Voldermort, aka “He Who Must Not Be Named”, antagonized far more people than it pleased. One pocket of opinion, who side with Rowling’s views on the trans issue, consider Garfield a coward for his impotent virtue-signaling. While others would argue that the entire Harry Potter universe is an evil creation by a wicked transphobe that should be shunned.
This second camp are not likely to be appeased by last week’s teaser trailer for the new HBO series based on the novels. The show will star newcomer Dominic McLaughlin as Potter and feature much-loved British stars in support including Janet McTeer, Nick Frost and Katherine Parkinson – as well as, in a slightly eccentric casting choice, America’s John Lithgow as Professor Dumbledore. Directed and show-run by Succession alumni Mark Mylod and Francesca Gardiner, the series appears to favor a grittier, darker aesthetic than the films, with a more naturalistic style of shooting and greater use of existing London locations. While still obviously aimed at families, this is less the wide-eyed wonder of the original Chris Columbus pictures and more something wearier, and more hard-won. Perfect for 2026, in other words.
The anticipated controversy from the trailer is the presence of Paapa Essiedu as Professor Snape. Dreadlocked and black, he could not be further from the stately performance of the late Alan Rickman in the films, bringing an air of urban menace to this otherwise fantastical setting. As expected, many viewers have reacted either with predictable support (“of course Snape has to be black!”) or equally predictable and racially-tinged abuse. Whether Essiedu is inspired or lamentable casting will be revealed in full when the show launches on Christmas Day. It is hard not to speculate that his presence is something of a lightning rod to draw attention away from the real source of conflict, the wicked transphobe billionaire author herself.
In Britain and the US, Rowling has been credited (or blamed) with changing the conversation about trans issues almost entirely, in her refusal to accept what very nearly became a shibboleth that “trans women are women.” She did so in the knowledge that she, unlike many lesser writers and figures in the entertainment industry, could not be canceled, simply because she was too powerful and influential to ignore. Although she remains a bestselling author thanks to her pseudonymously written Cormoran Strike series, it is her views on social matters (not least her very public contempt towards Britain’s Labour government, which she was once an avid supporter of) that have attract the most column inches.
HBO has spent an awful lot of money on the Harry Potter series – the teaser trailer for which, incidentally, became HBO’s most viewed ever, with 277 million views in the first 24 hours – in the certain knowledge that there will be substantial and vocal backlash because of who its ultimate creator is. Their calculation, which seems a safe one, is that there will be many more people who either don’t care about Rowling’s views or who would support them than there would be those who would boycott the show as a result.
She has been unafraid to publicly criticize those, such as Radcliffe and his co-star Emma Watson, who have shown her ingratitude by speaking out against her supposedly heretical views. It seems unlikely that she is going to shut up and behave herself because it might be beneficial to HBO Max’s subscriber base to do so. With all this in mind, those looking forward to the show and those who relish the very public prospect of its actors being asked some very difficult questions about their personal views will feel that Christmas cannot come quickly enough.
The three options facing Trump in Iran
As Trump contemplates a ground operation in Iran, he will be reckoning with the ghosts of previous western “excursions” in the region, as he recently labeled this war.
History suggests three endgames for his intervention in Iran are plausible. First, a hasty deal on terms that aggrandize and empower Iran, creating an American equivalent to Britain’s Suez Crisis. Second, a protracted struggle which becomes structurally reminiscent of the Iraq War. Third, a dramatic escalation which achieves Iranian surrender quickly and cleanly. The bad news for Trump is that the outcome he seeks, number three, is the one without real precedent.
In the first scenario, Trump makes a deal on terms that flatter Iran. Rather than compel Tehran to restrict its nuclear, proxy and missile programs – his initial war aims – the President would be forced to acknowledge Iranian authority in the Persian Gulf. This would either be explicit, via a new legal regime for the waterway, or implicit, via failure to break the blockade. But the upshot would be clear: in the Gulf, Tehran rules the waves.
Escalation without a coherent theory of victory risks another quagmire
For all the operational successes of the joint US-Israeli aerial campaign, this would be tantamount to strategic defeat. America’s brand of “security diplomacy” – the regional influence lent by acting as defender of last resort for Washington’s partners – would be badly discredited. Iran, meanwhile, would emerge with proof of concept of its capacity to bully both its neighborhood and the world by simply threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz.
In other words, this would be America’s “Suez moment.” Like Britain in 1956, a superpower will have lost out to a weaker adversary in the battle to control a strategic waterway. Like Anthony Eden, who was threatened with economic oblivion by Dwight Eisenhower unless he withdrew, Trump’s military gains would be vitiated by a harsh market response. Suez improved Gamal Abdel Nasser’s domestic position and enabled him to project greater influence across the region by forming the anti-western United Arab Republic and inspiring a military coup in Iraq and political crisis in Lebanon, both instigated by Nasserist forces. Today, an emboldened Iran will possess considerable leverage over its Gulf neighbors. This would confer the ability to exact levies in the Strait permanently, rebuild its proxy network and isolate Israel.
The second scenario sees the US escalate against a regime that refuses to fold. The sequence of events might look something like this. US Marines seize Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf involved in exporting oil and policing tankers. Simultaneously, US Special Forces deploy along Iran’s southern coast in a mission to degrade the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) mine depots, anti-ship cruise missiles and speedboat fleets.
Faced with the prospect of the US busting open the Strait while holding Iranian oil exports hostage – thus flipping the current strategic equation on its head – the Iranian regime could choose to double down rather than sue for peace. Iran could deploy elite IRGC forces – perhaps the Saberin Unit and Nohed airborne Brigade – to impose maximum political costs on Trump by killing American troops. American forces must fend off the assault, possibly supported by reinforcements, until either the regime’s will or economy breaks. Either could take months.
This “quagmire” would be Trump’s Iraq. While plainly incomparable in terms of the duration or scale or military deployment, the similarity is structural: unyielding strategic aims exert a ratchet effect on political and military commitment, resulting in an irreversible escalation ladder until one side cracks.
The opening gambits of both the George W. Bush and Trump administrations possess a similar logic. Both believed that overwhelming initial force would blow the adversary away. Thus, on February 28, the US and Israel launched massive strikes on Iran’s leadership, command-and-control centers and offensive capabilities (drone and ballistic missile launchers facilities). Between March 20 and May 1, 2003, the US-led coalition attempted to assassinate Saddam Hussein at Dora Farms, seized Iraqi oil fields, bombed the Ministry of Defense and Republican Guard headquarters and demolished key military production sites.
When unexpected consequences arise – Iran’s ferocious horizontal escalation, the scale and tenacity of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 – maximalist yet ill-defined strategic objectives assume an inertia of their own. As the White House supposedly considers a “final blow” against Iran, likely a military ground component with accompanying surge of air power, it is impossible to ignore the traces of the “big push” advocated by Bush’s national security advisor, Stephen J. Hadley, that later materialized as “the surge.”
The final scenario is the one the President is surely hoping for. Here, a successful US operation against Iran’s naval capabilities, combined with the seizure of Kharg Island, which accounts for 90 percent of Iranian outflows, forces the regime to capitulate before it implodes.
There are grounds to think it might. The Iranian economy cannot limp on without crude oil exports. Although oil revenue only constitutes 30 to 40 percent of the state budget, the yuan earned from these sales prop up the rial given the sanctions on Iran’s foreign reserves. Without this hard currency, inflation would swiftly become hyperinflation. Goods that Iran cannot import via barter trade with surrounding states would fast become unaffordable. The most credible estimates suggest that, under such a siege, the economy could hold out for two months.
More importantly, the salaries and pensions that sustain the undying loyalty of the military rank and file will become worthless. The favorable exchange rates enjoyed by regime acolytes would disappear. No longer able to enjoy superior living standards to their fellow citizens, one might expect the security forces to be less willing to mow down unarmed protesters again.
One might doubt the existence of a political system that would reject a negotiated settlement in favor of such pain, or to be precise, deflecting such pain on to its people. But the Islamic Republic is capable. It has chosen to be bombed not once, but twice, in nine months rather than relinquish uranium enrichment.
The regime did capitulate to survive on one occasion – the anomaly that proves the rule. In July 1988, Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a ceasefire after an eight-year war with Iraq he had couched as existential. Yet the immediate conditions that led to this decision are not apparent today. After eight years of exhausting war, Saddam Hussein’s army escalated dramatically between April and July that year as it conducted five lightning offensives. Simultaneously, Iraq signaled an appetite to widen the war further through its sponsorship of an incursion into Iran by the Mojahedin-e Khalq.
Also in the spring of 1988, the US destroyed Iran’s naval capacity to disrupt the Strait in Operation Praying Mantis. At that time, key figures in the regime such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani began to argue that peace alone could ensure regime survival. Even the fanatical commander of the IRGC, Mohsen Rezai – currently the supreme leader’s military adviser – confessed to Khomeini that summer that victory was likely unattainable.
The regime is neither so beleaguered nor receptive to compromise today. A hardline faction spanning the IRGC, clergy, and shadowy security elite has coopted the instruments of power, many of whom hail from the same few provinces and fought together during the Iran-Iraq war. Each views this war as a golden opportunity to re-establish much needed deterrence after a string of losses since 2023. One can safely wager that nobody of any stature is playing today’s Rafsanjani.
History, then, is against Trump. This is not to say that failure is inevitable, but that the mistakes of the past must be avoided. Blinking now turns Trump into Eden and Iran into Nasser on steroids. Escalation without a coherent theory of victory risks another quagmire. The challenge is that Tehran will only contemplate backing down if America projects unwavering resolve. Put differently, the President’s only path to victory is through escalation, even if the stakes are immense.
The markets have stopped listening to Donald Trump
Over the last 24 hours, President Trump has come up with a bewildering series of ‘solutions’ to the global oil crisis triggered by his war with Iran. He might seize all of the country’s oil wells. He may send the marines in to capture its main exporting hub, Kharg Island. He has threatened to bomb the country back to the Stone Age if it doesn’t re-open the Straits of Hormuz, while at the same time – apparently – he is very close to a ‘fantastic deal’ that will settle the entire conflict.
But will these threats work? Can Trump keep a lid on the unfolding crisis? Crucially, the markets are not listening to him anymore – and the price of oil keeps rising.
Brent crude oil, the key benchmark for Europe, rose to $116 (£88) a barrel overnight, adding to the pressure on inflation and interest rates across the developed world. The latest plan, if that is not too dignified a word, from the White House to bring it under control, is for the United States to take over Iran’s oil production. Trump told the Financial Times:
The oil market is out now of political control
To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the US say, ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.
If that doesn’t work, and it sounds implausible right now, Trump seemingly has other plans to force Iran to do his bidding. Just this lunchtime he wrote on his platform Truth Social:
We will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinisation plants!).
Meanwhile, the British government is trying frantically to keep up with events. The Prime Minister has summoned business leaders to a briefing on the war. Meanwhile, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is meeting with her G7 colleagues to come up with a response. But since Reeves and Starmer refuse to even contemplate the one practical step that might bring down the oil price a little – re-opening the North Sea to fresh production – it is hard to know how they expect to be taken seriously.
The significant point is this. The oil market is out now of political control. The war against Iran has taken out a significant chunk of production and made one of the key shipping routes through the Gulf too dangerous to use. The market is getting squeezed, with buyers scrambling around for any supplies they can get their hands on.
Over the medium term, this may not matter. Most countries are rapidly developing wind and solar alternatives, new nuclear power stations are being built, and countries such as Venezuela, with the largest reserves in the world, can increase production.
None of that will happen quickly, however. Against the backdrop of tight supply and spiralling demand, there is no point in President Trump simply trying to talk the price of oil back down again. It just won’t work.
Britain should brace itself for a small boat surge
According to a report in the French press today, the border between France and the United Kingdom is ‘at risk of being left unprotected’. The cynic might say that’s been the case for years, given the vast numbers of migrants who have crossed the Channel in small boats since 2018. Over 41,000 made the journey in 2025 – the second highest number on record – and more than 4,400 migrants have landed in England in the first three months of this year.
That figure is likely to increase significantly now that spring has arrived. The days are longer and, according to the BBC weather centre, the outlook for April is for ‘drier-than-normal weather’. The peak season for small boat crossings is normally early May to late September, when the weather in the Channel is at its most benign. But the well-organised people smugglers are always ready to capitalise on unseasonably clement conditions.
In March 2023, Britain and France signed a deal in which Paris received £468 million in return for promising to stop the boats. It hasn’t quite gone according to plan. In the three years to 2025, the number of migrants crossing the Channel has risen from 29,000 to 41,472.
There is no political will in Paris to combat mass immigration
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has done the maths and reportedly is demanding that France fulfil its side of the bargain. She wants the French police to intercept more small boats before they can be launched from the coast – what the Home Office has described as demonstrating more ‘flexibility and innovation’.
Apparently Mahmood’s demand for a performance-based deal has irked her French counterparts. The newspaper Le Monde quotes a source with France’s Interior Ministry declaring that ‘the negotiations have failed; everything has gone up to the ministerial level’. There is now concern within the Home Office that the French ‘might just delay things further’ or even take their ‘foot off the gas’ and leave the border unprotected.
But has a French foot ever really been on the gas? President Emmanuel Macron has fobbed off one prime minister after another in the nine years he has been in power.
The first to fall for his patter and promises was Theresa May. She hosted Macron at the Sandhurst summit in January 2018, and told reporters that Britain and France ‘share a determination to tackle the people traffickers and migrant smugglers who exploit the misery of those making the perilous journey to Europe’. Rishi Sunk and Keir Starmer have parroted similar platitudes after meetings with Macron, and yet the small boats keep coming.
Macron believes in free movement. It is why France has experienced record levels of legal and illegal immigration during his presidency. His centrist party is fully on board. Last week, one of the senior figures in his party, Yaël Braun-Pivet (who is also the speaker of the National Assembly) said that a referendum on immigration would be contrary to Republican values. That is not what the vast majority of the public think: 72 per cent would like to have their say on the changing demographics of their country.
Macron’s centrist MEPs in Brussels also toe the Elysee line on free movement. Last week they voted against a bill that will create return hubs outside the EU to where rejected asylum seekers will be sent before deportation. They and their left-wing allies lost the vote, however, and the return hubs will form part of the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum that comes into full effect in June.
This pact has been years in the making but the French media say it ‘risks missing its implementation deadline in France’ because of concern that some of the measures will need to be transposed into French law. In other words, the French government will deploy delaying tactics, just as they are with Britain.
There is no political will in Paris to combat mass immigration, and that won’t change in the final year of Macron’s tenure. He wants to be remembered as a progressive president and not the man who stopped the small boats.
Is therapy culture to blame for the manosphere?
There’s a moment in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere where Theroux asks one of Andrew Tate’s protégés a simple question: why doesn’t he just try being a good person? Harrison Sullivan, known as HS, pauses. For the first time in the documentary, he’s thinking, not performing. ‘It’s a good question,’ he says. ‘If I’d just done good things, I’d never have blown up on social media…’ HS understands that he is in a world which rewards clout, not virtue. And that is exactly what the documentary fails to examine.
Both the manosphere and therapy culture are selling the same individualistic values: be your best self, live your truth, prioritise your needs and don’t compromise
Theroux looks at the manosphere through the lens of psychology, drawing the loose conclusion that the extreme views of these men results from childhood trauma, absent fathers and wounded masculinity. He applies a popular psychodynamic approach to understanding their behaviour: trace it back to childhood, then find something specific in their upbringing that explains why they didn’t turn out right. That may be true, but it’s simplistic. Not least, the manosphere seems to be a cultural phenomenon. There must be something in society at large influencing these men.
I think the answer may lie in the rise of therapy culture. In the last decade, psychotherapy has become increasingly popular. In 2023, the Financial Times called it ‘The profession of the century,’ and technology companies like BetterHelp have expanded the practiceby offering more affordable online therapy. But despite the growth, demand for the talking cure continues to exceed therapist supply, and many have turned to social media accounts offering therapeutic platitudes. This is therapy culture.
Therapy culture is therapeutic language without therapeutic values. It is when we talk about boundaries, trauma and nervous systems outside of actual therapy. This kind of language justifies people’s self-interest (‘protecting my energy’), pathologises disagreement (‘that’s toxic’), and makes relationships transactional (‘does this serve me?’). It is the vocabulary of introspection without any actual introspection. And the manosphere speaks this language fluently.
Andrew Tate talks about ‘healing ancestral masculine trauma’. Myron Gaines, of the popular manosphere podcast ‘Fresh and Fit’, tells men they need to ‘heal from female manipulation.’ While their use of ‘healing’ sounds therapeutic, it’s really about justifying control.
Gaines advises: ‘Women will waste your time if you let them. Key words: if you let them.’ ‘Protect your energy from low-value females.’ While women are told by therapy culture to ‘set boundaries’ and ‘cut toxic men’ out of their lives, the manosphere tells men to do the same to ‘low-value women’. It’s the same logic with a different aesthetic.
The manosphere is particularly interested in ‘authenticity’. Tate claims he’s ‘living authentically as a man; society wants me to suppress this.’ This mirrors therapy culture’s call for you to ‘live your truth’, only redirected towards the dominance of others.
Crucially this kind of language sells well. HS offers to ‘coach boys to be fucking boys.’ Tate’s Hustlers University promises ‘cheat codes to win at life.’ The manosphere is monetising therapy-light self-help repackaged as masculine empowerment.
Therapy culture is typically coded as female. We think of women raising their standards, protecting their boundaries and choosing themselves first. ‘Know your worth. Don’t settle. He’s not good enough.’ But despite the red pill community rejecting exactly this kind of empowering feminist rhetoric, they are responding with a near identical approach when it comes to relationships. The manosphere tells men: ‘Focus on yourself, cut dead weight, maximise SMV [Sexual Market Value]. Is she high-value?’
Both the manosphere and therapy culture are selling the same individualistic values: be your best self, live your truth, prioritise your needs and don’t compromise. But this fosters detachment and causes relationships to be transactional. Therapy culture promises self-actualisation but delivers isolation. The manosphere is its masculine form, dividing us further under the guise of male empowerment.
Our grandparents’ generation understood that partnership requires shared values, complementary roles and working toward something other than the self. Without this framework – no religion, no stable community, no tradition of service to something larger – these young men have nothing to anchor them. They remain boys because therapy culture gave them the language of growth without maturity.
There’s a telling moment when HS is with his mother. ‘All the women I know aren’t like you,’ he says, almost wistfully. Of course they aren’t, he’s 23, socialising with OnlyFans creators who work in the same attention economy as him. His mother is the only adult woman in his life.
It’s a boyish moment that reveals what therapy culture can’t address: HS is profoundly immature. One of psychotherapy’s core aims is helping people become fully formed adults who no longer idealise their parents. But therapy culture uses the language of healing without requiring anyone to actually ‘do the work’ and grow up. Men remain boys, stuck in an Oedipal loop, chasing clout because they lack the emotional development to build anything real.
This is key to understanding why the message of the manosphere resonates. The manosphere is therapy culture’s shadow: individualism without introspection, self-optimisation without empathy and boundaries without connection. It’s the same culture we are currently all trapped inside. The problem is not just the boys.
The illusion and delusion of Matt Goodwin
Sometimes, a nickname comes along so excellently unkind that you know it’s going to stick. One such is “MattGPT” – which will, I suspect, follow former academic and failed Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matt Goodwin to his grave.
“MattGPT” is a nickname that will follow former academic and failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin to his grave
The taunt gained traction after the writer Andy Twelves noticed a series of factual errors in Goodwin’s self-published new book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. (He seems to have been strongly inspired in theme as well as in choice of title – intellectual homage, or Salieri eyeballing Mozart? – by the success of our own Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.)
Were these, Twelves wondered, the result of AI “hallucinations”? He noticed, after all, that Goodwin left ChatGPT URLs in some of the footnotes. When challenged, Goodwin said crossly he used AI only “to obtain datasets”, claiming that this was standard practice. But Goodwin also included quotations from Cicero, Livy, Roger Scruton, Friedrich Hayek and several others that appeared to have been misattributed or made up out of whole cloth, and for which he has still been unable to supply any satisfactory source. “Made-up quotes,” as Mrs Thatcher put it, “are the giveaway sign of someone using ChatGPT for research.”
The affair has certainly put a dent in Goodwin’s reputation. Chairing a lively debate between Goodwin and Twelves on GB News, Miriam Cates, whom Goodwin might ordinarily think of as an ideological ally, treated him with admirable rigour and dispassion. Tim Montgomerie, hardly a scion of the wokerati, likened the affair to Rachel Reeves’s “dodgy footnotes” and called for an inquiry. If even Reform thinks your presence in the party is a threat to their reputation, given the rogues’ gallery of disgraced former Tories that now adorn its front bench, you might take that a bit personally.
I do not claim to know how much Goodwin leaned on AI in the composition of his new book. The certain answer to that question is known only to Matt Goodwin, his search history and his conscience. Mr Twelves’s claim that “it’s not just factual errors in this book, but basic spelling and grammar ones”, I should say in fairness, tends to support Goodwin’s claim that he wrote it all himself.
But there’s a bigger point at issue, here, than Matt Goodwin’s slightly bonkers career trajectory from respected academic studying radical populism to radical populist to national laughing stock. It’s to do with his decision to write a book in the first place. Why, when most of his considerable income now comes from his rabble-rousing tweets on X, his Substack and his journalism and TV appearances, should he have bothered?
After all we are, it’s contended, heading for a post-literate world: one in which, soon, libraries will be shuttered for good and the transmission of human knowledge delegated to podcasts, bite-sized social media posts and, yes, AI.
Ever fewer students, we’re told, read books, and ever more outsource the research and writing of their essays to ChatGPT. Their teachers, likewise, let ChatGPT design their courses and mark their essays. It doesn’t get any better when these golden boys and girls graduate and go into their influential jobs in the big world. The Daily Telegraph last week published a survey on the country’s new class set-up containing the dismaying finding that today’s elites are the least likely of all the demographics surveyed to read books at all.
Yet even as we’re in wholesale retreat from books themselves, we’re still in thrall as a society to the idea of books. You could call it “bookiness”. Those made-up quotes, that pilfered subtitle, those questionable footnotes, and the fact of Goodwin’s argument being in a codex at all: these are clumsy tributes to the kudos that still attaches to real scholarship. The quotes are, at least ostensibly, from famous authors. The existence of footnotes and references imply a library. Intellectual pride, even when you’ve made the transition to full-time Twitter warrior, asks you to be the author of a proper book.
And isn’t bookiness exactly what ChatGPT and its LLM (large language model) cousins are selling? They’re selling – to the student, the self-published author and perhaps the sometime academic – the illusion that you’ve read the books they quote and allude to on your behalf. It’s selling the idea that you have the store of knowledge and understanding, or the facility with prose, that people get from reading books. It’s just saving you the bother of doing the work. Meanwhile the LLMs that are killing off our interest in books (and, judging by this, our trust in them) can only exist in the first place because of the books that they have stolen.
What I worry about is that this might be just a transitional moment; what stockbrokers call a “dead-cat bounce” in the value of the book. If we ask AI first to read books for us and then to write them, it’s hard to imagine that the importance we place on books themselves, or even on bookiness, will long survive. We’ll forget why we even valued these things. Why should the Matt Goodwins of the future – more efficient, less clownish Matt Goodwins – bother trying to produce something between hard covers? Even if they go to the trouble of writing one themselves, who’s going to believe they did so?
I imagine some future reader wandering into a ruined library like Charlton Heston stumbling on the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes: “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you. God damn you all to hell!”
Why Gen-Z turned back to Christianity
Secularists are cock-a-hoop at the news that the “Quiet Revival” in British Christianity may just be a thing of nought. On Thursday, YouGov announced that a survey they had conduced last year which had found a striking increase in Christian observance, particularly amongst the young, had been flawed. Controls to filter out fraudulent responses had not been properly put in place. Thus, the results, which have driven a debate about a national return to faith, could not be trusted.
There is something of the holier-than-thou and doth-protest-too-much in this secularist sermonising
Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK, was swift to chide: “This is both validation and vindication. We need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain…Much of the damage has already been done. Global media reports have too often and wrongly jumped on the bandwagon of a supposed Christian revival in the UK. That must stop.”
There is something of the holier-than-thou and doth-protest-too-much in this secularist sermonising. Secularists’ constant refrain that “The UK is not a Christian country” is undermined by them having no answer to the cold fact that our ideas of nationhood, law, education, time, and culture have all been profoundly shaped by 1,400 years of Christian observance. Besides this, they are out of touch with the data about the present. Although the YouGov survey is not reliable, there are a host of others from different pollsters showing a gentle growth in engagement with Christianity amongst the young. Harder to measure, but still perfectly visible to anyone involved in the field, is a change in the attitude of the young towards religion.
It was once the property of youth culture, freshly minted in the ‘60s, to rebel against Christianity. A fresh-faced Alan Bennett made the audience of That Was The Week That Was hoot with laughter at his parody of a pontificating parson. John Lennon didn’t just say that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, but that his disciples were “thick and ordinary.” The young deserted the pews and polite church tea dances for free love and the spiritual wisdom of the maharishi.
But just as Private Eye has turned from being the sharp satirist of the ‘60s into the present-day simpering senescent courtier with ossified manners and boundless self-regard, so too has the ‘60s progressive rebellion against Christianity aged into the overbearing orthodoxy of the establishment. It is folly to think Gen-Z will get their teenage kicks by mocking a faith that has already been the object of rebellion since the time of their grandparents.
Over the last year, I have visited a number of schools and universities to give talks about Christianity and history. On every occasion, I have been struck by a thirst for knowledge amongst students, and a desire to reconnect with and cherish a religious tradition whose neglect by previous generations disturbs them.
A striking example has been the burgeoning congregations for daily services at Oxford colleges. When I was an undergraduate in the ‘90s, daily matins and evening prayer were just the chaplain praying by himself. Sunday evensong numbers were only buoyed up by the prospect of free claret from the chaplain afterwards. But now, the chapels are bulging at the seams.
The Rev’d Dr Robert Wainwright, Chaplain of Oriel College Oxford, recently commented: “The chapel is full for Choral Evensong (between 80 and 110) every Sunday…Everyday students turn up for BCP Mattins at 8am, mostly lads, usually double digits – it’s a level of commitment I’ve never seen before in my 20 years at Oxford.”
These numbers don’t necessarily mean that everyone in the pews have become Christians, but that they are curious: “Plenty of non-believing students are happy to attend Evensong and they expect to hear a distinctively Christian sermon, not a humanist moral message with a religious veneer.”
Wainwright also reports that they have a strong desire for ritual. Others have confirmed this, and see it as a desire to connect with an authentic tradition of spirituality and contemplation not offered by contemporary online culture.
Similar patterns have been seen by Esmé Partridge, a researcher at the Christian think tank Theos who is currently studying new churchgoing patterns among young adults for the Church of England.
“In my research,” said Partridge, “I’ve been able to speak to over thirty young people who have recently started attending church. Naturally there are whole variety of positive influences that have personally led them there – social media, discovering Christian authors like C. S. Lewis, even learning about other world religions – but perhaps the reason these explorations are occurring now rather that say, ten years ago, is because of the absence of hostility towards Christianity in mainstream culture and the breaking down of barriers that once closed it off as an area of spiritual exploration. We’ve moved beyond both the Boomer rebellion against religion and the New Atheism of the early 2010s – today’s climate is one of curiosity and openness.”
If there is a rebellion, it is against the Boomers who have left Gen-Z with spiralling debt and a fractured country, while failing to pass on a Christian religious culture that might offer personal solace in the midst of chaos and the tools to re-knit society together. The questions I have been asked again and again by young people is “how are we going to reconnect?” and “how are we going to repair the damage?” The self-indulgent Boomers and the schoolmarmish secularists are driving the youth to be rebels with a cause: religious restoration.
Why modern ‘comedians’ like Romesh Ranganathan aren’t funny
It’s funny that the George Orwell statue outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House has a quote etched nearby from a proposed preface to Animal Farm: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. It’s almost ‘Orwellian’ in itself – an act of blackwhite Newspeak – that the BBC, of all institutions, have long touted this as their mantra. In recent years, the British liberal establishment – whose propaganda wing is the BBC – have added laugh-or-you’ll-cry modern examples of doublethink, not least telling us that ‘A woman can have a penis.’ The blood runs cold imagining what Orwell would make of it.
Another both silly and sinister trait of the modern Western authoritarian state is insisting that you find someone funny when they’re totally not. Being an invalid, I listen to the radio a lot, and I’m amused to find that I actively seek out the comedy shows on Radio 4, especially the panel ones. They make me feel smug and superior because – while I’m not going to pretend that I’m part of any contemporary Algonquin Club – my mates and I are funnier over lunch than 99 per cent of professional paid comedians on radio and television are. Why is this?
People generally used to become comedians because they were born funny or learned to be funny, and found that they could make people laugh at an early age; from Dave Allen to John Finnemore, they had a talent to amuse.
A minority became comedians because they were angry – from Lenny Bruce to Bill Hicks – and had a talent to abuse. But the current crop of state-sanctioned comics appear to be neither. It’s a mystery why they chose their profession; a bit like me, an OAP in a wheelchair, having ambitions to be a prima ballerina. Of course, there are exceptions; I was addicted to the excellent Amandaland on BBC One, and it’s telling that literally half of the nominees in the BAFTA Actress in a comedy category are from it.
But generally now, people appear to become comedians because they want to natter, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as ‘to talk continuously for a long time without any particular purpose’. You’ve heard of the Chattering Classes – modern comics are the Nattering Classes.
It’s not just a BBC thing though; two of the main culprits are Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan, who have a nomination for their Sky Max show, Rob & Romesh Vs…; they have seemed to be everywhere for a long time now, nattering away and having a ball being paid to hang out with their bestie. But compare them to the great double acts of the past and they fall woefully flat. Radio 4 is full of such natterers; I’m sorry to say that the ladies are well-represented here, by the likes of Zoe Lyons, Shappi Khorsandi and Susan Calman, the latter of whom has such a soporific effect on me that I find myself eschewing the sleeping pills if I can time it to have her on the radio when I want to fall into the arms of Morpheus. What these broads don’t provide in laughs, they make up for in giving fuel to the old saw that Women Can’t Be Funny, possessing as they do the dynamism and provocation of a trio of twice-used tea-bags.
Most of the over-promoted drolls are male, on both radio and television. It’s lovely to see them fail
But, of course, most of the over-promoted drolls are male, on both radio and television. It’s lovely to see them fail. At least in doing so they give one a chance to have a good old-fashioned chuckle.
When The Mash Report was cancelled in 2021, I laughed at Nish Kumar for the first time, especially when he fumed to the Observer of his heave-ho: ‘It placates the British right. It gives the sharks a bit of blood…a person’s political leanings can have a bearing on what they get to do on television, which is unacceptable.’
I also giggled for the first time at Ranganathan and Frankie Boyle when their dire shows were binned by the BBC; as Patrick West wrote here at the time: ‘Satire should lampoon those who rule. Except BBC satire has for years shirked this duty. It no longer challenges the establishment – in academia, the civil service, the unelected House of Lords, the BBC itself. It’s instead been a staple of BBC satire to punch down, to mock and deride the conservative, middle-class, Brexit-inclined middle-Englander. Audiences have themselves become bored of the BBC’s repetitious, relentless belittling of ordinary Britons at the behest of a smug, self-satisfied elite.’
West goes on to nail Brexit – and the first election of Donald Trump in the USA – as the point where modern comedians basically gave up bothering to work at being amusing. In the grip of the Brexit Derangement Syndrome which affected so many poor souls in show business, they fell instead into public self-soothing by uttering the B-word and receiving the affirming groans from their audience. From there it was the slippery slope that led to the current woeful state of state-sanctioned comedy.
Radio 4 Extra is my escape from Radio 4, when I’ve finally had enough fun looking down on the clowns; it’s where ‘heritage’ comedy shows are given extra enjoyment by being prefaced with the warning that: ‘The following comedy reflects the broadcast standards, language and attitudes of its time.’
I’m looking forward to that time in the future when we are warned the same way before the re-broadcasting of the Nattering Classes’ ghastly output. Will we look back, from a sunlit hinterland when we have come out the other side of The Capture, and laugh at what happened for a few decades to comedy in a country which, ironically, prides itself on its sense of humour? Or will the BBC comedy department continue to see 1984 as a user manual rather than a warning?