Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
Irving Kristol didn’t coin the term ‘neoconservative’ but he was the first person to run with it. Although it was originally intended as an insult towards those alleged to have abandoned their initial ‘liberalism’, Kristol wasn’t bothered with quibbling. ‘It usually makes no sense… to argue over nomenclature,’ he once said. ‘If you can, you
Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim infallibility Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in
Douglas Murray tours a country despondent about its presidential race and increasingly uncertain about Barack Obama. Yet the world still needs America’s strengths In front of me at the University of Chicago, and several times my height, is a stone carving of a half-human deity from the Assyrian empire. All round this exhibition on ancient
Debate about Geert Wilders and his anti-Koran film Fitna is everywhere in Holland. Newspapers, television shows and private conversations are awash with apprehension. Since the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the hounding into exile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wilders is the most prominent critic of Islam in Holland. With his shock
Michael Burleigh is riding a career high. The author of the 2000 bestseller The Third Reich: A New History has just published the last of a gargantuan trilogy of books on religion and politics in Europe since the French revolution. Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes took us up to the war on terror. Now, with
Tom DeLay has a slightly deflated air about him in the London club in which we meet. It might be the financial accusations and personal attacks made on him for 11 years before his indictment and consequent stand-down from Congress last year. ‘I was pretty much burnt out, exhausted,’ he admits. Or it could be
Before sidling off into history last month, the Commission for Racial Equality published a final report. Decades of multiculturalism, it revealed, had left Britain a fractured and unequal nation at risk of splitting up. The Commission’s chairman Trevor Phillips stated several years ago that multiculturalism had failed. His commission waited till its final hours to
I am registered as a voter in Ealing-Southall and have a problem. Though a member of the party, I could not vote Conservative. The candidate put up by ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ had been a Conservative for a matter of hours and been parachuted in over any number of dedicated, and equally ethnic, party workers. I
To be fair to him, George C. Schoolfield, of Yale University, does admit in his opening sentence that ‘movement’ may be too strong a word to describe the collection of writers on whom his Baedeker focuses. So, I think, may ‘fashion’. Links between authors in these 23 cross-global chapters are certainly thin — here an