Tom Leonard

Tom Leonard is US correspondent at the Daily Mail

It’s no surprise some Irish-Americans remain clueless about the Troubles

From our UK edition

For Democrats and their friends in the Irish-American community, there were really only two parties who achieved the Good Friday Agreement: the Clinton administration and the courageous peacemakers of the Irish Republican movement. And so it was that Bill Clinton and Gerry Adams topped the bill last Monday at a grand back-slapping affair for Sinn Fein

A league of their own

From our UK edition

 New York There comes a point in a New York expat’s life when you suddenly realise that the liberal elites that run this town have feet of clay. You have watched them joining anti-Trump marches, opening their beautiful homes for Democrat fundraising parties and noisily bidding ludicrous sums at charity auctions. Then the time comes

Rhodes Must Fall campaigners won’t disappear just because they lost

From our UK edition

Don’t imagine that the campaign group ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ has gone away just because Rhodes didn’t fall. They’ve now issued a list of demands, including a call for Oxford to ‘acknowledge and confront its role in the ongoing violence of empire’. And if America is anything to go by, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Shrunk

From our UK edition

 New York City Nothing says New York like a psychoanalyst’s couch. Think Woody Allen or those New Yorker cartoons. It fits our perception of east-coast Americans as all neurotic and self-obsessed. But that mental picture needs updating, because traditional psychoanalysis is in dramatic decline in its traditional heartland. Across the urban US, in fact, the

The war on frat culture

From our UK edition

 New York It’s a new semester and a new start at the University of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, once encouraged America’s youth to ‘come and drink of the cup of knowledge and fraternise with us’. But this term, any student who fancies a swig from the cup of knowledge had better be sure

Hug a hoodie: can there really be a kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan?

From our UK edition

 New York Without the unifying force of anger and the excitement of violence, the Klan is falling apart The Ku Klux Klan is rebranding. It’s less lynchings and cross burning these days, more novelty kitchenware (fancy an ‘Original Boyz N the Hood’ mug?), family barbecues and children’s TV shows. The traditional dress code — white

How to shop for the apocalypse

From our UK edition

 New York City An architect friend who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own

Bone idols

From our UK edition

New York The Manhattan tattoo artist Craig Dershowitz had already spent $60,000 fighting a desperate legal battle with his ex-girlfriend for custody of their ‘son’ before he appealed to the public a few weeks ago. He needed another $20,000 so he can keep going, he said. Had the helpless victim at the centre of this

What I heard at J.D. Salinger’s doorstep

From our UK edition

J.D. Salinger is in the kitchen when I turn the corner of his farmhouse, his reported deafness probably explaining why he doesn’t hear me until I am a few feet from him and ringing the doorbell. His wife correctly guesses the identity of the caller and, apprised of the information out of my hearing, the