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THE BEATEN DOCKET

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Ideas are not cost-free, argues Ronald Aronson. They have consequences, and we cannot shrug our shoulders about those and say ‘nothing to do with me’.
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DRESSED TRIPE AND TIPSY FIGS

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The American writer James Salter, in a piece entitled “Michelin Man” collected in the volume Eat Memory: Great Writers at the Table, traces his first connection with French food to the New York World’s Fair in 1939, which featured a restaurant at the French pavilion that everyone talked about but where few managed to get a…
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WAUGH IN ABYSSINIA

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Evelyn Waugh went to Abyssinia as a war reporter in 1935, where he mostly missed the war but thought the Italians were doing a good job of spreading civilisation in darkest Africa.
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POLITICAL POETS

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Beware of poets’ mere opinions or opinionating, writes David Wheatley. Many construct whole personae to this end, while secretly defying the reader to see them awry, in an entirely different light.
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1-9 of 694 results

  • For the Little People

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    • 29 April 2026

    Enda O’Doherty writes: Populists claim they represent the views of ‘ordinary people’, ignored by out-of-touch, ‘cosmopolitan’ political elites. But their methods of communicating with this segment of society are laden with calculation and condescension.
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  • Fleeing the Russian State

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    • 29 April 2026

    Alexander Obolonsky writes: Russia has something positive to present – both to itself and to the world. Alongside the dominant culture of subjugation, an alternative counter-culture of resistance has always existed and survived, even in the darkest times.
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  • Dropping the mask

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    • 29 April 2026

    Andy Storey writes: the old, better-managed order mourned by the writers in Foreign Affairs was no less violent and exploitative than Trump’s grotesque carnival of hustle and hubris.
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  • Reasoning Animals

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    • 29 April 2026

    Stephen O’Neill writes: What is stopping a conversation about a United Ireland which doesn’t knowingly inhabit the same structures that it seeks to replace, or repeat the same cliches and reinscribe the same privileges that those structures have perpetuated?
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  • The Berlin Fringe?

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    • 29 April 2026

    Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: The fiasco marring this year’s Berlin Film Festival shows once again that the most vital art does not emerge from approval but thrives on the margins. A lesson the BFF needs to (re)learn.
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  • Evidence of fullness

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    • 1 April 2026

    Ciarán O’Rourke writes: On the evidence of his work to date, Martin Dyar might be thought of as an able, and often savagely funny, dramatist of the universal human parish.
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  • Party Time Over?

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    • 1 April 2026

    Michael Laver writes: While ‘The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t’ by Didi Kuo adds to a burgeoning ‘decline of parties’ literature, are we to believe that this decline is part of a global pattern or more specific to the US?
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  • Centenary of ‘The Plough and the Stars’

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    • 1 April 2026

    Bess Rowen writes: 11 February 2026 marked a century since protesters disrupted Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ by singing nationalist songs and rushing the stage.
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  • Semantic Escalation

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    • 1 April 2026

    Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed to technological neologisms like ‘doomscrolling’, ‘podcast’, and ‘vibe coding’ and track them with the obsessive energy of a birder spotting a rare migrant.
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