Far-right parties in formerly communist Europe tend to both inflate their opponents’ links with the communist period and their own links with the historical political blocs of the pre-communist period. It is a tendentious game whose odds are always stacked…
In his polemic on Brexit, Fintan O’Toole offers a biographical caricature of a political decision as a man ‑ a white man, a middle-aged or elderly man, an angry man, a racist man, finally a straw man. What lies behind…
We are inclined to think of social identities as traits that are common to all members of a group, that a person cannot help acting like ‘a woman’ or ‘a Frenchman’. But identities are fluid and dynamic. People perform their…
In the last three years, more than two million immigrants – primarily young men – have entered EU states. The policies being followed by European governments in response to this phenomenon are not only harsh and oppressive, but may also…
William Vollmann is fond of tackling large subjects and writing very big books, both fiction and non-fiction. In a two-volume work on climate change he addresses himself to the future inheritors of the earth and tries to explain to them…
The most radical critics of our contemporary political systems offer solutions that sound more like symptoms of the illness than any possible cure. Surely there is plenty of space between thinking there is no alternative and believing that the only…
Big Tech seems to envisage a future in which most humans will be like docile cows, to be regularly milked for their data. If you want to retain some control over your existence you will have to learn to run…
Modern economics often seems wilfully ignorant of the moral context its founder, Adam Smith, brought to the discipline. Smith fully understood the difference between a scientific theory and an investigation into human and societal behaviour. A science of man would…
The internet is the most abundantly stocked pantry of grievance in the history of mankind, its users under constant surveillance. What future can there be for democracy if politics becomes a question of detailed statistical analysis and precisely targeted messages…
Charles de Gaulle was a traditional Catholic Christian. He rarely spoke of or even mentioned God but rarely failed to speak instead of France, the great stained-glass rose window in which the divine light had glowed through the centuries in…