Diary
In 2015, the novelist Catherine Nichols sent the opening pages of the book she was working on to fifty literary agents. She got so little response she decided to shift gender and try as ‘George’ instead. The difference amazed her. ‘A third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.’ More
Eighteen Hours in Vietnam
Once, every American knew the outline and the stock images of this chronicle. Because of largely unhindered television news coverage and the cameras that soldiers carried with them, this was the most visible war ever fought. Never again would the government allow reporters to go wherever daring took them. More
The German Election
Many leftists and Greens have been too stunned by Merkel’s modernisation of the CDU to notice that her trick is to avoid the country’s root problems while treating the symptoms more skilfully than any conservative politician before her has ever managed. The media, meanwhile, unwilling to address the difficulties caused by Germany’s position as the reluctant hegemon of the Continent, or the growing sense of lurking inconsistencies in the gospel of Atlanticism, prefer endless celebration of the leader: the intellectual, strong, patient, grounded, wry, compassionate, tough, reality-grasping, scientific, opera-loving, Bismarckian wunder-Kanzlerin on whom nothing is lost. More
Closing Time
‘Most of the white people I have ever known,’ James Baldwin once wrote, ‘impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order.’ Today, longing for the ancien régime increasingly defines the Atlantic seaboard’s pundits as much as it does the fine people defending the honour of Robert E. Lee. It remains to be seen whether America, Britain, Europe and liberalism can be made great again. But it already seems clear that the racial supremacist in the White House and many of his opponents are engaged in the same endeavour: to extend closing time in their own gardens in the West. More
