Daniel Trilling

Daniel Trilling recently contributed a chapter to Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis. He was shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness.

Stamford Hill to Aldgate

Daniel Trilling, 16 November 2023

Between​ 1881 and 1914, around 150,000 Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled in Britain, fleeing poverty and pogroms in the Russian empire. Most of them made their homes in the slums and tenements of London’s East End, but by the middle of the 20th century many had moved to Hackney, a few miles up the road. Hackney isn’t in the East End – to believe otherwise is, as...

Diary: Citizenship Restored

Daniel Trilling, 21 September 2023

The embassy official​ paused, collecting herself for a moment, before handing me the document. ‘Mr Trilling, it is an honour,’ she said. ‘This is in recognition of the great injustice done to you and your family. It should never have happened, and you should always have been a German citizen. I hope this brings you great joy.’ It was last October, and I was at the...

Not Much like Consent: Crisis at the Met

Daniel Trilling, 30 March 2023

‘It’s time​ for the police to stop virtue-signalling and start catching robbers and burglars,’ the home secretary, Suella Braverman, said at the Conservative Party Conference last autumn. ‘More PCs, less PC.’ It’s not surprising that the government’s most committed culture warrior would use her speech to launch an attack on wokery. What’s...

I am in the hell: The Refugee Underground

Daniel Trilling, 1 December 2022

The racist assumptions of some of the reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some commentators remarking on the tragedy of war affecting people who look white and Western, have been widely noted. But media attention can be fickle. Several million Ukrainians were displaced in the previous stage of the war, between 2014 and 2022, yet this rarely made the headlines. It’s helpful to pay attention to where the silence falls, because it shows you the way power operates. Libya is a particularly revealing example.

Memory Safari: Perpetual Reclamation

Daniel Trilling, 8 September 2022

In August 2015, two treasure hunters announced that they had discovered a train buried deep underground in the countryside outside Wałbrzych, in the Polish region of Lower Silesia. The legend of the Golden Train – filled with looted valuables that were supposedly hidden by the Nazis in a complex of tunnels dug using slave labour – had long circulated in the region. Here, it...

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