James Butler

Early​ results matter in politics. The news on the morning of 6 May seemed to confirm a familiar story. Labour had taken two totemic Tory councils, Wandsworth and Westminster, piling on metropolitan voters but failing to ignite the electorate outside the cities. Tory losses were bigger than expected, and by the end of the day looked very bad indeed: the cumulative loss was 485 seats; before...

Marthe​ Brossier, a provincial demoniac, had caused a stir in Orléans and Cléry before being brought to Paris in 1599. Her sponsors, probably members of the zealous Capuchin order, timed her arrival for just before Easter, when Lenten devotions among the Catholic faithful were nearing their climax. Furious at Henri IV’s edict of toleration for his Protestant subjects, the...

Humanity has proved itself powerful enough to change the climate at a planetary level, to spark off chains of extinctions and permeate wildernesses with microplastics. But this was inadvertent, even if the destruction has been prolonged by its beneficiaries. Whether human beings have the collective capacity intentionally to reverse this planetary effect isn’t clear. The question of agency has a bearing on a number of other issues: whether technology can save us; whether a climate-adapted future looks like Western consumer capitalism with a transformed energy base and less waste, or whether such a transition will necessitate a break with the proliferation of luxury commodities and the underlying obsession with acceleration and expansion; even the precise alloy of determination, optimism and melancholia with which one approaches climate politics. Andreas Malm is less uncertain: ‘The grotesque concentration of resources for burning at the top of the human pyramid is a scourge for all living beings; an effective climate policy would be the total expropriation of the top 1 to 10 per cent.’

Early​ results matter. They matter when TV pundits are required to fill hours of overnight election coverage, and they mattered especially during the 72-hour period that followed the UK-wide elections held on 6 May, during which results continued to trickle in. Labour was expected to lose the Hartlepool by-election, but the margin of its defeat, announced in the early hours, set the story...

Head​ out from the moorings on the Thames where I live – passing around the riverfront’s gated colonies and skirting the wharves, long since reanimated as desirable ‘resi’, on which my grandfather had his first job (‘A man’s job, at fourteen’) – and in a few minutes you reach a clutch of houses which might have been grafted from a garden city....