Diary

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‘The illusion of control that dictatorships offer is just that. They promise their acolytes eternal life in exchange for silence. But silence is expensive’

Diary
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‘I’m not sure that “gender studies” are having a terribly good war. A professor tweeted—Pat Robertson style—that Covid-19 “took its revenge” on men after the domestic abuse they inflicted on women’

Diary
Diary: the limits of liberalism

‘Many of those who usually insist ministers must “listen to the experts” are among those who now say Boris should ignore them. Armchair generals and football managershave become armchair virologists and epidemiologists’

Diary
Uncovering hidden family roots

‘I’m 52, damn it, even if I feel frustratingly closer to 82 on the bad days when my fingers are too weak to type or too stiff to do up buttons’

Diary
An oversized addition to a collection of Victoriana

‘As I have now discovered, moving a life-size marble statue is a complicated and expensive business’

Diary
Political homelessness galls; private pleasures keep me sane

‘I am an instinctive, conventional, tribal Conservative voter. But now I just can’t bear even to listen to the shenanigans in Parliament a moment longer’

Diary
Breakfast, diabetes research, and the right to make bad jokes

‘The Today Programme will survive John Humphrys leaving but will we all survive the death of the right to make poor jokes?’

Diary
Nostalgia’s comeback

‘The urge to renew tussles with the impulse to preserve’

Diary
Judaism, literary lust—and ‘fat camp’

‘Discovering Judaism has been a profound and fascinating process, from celebrating festivals to the spiritual joy of synagogue’

Diary
Train trouble

‘Every holiday of my childhood was spent either looking at art or making it. I remain helpless to resist the pull of the landscape on one side and lure of galleries on the other’

Diary