Counterpoints
Hot for lunch
If there is an art to writing after three courses and wine, I never mastered it. But now that the long, boozy lunch is endangered, I’m having serious second thoughts
A future foretold
The long-awaited sequel to A Very British Coup
Dog days
‘If every writer who disliked what other contributors wrote decided to withdraw their work, there would be no papers, no magazines, perhaps no telly’
Outsider values
“The dispute over Parkfield’s “No Outsiders” scheme shows that some people are eager for the state to take over”
Free to choose
The view that children need to go out alone, play unsupervised, take risks and learn independence and resilience speaks to something important that Western societies have largely lost
Brought to book
Mathematics publishing is a soft touch. The publisher usually hasn’t a clue, so they send the manuscript to someone like me to comment on. I used to be a soft touch too
A squarer mile
For better or worse, that City has undergone a revolution. Its old guard has been seen off, or paid off
Foie Gove
Michael Gove’s plan to ban foie gras is an essentially frivolous self-advertisement
Jam tomorrow
“We do so love a literary rejection, provided it isn’t our own, of course.”
The new normal
“Now nobody, it seems, wants to be seen as normal: not even normal people. But I do. All my life I’ve craved normality and never quite managed it”
China has a strategy and Britain doesn’t
A roadmap to better relations requires realism. Beijing’s interests and goals are openly stated—if you know where to look
The plague
Standpoint goes to press as the pandemic rages. So too does the search for blame and the political fall-out
Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left
The censorious culture of the liberal Left is hostile to freedom of expression. The fate of the trans-rights movement evinces this pointless politics