The Critic Magazine

Editor: Christopher Montgomery Deputy Editor: Graham Stewart Art Director: Martin Colyer Designer: David Rice Production Editor: Nick Pryer Deputy Production Editor: Neil Armstrong Literary Editor: David Butterfield Executive Editor: Sebastian Milban

IF WE TOOK THE FOREIGN POLICY rhetoric of Western statesmen at face value, we would have to conclude that Western adults are as neurotic and delusional as so many twentysomething Western youth appear to be. Obsessed with social media, moral posturing

SAVE 86% For just £3 you will receive a 3-month subscription to Britain’s wonderful monthly current affairs and culture magazine. Subscribe today and get: ☛ 3 issues of The Critic magazine ☛ Access to digital editions ☛ Save 86% on the shop price ☛ R

IF YOU GIVE AWAY MONEY, WHY DO YOU DO it? Why those specific causes, and those specific charities? The premise of “effective altruism”, a decade-old trend promoted by neo-utilitarian philosophers and seized on by graduates in tech and finance, is tha

“Let me be me!” Rishi is very excited, because he says this is the year he gets a “mandate”. This isn’t a word I’ve heard before, but I think it must mean when people ask you to stop being prime minister. He is having a meeting with his friend James,

THERE’S A LINE IN THE BLACKLY BRILLIANT sitcom Such Brave Girls that made me feel, as they say, extremely seen. “New clothes are really exciting,” gabbles the mentally fragile Josie during a shopping spree, “because you haven’t had a chance to create

IT WAS AN AGREEABLE NEW Year of raclette, cosy wood fires and cautious skiing — these days, lust for adrenaline is more than offset by fear of fractured femurs. Alas, now it’s back to being woken up in the dark to the twittering of the Today programm

JUST AS 2016 DEFINED THE POLITICS OF ITS decade, so 2024 has the potential to send an electroshock to political consensus in the 2020s. It starts with Russia. Vladimir Putin’s crusade for a fifth term in office is preordained, but not pro forma. One

SOCIAL MEDIA CAN THROW UP SOME strange juxtapositions. Scrolling on X (formerly Twitter), I recently saw a clip in which a hairdresser asks her client’s permission to touch her hair. The message is that consent matters at all times — though one might

UNIVERSITIES USED TO BE PLACES WHERE young people could learn about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. But now conservatives are trying to turn them into indoctrination camps that promote “Mathematics” and “Science” and other outdated concepts. Why don

I WAS GIVEN MY FIRST COPY OF NIKOLAUS Pevsner’s Buildings of England in the summer of 1967 when I was going off to boarding school and my kind Aunt Margaret gave me the Wiltshire volume, which had been published in 1963. My first weekend I cycled off

THE GREAT STRENGTH OF ED OWENS’S After Elizabeth is that it takes seriously the monarchy as a fundamentally political institution. While Owens, an historian and “royal commentator”, gives the customary overview of twentieth-century royal triumphs and

RICHARD WHATMORE’S INTRIGUING new book is a study of eight late eighteenth-century figures one would not expect to be brought together. All, with the exception of the unfortunate Jacques-Pierre Brissot, guillotined in October 1793, were British, and

“WHAT WOULD YOUR GOOD do if evil did not exist?” asks the Devil in Mikhail Bulgakov’ Faustian satire The Master and Margarita. For Wolfram Eilenberger, the light of intellect shines against the presence of evil in his genre-defying book The Visionari

THE PUBLICATION OF LETTERS BY twentieth-century scholars is an uncommon enterprise, especially when they are issued by a trade press. But then Tolkien was an uncommon scholar. “I was brought up on the Classics,” he recalled later in life, “and first

YOU HAVE TO FEEL SORRY FOR BOOKS that pass their shelf life before they’ve even been published. “Due out on 8 December”, quipped Private Eye last year of Harry Cole and James Heale’s book about Liz Truss’s “astonishing rise to power” … “the book, tha

THOMAS SOWELL, SENIOR FELLOW AT Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, must be the most distinguished anti-intellectual intellectual alive today. His best-known British opponent might be Aidan Byrne, a senior lecturer in English and Media Studies

ONE OF THE LEADERS OF THE opposition here profiled, George Tierney, described the role as being “to oppose everything, and propose nothing — and to turn out the government”. In this survey, Nigel Fletcher, who co-founded the Centre for Opposition Stu

I MAGINE LINING UP FOR AN OLYMPIC FINAL knowing that at least three of the other seven women alongside you are drug cheats. No wonder Sharron Davies is furious seeing it play out again, this time labelled “progressive”. The energy, courage and determ

EVERY MAP IS WRONG. Or, to be more precise, every two-dimensional depiction of the earth is doomed to inaccuracy. It is a simple geometric truth that the surface of a sphere cannot be rendered flat. Hence the need for approximate “map projections”, w

THE BEATLES’ HISTORY IS RIDDLED with what ifs. What if Ringo had actually been able to sing? What if George had decided after a weekend’s flirtation to put Indian classical music on the back-burner? And what if, in July 1963, a big, bear-like 28-year

GOOD NOVELS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN heavily buffeted in the marketplace of ideas. “Many books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered,” said W.H. Auden, who had clearly never heard of Wuthering Heights. So it’s natural — essential — for

A COMMUNITY DISMISSED BY SOME as “a set of traffic lights on the road from Wakefield to Pontefract” punched well above their weight 40 years ago last summer. On May 7 1983, Featherstone Rovers, a rugby league side from a small mining town in West Yor

● IN SLEEPLESS NIGHTS OF THE Gaza war I think about the musicians, improvising in the unfolding awfulness. A week or so after the Hamas massacres, members of the Israel Philharmonic toured hospitals in small ensembles, playing in corridors for casual

● REFLECTING ON MY DECADES-LONG campaign to destroy opera in Britain, I have to admit in all modesty that it seems to be going rather well. And while everyone credits the Arts Council — and Nicholas Serota’s hommage to East Anglian iconoclast “Smashe

● A WEIRD THING HAPPENED on the opinion pages of the New York Times at the beginning of this year: the paper published a 5,000-word essay by a writer called Anna Marks, speculating on Taylor Swift’s sexuality. Was Swift, wondered Marks, deliberately

● AMONG RAPHAEL’S MANY ASSISTANTS and collaborators, the most important was Giulio Romano (c1499-1546). According to the seventeenth-century biographer Filippo Baldinucci, Giulio “was so reverent and modest towards his teacher that, while he was ali

● THE HORROR-MEETS-MYSTERY genre is a lucrative staple of the streaming services and film, while proving much harder for the theatre to nail. Special effects and CGI that wow on the small screen can look clunky on the big stage. Even the hardiest Llo

● IREALISED IN DECEMBER that I’d spent quite a lot of the year watching films that I was supposed to admire but actually found somewhere between disappointing and interminable. Of the three-hour Epics By Great Men, I probably liked Oppenheimer most,

● SOME WORDS WE do not wish to hear in the coming year: nuanced, pitch-perfect, multi-layered, achingly beautiful, richly-textured, life-affirming. And if anybody is held to be at the top of their game, or the height of their powers, then bundle the

● PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE I HAVE reviewed several fine Dutch television dramas, including The Adulterer and Floodland, that the Netflix algorithm suggested I might like The Golden Hour. It was a good call. This enthralling Dutch crime series had me on t

● MY WORK DEMANDS THAT I SPEND a lot of time alone — and my social life is hardly Beau Brummellian — so I listen to a lot of podcasts. A problem with asking for recommendations is that as surely as a Pole recommends pierogi, a 30- to 60-year-old Brit

● MANY YEARS AGO, I WAS INVITED to be on the jury to choose an architect to design the museum in Wakefield which became Hepworth Wakefield. From what I remember of this process, we were confronted by a vast number of proposals by architectural practi

PETITE PORTIONS, delicately prepared and aesthetically presented: in every informed image of Japanese food, the same values recur. Like poems of few, well chosen words, or a love-letter made appealing by perfect folding and refined calligraphy, Japan

“YOU’RE CHARLIE’S nephew?” Bill Lumsden asked and then called out to the room: “Hey, everyone, we’ve got Charlie’s nephew over here!” The occasion was a visit to Glenmorangie distillery as part of my new job working for a whisky retailer. I was seate

THE GLOBAL ART MARKET is worth about $60-70bn annually, and the two major international auction houses turn over about $12bn between them each year: there is usually a few million dollars’ worth separating each. Christie’s turned over $6.2bn last yea

● A LIFETIME AGO, ON EVERY FOURTH FRIDAY AT 4PM, I would make my way to the Waldorf Hotel on Aldwych. Upon entering, sidestepping the elegance of its Palm Court where once Edwardian society was scandalised by the first British performance of a tango

FROM BEHIND A LARGE ROCK, some 60 yards away, I could hear the shot connecting. A moderated rifle makes a hissing sound and then as the round hits skin and flesh, there’s a muted phut. The first shot was followed by another; then there was a pause be

EACH TO THEIR OWN, BUT the prospect of watching four races on a Saturday afternoon with winning prize money of £4,193.42, £4,193.42, £3,247.81 and £3,247.81 respectively — competed over by horses of the calibre you would expect to be vieing for such

“SO BETTS,” I HEAR YOU cry, “last year’s low-buy to curtail your style addiction: how’d that work out?” To which I answer: “Look over there! No, really. Oh my God. Did you see it?” Which is to say, it both was and wasn’t a success. I definitely acqui

EVERY MONTH THE PREMIER League hands out a quartet of awards: PLAYER and MANAGER, the most influential men on and off the pitch, and GOAL and SAVE, the alpha and omega of the game. But there’s no award for arguably the most beautiful and subtle of fo