The Critic Magazine

THERE IS A GREAT RESET. It has a website with a video introduction by HRH The Prince of Wales. Sponsored by the World Economic Forum, it’s the Davos view on how the world might grow sustainably after the recession wrought by Covid. It is as worthy, d

Editorial Publisher & Co-Editor: Michael Mosbacher Co-Editor: Christopher Montgomery Executive Editor: Robert Low Art Director: Martin Colyer Political Editor: Graham Stewart Deputy Political Editor: David Scullion US Editor: Oliver Wiseman Productio

AUTHORITARIANISM breeds authoritarianism. A figure whose flimsy authority derives from the position he holds rather than from his barely human quiddity will, out of fear and self-preservation, appoint and promote in his own likeness whilst feigning t

REPORTING THE BOSNIAN WAR Several claims in Janine di Giovanni’s article Lessons of Bosnian war and peace (December) reflect poorly on me professionally and need correcting. I was the Sunday Times reporter working in Bosnia before her arrival there,

NATIONS HAVE ONLY limited resources. The allocation of these resources to the most productive ends is crucial to maximising output and achieving the highest possible living standards. Lord Lawson was therefore right to deride Boris Johnson for “econo

EVERY GAY PERSON WHO GREW UP before the new millennium knew that coming out of the closet wasn’t a one-off affair. It was an exercise to be repeated in the various spheres of one’s existence — family, friends, work — and there would always be new soc

THE SOCIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT needs the repressive capitalist state it professes to oppose. Without the power of governments to enact punitive laws, and of corporations to compel workers to change or pretend to change their behaviour, it will fail. Lik

In 1973, Anthony Burgess wrote in the New Yorker that he first had heard the phrase queer as a clockwork orange in a London pub before the Second World War: "It is an old Cockney slang phrase, implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert

IN OCTOBER ALAN YENTOB AND CAMILA Batmanghelidjh appeared in court at the beginning of a nine-week hearing following the collapse of her charity Kids Company, of which he was chairman. Six years earlier the pair were seated together in a setting suit

THE THING ABOUT BIG NUMBERS IS that they can always get bigger. In 2020, the already gargantuan sums involved in American politics ballooned. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organisation that tracks money in politics, a whopping $

Can parliament revive a prerogative power? And can it prevent the courts from questioning a dissolution of parliament? These seemingly arcane questions lie at the heart of the government’s latest attempt to rebalance the British constitution in its f

WHEN IT WAS OPENED IN 1927 the restaurant at Tate Britain was located in what was fatefully called the “most amusing room in Britain”. I was taken there as an undergraduate by a Yale professor of liberal views who loved wine. It had in those days an

SO READ THE HEADLINE in the Telegraph, evoking images of a bygone age when plagues were sent to punish us and repentance was the surest route out of any natural catastrophe. Not that this intervention reflected any desire for a return to the Lord our

My in-breathpanics the lungs,scrapes short. Space crawls awayfrom the ribcage. Calmdisappears in one cough—then a Zen monk squeaksOm frommy throat, but the in-breath runs riot,rattles the crown, turnsZapatista leading the charge,backed up by a trilli

NINETY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MOSHE HA-ELION proudly ushers me forward to admire the view from his smart fourteenth-floor apartment overlooking the beach in Bat Yam, south of Jaffa. It is late January and the mist is rising over the Mediterranean as if shield

MEMORIES ARE PRECIOUS to the fly fisherman, helping sustain him through the half of the year when the rules forbid the catching of trout, sea trout and salmon. On a January night when the opening of the season still seems depressingly distant I have

THERE ARE FOUR AGES OF MODERN VIENNA. Before the First World War, it was cultured and rich; from 1918 until the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, it was cultured and poor; from 1938 to the end of the Allied occupation, it was just poor; and from 1955 to t

THE REPUTATION OF Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal foreign secretary at the time of the outbreak of the Great War, has suffered greatly in recent years. Matthew Parris has called him “a bloody awful foreign secretary”, Andrew Adonis thinks him “arguably

I FIRST WENT TO RONNIE SCOTT’S when I was seven or eight years old. My father Benny had played with Scott and his partner Pete King, and had helped them set up the “Old Place” in Gerrard Street. They were old friends, and the older they got, the more

A TRAINEE BARRISTER IS CALLED A pupil. They shadow a fully-fledged barrister for six months then can get up on their own feet in court and start earning money (not a lot of it at first). Pupils are not paid by the chambers although generous scholarsh

THE PUNISHING HOURS, the backstabbing, the constant manoeuvring for power and influence, and then after two or three years you are marched out of the office, pathetically clutching your possessions in a black bag. As recent events have so amply demon

IF ANY PERIOD OF BRITISH HISTORY can qualify as an illustration of Carlyle’s great man theory, then it is surely the nineteenth century. It was a time when individual men did demonstrably great things, such as invent world-changing machines, fight wa

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH WROTE such vertiginously novels one isn’t much surprised to be told that she ate beef straight from the butcher’s block. Nor is one all that startled to learn that having battered a rat to death in her garden, she tossed it through

‘‘WOULDN’T IT BE wonderful,” thought one of the editors of this new anthology at the outset of her project, if a collection of highbrow stories on BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism and masochism) “could live together in one book, in the kind of book

CAN EXORBITANT LOVE TURN YOU into a misanthropist? Perhaps it can, if the underlying character is right. Henry Darke, retired public school teacher, widower, former cuckold, and possibly worse, is a case in point. Darke’s novelist wife, Suzy, has rec

The secret author has been accused of — that dreadful modern word — “negativity”. He has, even more distressingly, been accused of cynicism. He has been accused of living in the last century. He has been accused of being a middle-aged, middleclass an

I THINK IT WAS Auberon Waugh, or one of that gang, who pointed out that there’s nothing like Mozart’s well-known Classic FM standby Alleluia for gradually but catastrophically lowering the spirits. This would-be jubilant peroration is a handy flag-wa

SOMETIMES I WONDER if everyone’s heart is really in the culture war. When America’s top contrarian, Candace Owens, saw singer Harry Styles wearing an elegant cornflower-blue lace Gucci dress on Vogue’s December cover, surely even she felt a wave of t

THE ART MARKET faces 2021 in an uncertain and anxious frame of mind. In many ways it adapted quickly to the events of 2020, with online auctions — which had grown in five of the past six years to reach $5.9 billion in sales in 2019 — quickly becoming

SONIA FRIEDMAN is a doyenne of theatrical production in London — as tough as they come from a family born to the stage. As the pandemic unleashed lockdowns around the world she closed 18 productions, forfeiting revenues for the year of many tens of m

WITH MOST CINEMAS in the United States and Europe closed, and the major studios holding back most of their 2020 releases until the end of next year, including Steven Spielberg’s remake of the musical West Side Story, we are entering an untypical awar

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year … make damn sure it leaves then slam the gate shut. We won’t be wanting that year back!” With apologies to the literary executors and admirers of Minnie Louise Haskins’s inspirational poem, tha

SHOULDERS TOUCHING, we sat side-by-side, the retired marine and I, under the russet leaves of a stunted oak. The clock in the churchyard had just chimed five and the last of the light was fading over the River Stour. One flask between us and two enam

CATHOLICS ARE PECULIARLY morbid. That, at any rate, struck me as the most plausible explanation. It must have been 15 years ago, and I was with a group of Englishspeaking aficionados learning handson capework in the breeders’ practice rings around Sa

THE START OF A NEW YEAR generally means austere regimens of meagre repasts and masochistic workouts, but really, who among us has the appetite for selfsacrifice this time round? Rather than firing up the NutriBullet, why not focus instead on getting

ASTUTE READERS of this column — as if there is any other kind — will have noticed an uncharacteristic note of vainglory in my last piece. Having described the hell that was my first cross-country race across the rain-soaked, mud-choked playing fields

AND SO FAREWELL, then, 2020, the year in which the human race found it was not so much over dressing as over life itself. People have purchased two items of clothing during the last 12 months: sweatpants and pyjamas. Accordingly, a national joggingbo