Society

The best time to visit Provence, I always advise when asked, is in the spring before the scorching heat and summer crowds. I have been spending time in the south of France since the early 1990s. Provence was fashionable in those days. Peter Mayle’s massively successful book, A Year in Provence, inspired thousands to pull up stakes and move to southern France to emulate his idyllic life in the Luberon hills. Some settled farther west in the Dordogne, famously called “Dordogneshire” for its concentration of British expats. Mayle became a one-man publishing industry, following up with sequels including Toujours Provence and Encore Provence. Thirty years ago, I stayed with friends who owned a renovated farmhouse

The public disturbances in south London, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. “You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,” wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, “the surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.” Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft. On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three “flash mobs” were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028. This outbreak belonged to a slightly old-fashioned trend that began in

They say that the clue is in the name, but with Meghan the first two letters give the game away: me. The Duchess of Sussex is staying true to form by making it all about herself on her and her husband Harry’s tour of Australia. Meghan told a group of students that for a decade she was the “most trolled person in the entire world’ online. Speaking at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology earlier today, Meghan said that she was “bullied” every day for ten years – and took a pop at the social media giants for not cracking down: When I think of all of you and what you’re experiencing,

Samuel Beckett, with his quizzically peering gaze and handsome, hawk-like appearance, has long been the academic’s pin-up. Endless PhD dissertations exalt the Irish writer, who was born 120 years ago in Dublin on April 13, 1906, as an unsmiling existential hermit figure when he was really nothing of the sort. Over the 60 years of his writing career, Beckett created a memorable gallery of tramps, waifs and other “crotchety moribunds” who find a lugubrious comedy in human failings. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” declares a character in Endgame, while Estragon in Waiting for Godot pines for death in a dry climate where they “crucify quick.” Beckett’s terminal vision was bleakly humorous

The first American pope does not like the President of the United States. One of the few things we knew about the Chicago-born Robert Prevost when he was elected last May was that – despite having an older brother who supported MAGA – he detested the immigration policies of the Trump administration. His private X account, now deleted, made that clear. Pope Leo has rejected the President’s invitation to visit the United States to celebrate his own country’s 250th anniversary; instead, he will visit Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island collapsing under the strain of thousands of North African migrants who have risked their lives to get there. When President Trump issued

I have spent a small portion of my time lately wondering what I would do if I thought communists were about to take over Britain. At the more civil end of things, I could see myself going on an anti-communist protest, though I would shrink away if I noticed that my fellow marchers were flying swastikas. I don’t exactly know what I would do next. Perhaps I would hope for another election soon, and do what I could to unite other anti-communists. One thing I am fairly sure I would not do would be to dance. In fact, were this country facing the prospect of Stalinism coming at us full

A friend who spent much of his life as an archaeologist in Israel once told me that there were three levels of authenticity when it came to Christian pilgrimage sites in the holy land. There were those that were almost certainly inaccurate but soaked in prayer. Those that may or may not be the real thing, of which there are many. Finally, those that according to most of the experts were the real thing. “No serious doubt,” he said with a smile, “it happened here.” It’s not altogether different when it comes to Christian history or the places and events that shaped the early church, including Easter. So, what do

If you follow the courts, you will certainly have come across Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. On March 12, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in this case, which began in 2020 when a transgender woman in Washington State alleged that a traditional Korean spa, which requires patrons to be entirely naked, refused her (or is it him?) entry because she (he?) had not yet undergone so-called gender-affirming surgery. Cases about the rights of transgender people are increasingly on courts’ dockets, with tricky legal issues far from sorted out, but what brought Olympus Spa to wide attention is the explosive and deliberately vulgar dissent by Judge Lawrence VanDyke and the formal castigation of the judge by a very large number of his colleagues. 

The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority of deaths, about one in 20, often those of the middle aged whose diseases are more predictable. Frailty is less orderly, and the fitful hazards of age bring many to the general wards where I work. More of us die in hospital than anywhere else. What sort of spring wakes the hedgerows and the weeds,

And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says “Heil Hitler” gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets canceled. Threaten to go “death con 3 on Jewish people” and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts adorned with the swastika? No problem. Doing a duet with someone from the Jewish state? Don’t even think about it. In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel That