Features

The greatness of C.S. Lewis

He died on the very day that President Kennedy was assassinated, Friday 22 November 1963, so it is not surprising that the event was overshadowed at the time. With the passage of 60 years, C.S. Lewis’s reputation is undiminished and the sheer range of his achievements as a writer and teacher appears ever more prodigious.

What prison taught me

I confess I never expected to see myself going to the lavatory on prime-time national TV. In fact, the expedition was a failure. Sharing a cell, especially with a young man with a record for GBH, is a very constipating experience. But when I accepted Shine TV’s proposal that I should submit to living alongside

Hope is not yet extinguished in Jaffa

When I first heard of the 7 October attacks, I feared it would be the beginning of a war on several fronts: in Gaza, in northern Israel, and in the West Bank. My biggest concern was that the high casualties from the retaliatory Israeli airstrikes would cause violence within Israel itself, as Palestinians in mixed

The 2024 veep show has already started

Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in

How to get rid of your saggy tattoo

Sagging angels, wilting lilies, drooping lines from love sonnets, withered swallows, flaccid snakes, limp dragons, shrivelled babies’ names: this will be the view inside the British bathroom, and at the British seaside, and in British hospital beds and morgues, in 2060, when today’s tattoo-wearers now in their prime will be in their seventies and eighties. 

Why I love terrible towns

There are plenty of reasons to visit Catania in Sicily, and some of them are positive. The town is impressively ancient – dating back to the 8th century bc. It boasts a handsome, lavishly voluted Baroque core. A few steps from that main piazza you can find the picturesque fish market, the Pescheria, which sequins the

Back to the future: Sunak’s big gamble

On Remembrance Sunday, former prime ministers are given ceremonial roles. When everyone assembled last weekend, it was a reminder of the recent mayhem within the Tory party. Labour’s 13-year era seemed neat by comparison: Tony Blair, then Gordon Brown. The Tories’ 13 years in power were represented by a more chaotic line-up: David Cameron, Theresa

Migrants should want to go to Rwanda

  Kigali The Supreme Court’s ruling that sending migrants to a former hostel in Kigali is illegal strikes another hammer blow to the government, not least because Rwanda gets to keep the £140 million that set up the proposed deal in the first place. Never mind what happens now – and this story is far

Will Lebanon be dragged into a war with Israel?

Southern Lebanon In the week following the 7/10 attacks by Hamas, a journalist in Beirut put the question all of Lebanon wanted to ask to the Prime Minister, Najib Mikati: do we have to be dragged into the war with Israel? It was more of a cri de coeur than a question, because the whole

Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky must be honest about the state of the war

‘Happy New Year! The year of our victory!’ said Volodymyr Zelensky on 1 January. After the liberation of the Kharkiv region and Kherson, Ukrainians entered the ninth year of the war with hope that they could win. Light will always prevail over darkness, Zelensky likes to say. But now the counter-offensive is nearly over, having

Keeping the peace: the politics of policing protest

Armistice Day is meant to be a moment of solemn national unity. Yet this year it is expected to coincide with the rather less harmonious ‘Million March for Palestine’, as hundreds of thousands gather in central London on Saturday to protest against Israel’s war on Gaza. Are these events compatible? Should the protest be banned?

The unfathomable depths of Palestinian despair

Away from Gaza, things are getting worse in the West Bank. I’ve received many messages from Palestinian friends raging at what is going on there. To get an idea of the despair of West Bank Palestinians, remember the suicidal attacks on the streets of Jerusalem a decade or so ago. Usually what happened was an

How Egyptians see the Gaza crisis

I was invited to speak at the memorial service for my colleague and friend, Professor Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri, at the American University in Cairo. It was to be held at the downtown Cairo campus, overlooking Tahrir Square. Doris had worked as a professor of English literature at the university from 1955 to 2017. The same

How to speak London

Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling ‘Ge’ aah-a my pub’ is as fossilised as Eliza Doolittle. And what a shock it is today to hear the late Queen, aged 21, declare: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall

The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank

This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40 years of going on about Firbank, that not everyone who sees it will have heard of him. He falls into that intriguing and important category of blue-plaque subjects who are not household names, but whose

Help! I’m on a dating blacklist

There’s a online blacklist of men you should avoid dating and I’m on it. I discovered this over the summer when a colleague gave me a nudge and showed me a screenshot of my dating profile. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ A wave of fear passed through me. I had been posted on a Facebook group