Features

Would you go to a naked dining club?

Why would anyone want to dine in the nude with other nude diners? Yes, I get being nude on a sunny beach. Swimming nude. Walking nude. But eating nude in public? What’s the appeal? Why leave your comfort zone for the Twilight Zone? Yet nude dining is making a comeback — or at least it’s

Wuhan clan: the price I paid for my lab leak exposé

On 12 March last year, I texted a trusted source connected to Australia’s foreign intelligence agency. ‘What do you think about the theory that the virus came from a virology lab in China? Does that have credibility? I know it’s officially a conspiracy theory but China is not exactly a picture of transparency so I

Britain’s fatal unwillingness to confront Islamic extremism

More than any other country in the West, Britain has become practised in the arts of self-deception and subject avoidance. If a politician in France had been butchered by a Muslim of Somali descent, the French media and political class would have gone through a cycle of debate about the ideology that propelled the killer.

Melanie McDonagh

Why is it so hard to live without a mobile phone?

Last week, my mobile phone stopped working. No big deal you might think. If you can get emails on your computer, and you’ve got a landline and that old-fashioned thing, post, why, you’re not cut off, are you? There are, of course, people who wilfully eschew their phones so as to be more in touch

Mary Wakefield

Why I left the Church of England: an interview with Michael Nazir-Ali

By now, almost everyone who’s remotely interested will know that Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, a man once tipped to become Archbishop of Canterbury, has converted to Catholicism. Dr Nazir-Ali is the second senior Anglican cleric to jump ship this year, which makes church gossip sound pleasingly Shakespearean: ‘Ebbsfleet has fallen… what and Rochester

Brexit has ended Thatcherism. And about time, too

A Conservative government is raising taxes to fund the NHS and telling business to pay its workers more. The world is upside down, and classical liberals are furious. Steve Baker, one of those MPs, tweeted a picture of a pile of books including Hayek, Popper and Von Mises and said ‘This is what we believe’,

Italy’s anti-Green Pass movement has a new figurehead

Rome From this week, all workers in Italy must show a ‘green pass’ certificate in order to access any public place. A green pass shows that you’ve either been vaccinated, tested negative or recovered from Covid-19, and anyone without a pass could be suspended from work and fined. But why is the Mario Draghi administration

The problem with Boris going on Bake Off

Our plans for the Seychelles twice thwarted, we finally decide on Gozo, Malta. Afraid that the Insulate Britain brigade might have us miss our plane, we book a night at the Premier Inn next to Heathrow. We find it clad in scaffolding and the car park rammed. A row of cars stuffed with suitcases outside

Olivia Potts

Why I retrained as a butcher

Two years ago, I enrolled on a butchery course. I rather fancied seeing how the sausage was made, and also envisaged taking home handsome pork chops and having an ‘in’ when I needed to order my Christmas turkey. But the amateur course was no longer offered by my local college. So instead of a four-week,

China is using the climate as a bargaining chip

China’s President Xi Jinping has apparently not yet decided whether to travel to Glasgow next month for the big climate conference known as COP26. That is no doubt partly because he’s heard about the weather in Glasgow in November, and partly because he knows the whole thing will be a waste of his time. After

Power grab: who’s hoarding all the gas?

Before Britain started worrying about a shortage of lorry drivers and petrol, we were fretting about a spike in wholesale gas prices. A couple of weeks and news cycles later, it would be easy to imagine that crisis had gone away. It hasn’t. On the contrary, global gas markets are preparing for a volatile winter.

Tanya Gold

Has Covid killed criticism?

The pandemic was bad for criticism with its universal dogma of ‘kindness’. Restaurant, theatre, film and book critics felt compelled to be kind, as if criticism itself was coughing at a death bed. But who does this kindness benefit? Last year I reviewed Michael Rosen’s book about his Covid-19-related coma: Many Different Kinds of Love.