Social commentary

A London-based foreign correspondent is probably not the target audience of Michael Peel’s latest book. Indeed, what Peel (himself a former Financial Times correspondent in Lagos, Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Brussels) discusses in eight lively, well-researched chapters won’t come as a surprise to any of his UK-based foreign colleagues: how Britain is perceived abroad; and how little it seems to permeate the national consciousness. This blindness – or the British inability to realise how they appear to others, as opposed to the image they have of themselves – often has foreign correspondents pulling their hair in disbelief. If only Britain knew how it was seen! One senses that Peel’s return

Books about endangered languages tend to be laments, full of shocking statistics and portraits of impossibly frail, ancient last speakers in faraway places. Ross Perlin’s exuberant, radical book blasts that away, exploring, instead, New York, now ‘the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world’, home to more than 700 languages (of approximately 7,000 on the planet), and a ‘last improbable refuge’ for many speakers of ‘embattled and endangered’ tongues. ‘Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains or impenetrable jungles, they are now right next door.’ So one block of flats in Brooklyn is a ‘vertical village’, home to 100 of the world’s 700 speakers of

The subject that Sarah Ditum addresses in Toxic is why the early part of this century was ‘such a monstrous time to be famous and female. It’s about how the concept of privacy came undone and why that was a catastrophe for women’. The concept of privacy was actually undone by a judge in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2006. A 16-year-old girl was browsing through greetings cards in a shop when a man crouched down beside her and took photographs up her skirt. A security guard saw him and called the police. The whole scene was captured on CCTV, so there was no shortage of evidence. But the judge ruled that

Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his

The War on the West is Douglas Murray’s latest blast against loony left wokery, chiefly in the areas of race and ‘social justice’. ‘This is not like earlier wars,’ he writes. ‘It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the western tradition and against everything good that the western tradition has produced.’ The meticulous, measured way that Murray presents his arguments and evidence suggests a man who knows he’s in for a lot of flak. For instance, he has the audacity to suggest that the death of George Floyd, however brutal and inept the policing, doesn’t actually bear any signs of racism.

Modern British history can be divided into two parts: before Covid and after. That is the central pillar of this at times arid but ultimately compelling account of British social policy since 1945. We recovered in the aftermath of the second world war. Can we do it again, post-pandemic? Peter Hennessy, a crossbench peer, starts with the observation that government has a duty of care to the people, a conviction that emerged in the aftermath of the war and underpinned the creation of the welfare state. At the centre of it all was William Beveridge – ‘dry, prickly and difficult, but a genius when it came to the social arithmetic

The greatest ever social media spat took place before the first tweet was sent, and was conducted via fax, which was like email but with the satisfyingly tangible tear of a fresh missive just arrived from across the planet. It was early 1993 and Julie Burchill, then of the Modern Review, was locked in a war with Camille Paglia, then of any US talk show you cared to tune into. The conflict began with a disobliging review Burchill filed of Paglia’s Sexual Personae, before shifting to the Xerox front, where Paglia made the mistake of questioning her interlocutor’s working-class credentials. Burchill brought hostilities to an abrupt close with her final