Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from the poet Tom Paulin. I remember him claiming in a lecture that the ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ sonnet must have been written by someone who had seen the despoiled monasteries, desecrated churches and ravaged holy places
Earlier today, Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times and published a devastating letter of resignation on her website (also available here). There will be those who try to pretend that this is no big deal, or that it is just a storm in a journalistic tea-cup: they would be wrong. For several generations
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Douglas Murray writes in the Spectator this week that Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore defended all the right bits of American history. He joins the podcast with Freddy this week to talk cancel culture and how Trump is taking on the left in the right way.
Ahead of Independence Day last week, CNN went live to its correspondent Leyla Santiago. Here is how she described the upcoming celebrations: ‘Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native
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On this week’s episode, James Forsyth talks about Boris Johnson’s impossible mission – to rewire Whitehall (01:00), Douglas Murray on woke books (09:00), and Leaf Arbuthnot on the underground world of lockdown speakeasies and theatre (17:15).
Of all the people who have made cash in the past month, few can have raked it in like Robin DiAngelo. Since the death of George Floyd, the white American academic and author of White Fragility has been absolutely milking it. A term I probably shouldn’t use, since Peta last week declared milk a symbol
Imagine if on Saturday evening a white neo-Nazi had stabbed three men to death. Imagine, furthermore, if in the wake of the killings it had turned out that all three of the victims were gay. Or ‘members of the LGBT community’, to use the lexicon of the time. And then imagine if two days later
Since the whole world is in crisis, a crisis in the world of publishing might seem like a niche issue. But something that has been going on at the publishers Hachette is worth noting. Not least as it may be a portent of worse things to come elsewhere. Earlier this month the publishing house was
During these months of inertia, I confess to having on occasion made illicit trips to churches in the English countryside. Enjoying the frisson that surely accompanies all law-breaking, I have often gone so far as the church door, there to examine not only the locks and bolts but also the laminated notices which adorn so
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Douglas Murray reads his cover piece in which he argues that liberalism is under threat; Matthew Parris rejoices in the toppling of Bristol’s Edward Colston statue, calling it a thrilling act of history; and Kate Andres explains the problems of policing back in her home country of America.
45 min listen
Are we witnessing the death of the liberal ideal? (01:02) Next, what’s behind the government U-turn on primary schools and what effect could it have on the poorest students? (20:14) And finally, Britain’s ash trees are facing a pandemic of their own, with so-called ash dieback sweeping the nation. Can Britain’s ash trees be saved?
It has become fashionable in recent years to talk of the death of liberalism. But as crowds high on the octane of generational self-righteousness rampage through major cities, the evidence mounts. The growing intolerance of freedom of thought, the inability to talk across divides, the way that most of the British establishment, police included, feels
Further Black Lives Matter protests took place yesterday in the UK, in response to the death of a man at the hands of a Minnesota cop a fortnight ago. So far the tally from the London protest includes not only the now traditional mass-breaking of the government’s Covid guidelines, the graffiti-ing of the Cenotaph, the
14 min listen
Fraser Nelson reads his cover piece campaigning for the British government to offer citizenship to the Hong Kong Chinese; Douglas Murray asks – why do the Black Lives Matter protestors get to be exempt from the lockdown? And Tanya Gold reviews: Monster Munch.
It is nearly four years since Black Lives Matter had their first major protest in London. Emulating their US counterparts, the protestors held up their hands and chanted ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, a chant popularised after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. By then it had been known for a year that
God, I loathe the bishops. Not Beth Rigby, Robert Peston and the other hacks who seem to be auditioning to guide the morality of the nation. I mean the actual bishops, who turn out to be even less use than these competitively incensed cross-examiners. Most people in Britain couldn’t name a bishop if they tried.
There have been an enormous number of positive attributes on display during the lockdown. Family members keeping an eye on each other. Neighbours looking after each other more. But there have been ugly attributes about as well. None uglier than the sort of tell-tale attitude that makes you realise how the secret police could always
19 min listen
On this week’s Audio Reads, Douglas Murray advises Labour to get a new attack line, now that the Conservatives have become the party of the NHS. Professor Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist at the LSE, ponders what would have happened had the pandemic started in Sweden, rather than China. And Andrew Watts says – if
I wonder what the Labour party will use as its scare slogan at the next election? After all, the usual one of ‘[Insert number] weeks/days/minutes to save the NHS’ may not work next time. Not that it worked every time before. But it has long been the favourite attack line of a British left that
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in the magazine how the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to bully our allies and friends in Australia. The government of that country having had the audacity to demand an independent and international inquiry into the origins of the Wuhan virus. Since then, the CCP has been
