Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire
If you want to picture Rupert Murdoch imagine an old man on a tight rope. On the one hand, his newspapers must pursue his interests – say that everyone but the rich must pay the price of austerity, for instance. But as he wobbles over the void, Murdoch must also balance his rather brutal class
The typical plot of a Sophie Hannah thriller sounds ridiculous when you condense it. A man yearns for a family. His wife has a child to please him, but she does not love her daughter. Desperate for affection, the little girl gets angrier and angrier and throws an electric heater in her mother’s bath. Realising
Last night I went to hear Chris Mould of the Trussell Trust speak at my local church. The scene appeared to confirm every myth Tories tell about themselves. Though it does not make a great noise about it, the Trust represents the Anglican conscience at its active best. On their own, without state support or
Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust By Hans Kundnani The best political book I read in 2013 actually came out in 2009 – I am afraid my finger is a long way from the pulse of contemporary publishing. Hans Kudnani history of Germany’s 1968 generation tells an extraordinary story: the revolt of
The other day Mumsnet asked whether I would talk to its audience about my Spectator pieces (here and here) on the universities’ plans to authorise the segregation of men and women on campuses. Why not? I thought. Mumsnet has a large and interesting audience. More than five million people visit each month, and politicians beg to go
On the Today programme this morning Justin Webb covered the decision by Universities UK to allow fundamentalist speakers to segregate women from men at public meetings. With a characteristic disdain for accepted standards of behaviour, Universities UK refused to go on air and answer his questions. Webb had to ‘put the other side of the
For over a week now, astonished reaction has been building to the decision of Universities UK to recommend the segregation of men and women on campuses. The astonishment has been all the greater because, in a characteristic display of 21st century hypocrisy, the representatives of 132 universities and colleges clothed reactionary policies in the language
Like the whiff of a mouldy madeleine, the statement by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) on the expulsion of Comrade Balakrishnan takes you back to a time that is well worth forgetting. ‘Balakrishnan and his clique were suspended from the Party because of their pursuance of conspiratorial and splittist activities
Whenever a heresy-hunting left-winger fixes me with an accusatory glare and demands to know how can I talk to ‘someone like that’ (the ‘someone’ in question being a right-wing object of righteous denunciation) I reply, ‘I’m a journalist and will talk to anyone – even you.’ Still, I like to have a choice. I did
Firoozeh Bazrafkan is frightened of nothing. Five foot tall, 31 years old, and so thin you think a puff of wind could blow her away, she still has the courage to be a truly radical artist and challenge those who might hurt her. She fights for women’s rights and intellectual freedom, and her background means
In the past few days, my colleagues on the Guardian have been publishing stories of national and international significance – indeed, if truth be told, they have been publishing them for most of the autumn. The international scoop was that America’s National Security Agency tapped Angela Merkel’s mobile phone (along with the phones of many
Just before the hacking scandal broke, the Sun sent a young and by all accounts decent reporter to meet a woman who said she had a story — a ‘walk-in’ as we call them in the trade. The walk-in produced a phone and said the Sun would want to take a look. One picture on
I was shocked this morning to log on to Twitter and learn that Norman Geras had died. I can think of few political writers, who have influenced me more comprehensively. Whenever I faced a difficult moral question, I would at some point think ‘ah, what is Norm saying about this,’ go to his blog and
Britain’s journalists ought to be asking themselves an unfamiliar question: what is the point of my life? If they have any knowledge of history, they ought to know that they are the custodians of a tradition of press freedom, which began with John Milton and the “Independents” who opposed both Charles I and the Presbyterian
As displays of duplicity go, Mehdi Hasan’s performance on the BBC discussion show Question Time seemed hard to beat. Hasan delighted leftists by hounding the Daily Mail. Who really “hated Britain”? he asked. Not Ed Miliband’s father, as the Mail had claimed, but the “immigrant-bashing, women-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.” How the audience clapped
Last week I wrote in the Observer about Qatar’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers, who will build the stadiums and hotels for the 2022 World Cup. They were dying at a rate of one day. They had to cope with inhuman conditions and labour laws that treated them as serfs by giving
That wrenching sound you can hear is the noise of the Tory columnists slamming their gears into reverse. Until yesterday, they had assured their readers that Ed Miliband was a useless, limp-wristed bleeding heart without the machismo to hack it as prime minister. He was weak. He was hopeless. He was toast. But that was
The Chippenham Labour Party has decided that its candidate to contest the 2015 general election will be one Andy Newman. As the anti-totalitarian blogs Howie’s Corner and Harry’s Place have already argued he is almost certain to be the worst politician to stand for a mainstream party. An innocent observer, who believes the British Left’s
In the Spectator last week, I described how Richard Dawkins had become a space-filler for empty-headed pundits with no idea what else to write about in these slow summer days. The standard form was to upbraid him for being an Islamophobe because of a series of remarks he had tweeted about Islam in general and the
