Stuart Jeffries

The world divides between creeps and jerks. History can be seen as a long, unedifying creep, or what one of Alan Bennett’s characters called ‘one fucking thing after another’. Alternatively, it might be seen as consisting of jerks – that’s to say, big events that revolutionise the world (the invention of the printing press, the

Before the second world war, the Croydon-born cricketer C.B. Fry was offered the throne of Albania. It’s not certain why. Possibly because his splendid party piece involved leaping from a stationary position backwards on to a mantelpiece. Or because, historically, the Balkan nation has been so inexplicably Anglophile as to appreciate the pratfalling funnyman Norman

In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God’s punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely

At an improbable soirée in 1987, Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances to the young model Naomi Campbell when the septuagenarian philosopher A.J. Ayer stepped in to demand that the boxer desist. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ snarled Tyson. ‘And I,’ replied Ayer, ‘am the former

‘War – what is it good for?’ asked Edwin Starr on his 1970 single of the same name, before answering his rhetorical question:   ‘Absolutely nothing.’ In this, Starr was not only excoriating America’s contemporary folly in Vietnam. He was implicitly endorsing the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s recommendation that humanity could and should trade up from endless

Elaine Herzberg was pushing a bicycle laden with shopping across a busy road in Tempe, Arizona in 2018 when she was struck by a hybrid electric Volvo SUV at 40mph. At the time of the accident, the woman in the driver’s seat was watching a talent show on her phone. The SUV had been fitted

Long before Covid, wi-fi and Deliveroo, Badger in The Wind in the Willows showed us how to live beyond the manifold fatuities of this gimcrack world. Cosily tucked into his burrow with a roaring fire and well-stocked cellar, he was unbothered by importunate weasels and other denizens of the Wild Wood. He padded his underground

‘Now tell us, you miserable wretched sack of maggots,’ wrote Thomas Müntzer, sounding like the love child of Owen Jones and Ian Paisley, ‘who made you into a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his own precious blood?’ The question Müntzer posed Count Albrecht of Mansfeld was, you’d think, rhetorical. Like his contemporary

In 1982, a board game appeared in West Germany. If you landed on square B9 you were sent to a refugee camp in Hesse where you became ill from loneliness, unfamiliar food and not being allowed to work. Worse still, you had to miss a go and spend the free time thinking about ‘how you

Last August a bomb tore through a Toyota Land Cruiser outside Moscow killing its 29-year-old driver. Darya Dugina, a pro-war TV pundit, had been returning from a conservative literary festival where her father, an ultra-nationalist ideologue, had been giving a talk on tradition and history. Quite possibly he was the intended target. Alexander Dugin was

Imagine your donkey and mine graze in the same field. One day I conceive a dislike for my donkey and shoot it: on examining the victim, though, I realise with horror I’ve shot your donkey. Or imagine a slightly different scenario. As before, I draw a bead, but just as I pull the trigger, my

Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is

On 7 September 1695, the 25-ship Grand Mughal fleet was returning through the Red Sea after its annual pilgrimage to Mecca when it was attacked by five pirate ships.  In the ensuing battle, the pirates’ leader, an Englishman variously known as Henry Avery, Henry Every, the King of Pirates and Long Ben, seized precious jewels