In just the last few years, the once radical left has gone fully mainstream trading esoteric academic journals for six-figure book deals, front page headlines, and, in some kind of punchline to a cosmic joke, regular editorials in Teen Vogue. Critics often blame this on Marxism, an ideology smuggled out of universities, they say, inside […]
The utopian image of the internet is that it allows us — for the first time in history — the genuinely unfettered and open exchange of information. And so quickly has an approximation of this ideal become a fixture of our lives that we now assume it to be an inevitable, permanent feature of our […]
One evening, about five years ago, a friend and I found ourselves wandering through Southall, an area of West London known for its large South Asian population. We decided, on a whim, to pop into a pub on the main road, which turned out to be owned — and largely patronised — by Sikhs. Inside, […]
In totalitarian societies, all culture eventually gets frogmarched into championing the cause. Under Stalinism, for instance, even music — the most abstract of art forms — was required to convey, say, idyllic peasant life in the fields. Communism slithered its way like an amoeba over the press, the courtrooms, and the arts, absorbing every last […]
Writing in the Spectator 30 years ago, Kingsley Amis described the Arts Council as a “detestable and destructive body”, whose grants encouraged artists to “sod the public” and “seek the more immediate approval of their colleagues and friends instead”. Amis was giving voice to a widespread suspicion of the time: that cabals of high-minded artists […]
