The cost of the Paris Olympics will never be known, but whatever it might be the French taxpayer will foot the bill

Increasingly, we feel not that we live in countries with a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but that we are a people of the government, by the government, for the government. Even now, though, our lives are not hell, unless we choose to make them such ourselves

For ordinary Parisians, the Olympics will be somewhat reminiscent of the Covid lockdowns, People I know are fleeing to the provinces because they would otherwise need a special pass to leave or enter the streets in which they live. Those who remain have reason to fear surging street crime, terror attacks and, mon Dieu!, even killer drones

In his great book, Russia in 1839, the Marquis de […]

One of the guises in which wolves come is as the righteous and empowered foes of 'hate speech'. Everyone knows that to be hated is discomfiting -- and to be discomfited is like saying goodbye, it is to die a little. Hence it must be suppressed, for the sake of the welfare of the sheep

No system of criminal justice will ensure that there are never again such people as whoever decapitated the victim found in Sheldon Johnson’s flat. Individual propensity to do evil is always distributed in a normal curve, and the most that any system can do is move the whole curve either in the direction of good or evil. But that is already much

The Australian example vaptures the loss of confidence of Western civilisation vis-à-vis the rest of the world. It is detectable in Europe and in the United States. Oddly enough, that loss of confidence also partakes simultaneously of moral grandiosity, that at long last indubitable moral truth has been found. Quite apart from its absurdity, this attitude is no pleasanter to behold than jingoism

Most women, at least in my medical experience, agonise over the problem and exhibit none of the ideological triumphalism of the proponents of a constitutional right to abortion. They may deem an abortion necessary, but it is for them a regrettable necessity

On an American campus, privileged young women stood behind banners saying 'Whatever it takes' and the popular slogan 'Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea'. The kind of 'freedom' a movement such as Hamas would impose did not apparently trouble or even occur to them