When the Berlin Wall came down we told by those who should have known better that the age of ideology was at an end. On the contrary, ideologies proliferated, driven by a quasi-religious compulsion to believe in the all-encompassing cause

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The question might be: Does rap makes people stupid and aggressive, or is it only stupid and aggressive people who listen to rap music?  If your agenda requires a particular answer, count on the dark art of statistical manipulation to make it so

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Wrapping her prose in arrogant conceits and an oracular omniscience, the prolix Miss Toynbee (left) can take up any topic beloved of the Left and produce, time after time, the standard-issue cliches and perspectives so beloved of Guardian readers

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The social security system in Britain makes it possible, and perhaps even profitable, for parents -- the word is used only in the biological sense -- to bring children into the world without thought or care. That indifference is matched by the police

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Anyone able to quit the city has done so, leaving the urban wasteland of a humbled metropolis to the feral dogs, the desolate ruins of abandoned suburbs and all the other relics of a shining future that has come and gone. Poverty is never pretty, the policies that inflict it on a community even less so

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Unless definitions are narrow, rigid and clear, any attempt to limit freedom of expression because some opinions are deemed intolerable inevitably leads to the suppression of free and frank discussion. Unfortunately, our world is not made for narrow, rigid and clear definitions

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For an architect whose abstract ideas were, he assured us, very so important, he wasn’t much of a thinker. His notions were to real thought what doggerel is to genuine poetry -- a catalogue of inaccuracy, looseness, laziness and mendacity, all covered in a thick sauce of arrogant self-confidence

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Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse by Emmanuel Todd Éditions de Seuil, 2015, 252 pages, €18   On hearing of the massacre of eleven journalists at Charlie Hebdo, I thought of Karl Kraus’s magnificently laconic words: “When it comes to Hitler, I can’t think of anything to say.” Kraus, who wrote thousands of pages […]

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Ever inclined to find fault with those who did not recognise him for the genius he took himself to be, Anders Breivik's life was a catalogue of fantasies and failure. His one achievement, if that is the right word, has been to strengthen the multiculturalists. On one side angels, on the other devils

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Fame is not always proportional to merit: if it were, Simon Leys (who lived the last forty years of his life in Australia, and died last year) would have been one of the most famous writers in the world. After his recent death I asked a few Belgians of my acquaintance, all well-educated, what they […]

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