EXTRA
FERDINAND MOUNT‘Just get us out’
How strange it is at this late date to see the defunct Act in Restraint of Appeals held up for our admiration. Its passage, after all, was one of the scurvier episodes in Parliamentary history, that would in due course lead to the execution of almost all concerned – Anne Boleyn, More, Fisher, Cromwell and Cranmer himself – and in the longer run to the religious wars that were to convulse Europe for nearly two centuries, and later still to the breakaway of Ireland from the United Kingdom, which was followed by two civil wars, in the first and last quarters of the 20th century, both of them so ghastly that we have euphemised them as the Troubles. So not exactly a glorious precedent. Yet increasingly, as the economic arguments for Brexit lose what cogency they ever had, the Brexiteers grope for justification in the mists of our island story. More
FROM THE LATEST ISSUE
‘Down Girl’
Kate Manne knows that a book about misogyny is going to be preaching to the converted, when the converted don’t necessarily know what or how they think; or indeed what to do with their doubts, not least their doubts about the ideology of virtue, about being on the side of the angels. Down Girl rightly insists that misogyny is so all-pervading and so alluring that we are more likely to take it for granted than we are to acknowledge it properly, or want to change it for something better. ‘What could possibly change any of this?’ Manne asks in the conclusion to her book, and it sounds like a cry from the heart. More
Nightmares in Harare
Zimbabwe doesn’t need to be poor; that’s what’s so devastating. It has copious minerals, well-managed water resources, an educated and ambitious population, a safari park the size of Belgium, and some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. It’s poor in part because of theft on a grand scale: Zimbabwe is being looted by its own government. Small numbers of elite Zimbabweans feel entitled to wealth, and the only way for them to get as rich as they feel they should be is to plunder the parastatals and the public purse. Uncertainty about the current regime and how long it will survive makes for extreme myopia. More
I met a Republican
The question remains whether the citizenry – between 35 and 40 per cent of eligible voters – who register across-the-board approval of Trump will accept the removal of a president solely on the grounds that his success was founded on corruption and he won the presidency with a conflict of interest between his business and his country. The word ‘collusion’, which has no legal status, has rooted itself in popular journalism to describe the putative co-operation between Trump and Russia, but the legal term ‘conspiracy’ has a sharper definition and a higher standard of proof. Democrats have made things easier for Trump by droning on about Putin, with the clear suggestion that a written or recorded bargain to subvert the election is waiting to be discovered. That would qualify as conspiracy. But such evidence is hardly likely to exist. More
LATEST AUDIO AND VIDEO
VIDEO The Communal Mind
Watch Patricia Lockwood travel through the internet in her Winter Lecture. Watch »
