The New World

“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye” Dorothy Parker Portraiture is an intimate business.

We began our conversation in one era and ended it in another.

My stance doesn’t really make sense from the outside: I’ll give you that.

The call comes as I am running through nettles in a bikini, wellies and a cooking apron having just spotted deer at the bottom of the field.

To understand how Benjamin Netanyahu’s camp are handling easily the most crucial election of his long career, it helps to consider the recent interview the prime minister’s wife, Sara, gave to Channel 14, the far right, fanatically pro-Netanyahu station t…

The Times has turned its hand to doing PR for the black-clad balaclava’d up far-right mob who descended on Dover at the weekend.

Last month Rats in a Sack reported how 1970s disco group Boney M were being lined up as the unlikely musical guests for Reform’s annual conference, with the outfit scheduled to play at the Friday night after-party of Nigel Farage’s shindig.

According to the bookmakers Labour is odds-on to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.

When Ben Habib, Reform’s former deputy leader, claimed earlier this year that Thai-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne had paid Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson £1 million each to essentially rig the 2019 general election in the latter’s favour, he

Ahead of last weekend’s Reform party conference – a conference largely overshadowed by a Channel 4 News undercover investigation which appeared to show senior political figures prepared to funnel foreign donations into the party – much of the coverage was…

It was a case of déjà vu all over again.

On one level, Reform is telling the truth when its leading figures say that the bombshell undercover footage aired by Channel 4 News on the eve of its party conference changed nothing – just probably not in the way that they intended.

“A spontaneous protest” was Kent police’s assessment of the temporary blockade of Dover ports on Saturday by several hundred balaclava-clad individuals all dressed in black, which resulted in no arrests.

PICK OF THE WEEK The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, by James Marriott (Bodley Head) “As reading fades,” writes James Marriott, “I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles t…

In his recently published memoir Great And Unfortunate Things, the late Jason Arday recalls being taken by his mother to demonstrations in London in honour of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

If you happened to tune into the speech without knowing who he was, or where he was speaking, you could have almost found it quite touching.

For a brief summer when I was 16, I tried to wear my wire-framed glasses over the front strands of my hair.

There is a very well-known piece of good advice: that when you’re in a hole, you should stop digging.

Reform’s absurdly self-styled “shadow home secretary” Zia Yusuf extended his usual friendly congratulations as it emerged that Sagal Abdi-Wali, the leader of Camden Council, was the favourite to run as Labour’s candidate in the Holborn and St Pancras by-e…

Given how its tentacles reach into every aspect of UK life post our formal departure in 2020, it is difficult to quantify how many times Brexit has been formally debated in the House of Commons ever since.

Wait, look – no, stop, hang on, I said: just look.

“ONE IN THE EYE FOR ANDY”, ran the headline on the front page of the sinking Sun on Thursday, as the tabloid attempted to draw a tortured analogy between the Bayeux Tapestry and its fury over small boats.

It’s been a whole two days since Andy Burnham turned up in Parliament as prime minister for the first time, and already he has to face the rite of passage of pretty much all Labour leaders: deciding whether to turf Diane Abbott out of the party.

There are, the Stranglers told us, no more heroes.

It’s 2026.

Is Michael Gove on some sort of bet about getting the most crackpot far right figure he possibly can into the pages of his Spectator?

L’angoisse extrême.

Having returned to the House of Commons following his farcical summer battle with a bin, might a new, reinvigorated Nigel Farage be planning a more vigorous approach to Parliament the second time around?

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist, once famously mused about power.

With Keir Starmer quitting the Commons and his Holborn and St Pancras seat for a big job on the international stage, tongues are a-waggin’ as to who will get the Labour nod for what should, on paper, be a plum seat.

On Tuesday this week, Peter Geoghegan, who writes the investigative Substack newsletter Democracy For Sale, had a genuine scoop: that there were internal concerns within Reform about Nigel Farage’s decision to accept a £5 million “unconditional gift” from…

There is no elegant way to say it: by resigning as an MP in the way that he did, at the time that he did, Keir Starmer guaranteed that his political legacy will be that of a messy bitch who lived for drama.

It’s not fair to start judging a film on the basis of a couple of photographs leaked on to the internet, but as Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “Since when has fair been fun?”.

A church is in flames in the middle of the night.

There are two possible ways to read Life of M by Rachel Cusk.

The Gilded Age author Mark Twain was enamoured of technology.

November 22, 1966 – September 6, 2021 “I don’t think we should ask anyone.

The government of Turkey announced four years ago that it wants its country to be internationally known as Türkiye – its name in the Turkish language itself – regardless of what language people happen to be speaking or writing.

Now that August is over, we can start thinking back to the summer we’ve just had, and begin idly planning for the summer that will start in around 10 months.

Nic Aubury’s 4-line poem: Fiddling and Burning

Modern Toss’s Tossary: Preating

Tim Bradford’s cartoon: RFK Jr Confidential

Next month should bring the grand reveal: the cloak of vagaries will have to be removed to show the prime minister’s true colours.

There’s more to the bickering and constantly changing relationship between Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump than meets the eye.

The German idiom for a deer caught in the headlights is “wie ein Kaninchen vor der Schlange” – like a rabbit before the snake, frozen as the threat slithers closer.

In 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China contributed less than 4% of world GDP; today that figure is close to 20%.

Re: “The climate crisis is coming to your kitchen” by Paul Mason, TNW #495 Paul Mason neatly summarises the necessary change for which consensus is building.

As Fiona has learned during almost half a century together, I don’t really do holidays; “I work in different places” (my copyright).

The votes were counted by Sunday morning, yet Iceland feels less like a country that has reached a decision about its relationship with the EU than a family that has just finished a very ugly argument.

John Locke was born in Somerset on August 29, 1632.