UnHerd

You don’t have to travel long in Sierra Leone to hear stories of its 11-year-long war.

After the documentarian Alex Gibney opened his four-hour film about Elon Musk at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Elon nailed his review in minutes.

Can’t Pay?

In April 2024, Bear Grylls and Russell Brand stood shirtless in the River Thames.

If, like me, you studied French at a Scottish comprehensive in the Eighties, you will have heard of Créteil.

Vaccines are our best defence against infectious disease, saving millions of lives each year.

Barbara O’Neill likes to style herself as “grandmother to the world” — and a grandmother is exactly what she looks like, with long grey hair, a benign smile, and a trim and spritely physical presence (O’Neill is 73).

Twentieth-century American literature has a tradition of writers exiling themselves to Paris, from Lost Generation icons like Ernest Hemingway and F.

I followed all the natural-birth instructions.

Fifty years ago, as a currency crisis threatened Britain’s finances, Denis Healey was forced to leave the VIP lounge at Heathrow and rush back to the Treasury.

The constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, Labour since its inception 43 years ago, is a strange shape, encompassing strange people.

“Conference.”

Last week, a 28-year-old lab worker died in Siberia after developing a severe pneumonia of unknown origin.

“The Cornell gang bang participant and/or victim looks exactly like how you’d think she would and we all know what I mean by that and I trust there won’t be any misunderstanding,” read the worst-faith post, in a crowded field, on X last week.

Less than a century ago, Birmingham was a Tory fiefdom.

The tomb is in the crypt, beneath two vast churches stacked one on top of the other, beneath Giotto, beneath Cimabue, beneath an acre of fresco and several thousand tonnes of pink and white Subasio limestone.

At a seaside villa, a Who’s Who of political, business, and judicial elites mingled with dozens of scantily clad women flown in from Eastern Europe.

For most of the past week, the main French news channels have been leading with images that are familiar but still frightening to the French public.

The suffix “-ism” is a relatively modern one, but the ideas it bolts on to are often ancient.

Last summer, a section of Justin Timberlake’s fans began to complain that the “SexyBack” singer wasn’t giving it his all on his Forget Tomorrow tour.

“The idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie,” Tucker Carlson told Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg in a recent TV debate, “and everyone believes it because they know nothing of the actual facts.

A British politician’s attitude towards the EU is as immutable as his blood type.

Last month, the Netherlands pushed its euthanasia rules just a little further, with the Public Prosecution Service announcing that it won’t prosecute a doctor who last year ended the life of a toddler.

Vivek Ramaswamy wants to carry Ohio, but on Saturday he struggled to carry one young Ohioan.

Neoliberalism has the rather strange distinction of being declared dead for nearly as long as it has been alive.

There is something so exhilarating and disturbing about Digger that some people may elect to dismiss it as chaos, or out of control, and a woeful mishandling of our dear Tom Cruise.

Back in August, a chance remark from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sent the media scurrying.

The tale of RAF Fairford grows stranger and stranger.

By his own account, during many a dangerous expedition Sir Ranulph Fiennes “mistrusted anyone else’s navigating abilities”.

“Hope comes from honesty.”

Inside the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, DC, a colony of flamingos has gathered.

May 15, 2025, was a bright day in New York.

Once the French had sent troops, anti-aircraft missiles and fighter-bombers to help the Saudis fight the Houthis, it was inevitable that Britain’s Labour government would drop its anti-imperialist posturing and join the war.

It looked like a Victorian madhouse from where I stood: all smoke-stained redbrick with the windows barred to discourage suicide.

The jaw-dropping scale and fervent intensity of the crowds surrounding Pope Leo XIV in France have astonished everyone.

It’s Andy Burnham’s victory parade.

The summer just gone saw the 40th anniversary of Paul Simon’s seminal album Graceland.

They say that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.

Houston’s Energy Corridor neighborhood, named after the oil and gas companies that have planted their US headquarters along this far-Western stretch of Interstate 10, is a charmless dystopia if you listen to urban planners, academics and most media: it’s…

To widespread scorn, cartoon posho Jacob Rees-Mogg has been making videos, enjoining young Brits to get ready to fight and even die for the nation.

The mathematics professor Graham Gladwell, who died in 2017, used to lay down a rule for his students.

“I’m like the British Marco Rubio.”

Dan Osborn, the independent making a bid for Nebraska’s junior Senate seat, is confused — or wants to appear to be.

In a famous 1922 speech, Winston Churchill lamented “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”, a literary device for the intercommunal conflict in Ulster which, even as great empires collapsed and new nations were born across Europe, continued with a…

In the wake of President Trump’s re-election in 2024, an unnamed banker told the Financial Times, “I feel liberated.

They’re everywhere, those retired generals and grand officials who keep on briefing about Ukrainian advances and successes in the current conflict.

Boobs, tits, melons, jugs, norks, funbags, hooters… There are hundreds of words for breasts in English, which tells you something about our obsession with them.

Dr Iain McGilchrist has risen to global renown for his theories about the two hemispheres of the brain.

“Only dangerous fanatics refuse to compromise,” my mother used to tell me.

“You may not be interested in war,” Leon Trotsky is supposed to have said, “but war is interested in you.”