The Critic Magazine

IT IS NOT HARD TO MAKE THE CASE AGAINST the BBC. The revelations that Tom Mangold, a BBC lifer, makes against its handling of the Martin Bashir saga in our cover story this month are devastating. The principal moral engine in this country — and one w

Editor: Christopher Montgomery Deputy Editor: Graham Stewart Art Director: Martin Colyer Designer: David Rice Production Editor: Nick Pryer Literary Editor: Paul Lay Online Editor: Sebastian Milbank Digital production: Kittie Helmick Contributing Edi

MY UNCLE BY marriage, Eric Gibson, was as distraught as I was at the accident at Munich airport which took 21 lives, including seven Manchester United players, Busby Babes, and left an eighth, the marvellous Duncan Edwards, in an iron lung for two we

Claire Foster and Juliet Harrison (“IDEOLOGY OR THERAPY?” NOVEMBER) are to be congratulated for their tenacity in uncovering the extent to which postgraduate courses in clinical psychology have been subverted to the crude and unscholarly agitprop of

BARRISTERS TEND TO make awful writers, a fact which has not stopped them from filling the shelves of WH Smith with the sort of paperbacks people buy for indifferent aunts. The latest example of the genre is Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms i

FROM CHEVENING TO CHEQUERS. FOR ME, two weekends, eight weeks apart, will forever bookend my friend Liz Truss’s time as prime minister. The first, a wash of August Bank Holiday sunshine over the Kent countryside. Walking the grounds of the Foreign Se

“It’s important we show people that I understand their problems,” says Rishi. “That I’m just like them, whether they’re aristocrats, upper class or working class.” He thinks for a moment. “Well, not working class.” We are having a meeting with Amber,

GEORGE SOROS IS WIDELY KNOWN AS the man who broke the Bank of England. As we will see, the Bank is quite capable, advertently or inadvertently, of breaking governments. The brutal demise of the Truss administration following the mini-budget has been

CORNELIA HAS PUBLISHED three novels so far in her brief but distinguished career. Iron Men, her debut, 200,000 words long and set in a neolithic hillfort, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. According to Lot, its somewhat terser stable

20 OCTOBER 2022 IS A DATE I SHALL NOT FORGET. It’s the day when Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street to announce her resignation — the fourth Conservative prime minister to be hounded from office by their own party in six years. It was also the day

IN TRAUMA AND RECOVERY, THE PSYCHIATRIST JUDITH HERMANdistinguishes between traumatic events that are “natural disasters or ‘acts of God’” and those “of human design”. In the case of the former, she writes, “those who bear witness readily sympathise

A psychologist at a dinner party which I attended recently spoke about his “CLIENTIN THE COMMUNITY”. Two lies in four words: I suppose this was concision of a kind! His “CLIENT” was a madman known to wield knives in a state of psychosis, a potential

20 NOVEMBER 1995 Martin Bashir’s interview with Diana, Princess of Wales is aired on BBC Panorama. It is watched by 23 million viewers in the UK and 200 million worldwide 22 NOVEMBER 1995 BBC graphics artist, Matt Wiessler, first reveals to executive

It is no exaggeration to say that Elon Musk’s annexation of Twitter is the most terrifying development in recent history. Only a fascist would seek to impose free speech on humanity. This is why there has been such a chorus of execration from left-wi

THE MOST IMPORTANT episode both politically and economically in 2022 was September’s mini-budget and the spectacular fallout that ensued. Many lessons can be drawn from it, not least the importance of communication. Liz Truss’s government failed to l

LIZ TRUSS’S PREMIERSHIP was short, but the debris — misjudged ideas and shattered reputations — may take years to clear. According to William Hague in the Times, the message was that “ideology is dead” and “it’s competence we need now”. In his view,

PERHAPS LIKE INVESTMENT advisers’ caveats that past performance may not be an assured promise of future profits, historians ought to issue a health warning when making predictions about the future, which can be a precariously exposed business. In 201

IF THERE WAS ONE THING THE Romans did well — aside from sanitation, irrigation and concrete — it was polemic. Cicero composed fourteen fiery Philippics against Mark Antony in the 40s BC, and Catullus jibed at Julius Caesar so profusely in his poems t

IT IS LESS THAN 20 YEARS since Shirley Hazzard won the National Book Award for Fiction, yet if she retains a reputation at all, it is more for how little she wrote — four novels, two short story collections — than what she wrote. Now comes her chance

ONE OF THE PARADOXES of the early postwar era is that, after Germany’s defeat, the Nazis were vilified at the same time that their expertise was sought after by both Cold War superpowers. Germans played key roles in both sides’ space programmes. Less

NO HAGIOGRAPHY OF EMPIRE is offered by Dominic Lieven, but the level of wisdom offered about the vital human aspects of imperial rulership make this a quietly devastating rebuttal of some of the cruder anti-imperialist critiques of our superficially

GIVEN THE FACT THAT IRAN has always occupied some measure of media attention in the Anglophone world even before the Islamic Republic made it into a pariah state, it is odd that most politically-minded members of the public or even of the academic cl

AS I WENT TO UNIVERSITY in the days before higher education was taken over by a gaggle of mentally ill spinsters, the emergence of woke ideology reached me second-hand and from a distance. It seemed no big deal. Students will be students, I thought.

IT’S NOT BEEN A GREAT YEAR for non-fiction books. Indeed, it’s been a while now since the last one, which is probably something to do with the pandemic, as well as the general lack of courage and conviction among too many publishers and commissioning

“THIS WAS A QUIET YEAR. There were no sensational or overpowering entries.” That was Douglas Hurd, chair of the 1998 Booker Prize judges, author of the thrillers Scotch on the Rocks and A Vote to a Kill — and holder of one or two other claims to fame

ONE MORNING HALF A lifetime ago I was sitting in a garret office at the London Coliseum listening to the Queen’s cousin tell me what the public really wanted. The Earl of Harewood — George, when you got to know him better — was managing director of E

I LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT A LOT. To review: I’ve seen her in concert twice, listened to her albums obsessively (OK, I’m a bit patchier on the first three Nashville-y ones), can measure out the last ten years of my life in her songs, and have advanced theor

LET US GARLANDS BRING. It is sixty-one years since a young man from Wigton skipped along the yellow brick road from the city of dreaming spires to Broadcasting House, to serve as apprentice stoker at the BBC’s cultural furnace. He’s still there, seek

I HAVE FOLLOWED THE CAREER OF David Kohn, a youngish architect (at least young by the standards of architects), originally from South Africa, trained in Cambridge and New York on a Fulbright Scholarship, who I first met when he designed a pop-up rest

IT’S ALL OUR FAULT. And yes I do mean all of it. And yes I do mean all of us. By “it” I mean the mess that our country has, by any conceivable metric, fallen into. And we are to blame. We, the body politic of the United Kingdom. “The voter is never w

A SUNDAY MORNING in London, my daughter is three. She wakes up, we read a story, go downstairs for breakfast, wrestle her into jacket and boots, go out for a long walk, feed the ducks, a bit of swinging and sliding at the playground. Back home, I che

IN ONE OF THE FISHING BOOKS in the lodge at the mouth of the river Grimersta, there is a picture of Ted Hughes as an old man. Moth-eaten jumper, thick grey hair blown to one side by the heavy Hebridean wind, and a dour face with a downturned mouth. G

WHETHER THEY UNLEASH your inner Andrew Carnegie or expose your suppressed Ebenezer Scrooge, there’s no dodging the seasonal gift round-up. Even we gardeners are portrayed as craving sailcloth smocks, traditional trugs, robotic lawnmowers and thermal

I am indebted to Professor Kenneth Weisbrode, the historian and biographer of ambassador David Bruce, for reminding me that not only was this consummate diplomat legendary for his grace and his elegance, for his wit and for his unique triple crown as

I AM OLD ENOUGH TO remember the days when the BBC’s sports broadcasting was iconic — both the events it covered and the way it covered them. Now it’s just a mishmash of secondhand highlights programmes, some rugby and Wimbledon (and as everyone secre

CHRISTMAS, AND FASHION — like so many things, is fucked. You know, again. If the pandemic meant no one to manufacture clothes plus nowhere to sport them, we are now presented with no way of affording them should we desire food, warmth, habitation etc

SPORTS PERSONALITY OF THE YEAR usually promises more than it delivers: it is pre-Christmas Sunday night comfort TV rather than a comprehensive review of the sporting year. There is one aspect of the show, however, which is both resonant and important