Generally speaking, a watershed between the right and the left in politics is formed by the Enlightenment.

People I’d describe as real conservatives detest it, while those on the left feel exactly the opposite.

Sir John, who, I don’t mind admitting, is my political, moral and intellectual idol, hit the nail on the head the other day, with Ukip being the nail and Nigel Farage the head.

Ukip, explained my idol, “is peddling sheer nastiness” that is “profoundly un-British in every way”.

November 2013 marked fifty years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but also the passing of Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis, each prophetic in his own way.

Huxley’s most famous work Brave New World (1932) predicted that people would be bred like animals and graded according to their pre-destined place in society. As we will see, the idea had already been canvassed in fiction, and the Eugenics Society was busy working on the scientific breeding of humans. But has Huxley’s ‘brave new world’ come to pass?

Arithmetic and statistics are useful tools for liars. A little massaging here, a little bending there, and suddenly a lie sounds plausible. When it comes to liars in our government, they don’t have to distort their sums to make a false point. All it takes is applying arithmetic to issuesRead More

Yesterday afternoon a young woman stood by the side of a road holding up a sign. It read “Gush Etzion”. Those two words summon up spittle-flecked rants about Zionist settlements from the anti-Israel left.But for Dalia, it was just home. And then it wasn’t. Dalia caught a ride to aRead More