That, faced with top-down tyranny in the United States, the gun-clinching conservatives are the ones splaying themselves in front of its seduction and sweatily defending its enforcers while the limp lefties are the ones opposing it with gritty courage, is an irony both massive and sickening.

Christianity, to Holland, is an unnoticed yet vital source of moral oxygen. But to suppose modern conceptions of goodness come SOLELY from that prophet’s teachings is to insult our special fleet of faculties. The conscience shuddered before God, and it’ll shudder long after him too.

There is now an enemy so fierce in its territorial intent, so ravenous in its oppressive crushing of domestic opponents, and so appalling in its inversions of reality, that Europe must force herself to fear it. Oh…..and Russia is a nasty place too.

Montaigne’s four hundred year newness is astonishing. Snide, slippery, and yet intellectually seductive, I’ve never read essays that jog at a more convenient speed alongside our intemperate modern minds. From boozing to speciesism, from radishes to Pythagorus, all done with a cherubic caution.

The England cricket team’s juvenile contempt for external forces, its six-swatting solipsism and its inability to embrace tactical change, have in concert seen them fall as hard as every touring side always does. McCullum and Stokes, with their bucket hats and baggy trousers, are no visionaries.

Today marks 5 years since my Trump disavowal. Until Jan 6th (without ever supporting him) I was happy for that repellant raptor to be my enemy’s enemy and therefore my friend. The schadenfreude with which I saw him soil safe norms to that point, is a mark of this century’s ability to pervert!

“The lions, i.e the ladies, have got the brush in their hands with a vengeance now, and are retaliating for the calumnies of men from Adam downwards. Perhaps it is but fair to allow them a little exaggeration.” - George Eliot (Geraldine Jewsbury’s ‘Constance Herbert’)

“Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way” - George Eliot.

Just in case your algorithms are aggressively trying to tell you otherwise, Donald Trump does not care about electoral legitimacy, suppressed dissidents, or any more of Maduro’s many sins. This was a grab without pretext; as a toddler might select a ladybird from the sill and pluck its wings.

Some personal thoughts on an ENORMOUS game at Wembley.

“Eyre Crowe’s question had always been: ‘Should the war come, and England stand aside…[and] Germany and Austria win, crush France and humiliate Russia, what will then be the position of a friendless England?’ The historian’s answer is: better than an exhausted England in 1919.” The Pity of War

It’s two years since Amis died, and his scything bountiful charisma is the still the standard against which all scribblers are judged. He dropped the literary drawbridge to a simple-minded young Spivey and his critical swagger upholsters my mind still!

My latest ⬇️ “Mouth-breathing mortals abandon realism at their peril. Ropner Hall and its habitants (both lazily stateless) do not cohere in the presentation of a believable, smooth story. The author’s predilections for madness make The Ladie Upstairs a jarring, mirthfully obscure hallucinogen.”

Trollope on the obsession (prominent in his age and ubiquitous in ours) with the writerly spark ⬇️ “To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting.”

Within its ‘analytical’ sections, this book has all the bigoted bloviation I expected. The slippery attribution of modern meaningless to atheism gives it a repulsive piety. It coarsens throughout and cradles at the end, leavened by equivocations just in case we mistook Murray for a monster.

My latest Substack⬇️ “What will happen when all the foreigners’ removal does not result in national prosperity? What will happen when Reform’s otherwise scant knowledge base is shown to be ludicrously unbecoming for high office? These will be phenomena for the next generation of political analysts.”

My latest ⬇️ “If only Harding had given more splendour to his sentences and given more umph to his explorations, we might’ve been witnesses to a remarkable book on the incommensurability of Nazism and science, the vanity of hope in fascistic countries, or the temporal erosion of human empathy.”

A media outlet discusses how his every belch and bleat is inexplicably covered, by inexplicably covering his latest belch and bleat! Reform have a grand sum of four MPs, and yet he need only wobbly his goiter for the nation’s press to congregate!

Guileless, gibbersome and frantically frayed with inexactitudes. This was Peterson’s worst performance to date. His syllable-heavy sermonising and his drawling sanctimony is now unparalleled. I can’t believe I used to defend this flaccid charlatan at university gatherings!

Like my own Kingston Rovers, Arsenal have for years conducted themselves in a professional manner and beaten most with a soldierly doggedness. That performance in Madrid was more elegant and much wilier. They’ve put away the CL holders. Who’s to say they won’t visit similar expertise on PSG?

Hell, I would be the last person to save Douglas Murray from a stint in the intellectual slammer, but his invoking expertise during an age of boundless stupidity should be cheered. Rogan has been emboldening and legitimising pillocks and warped theorists for years!

My latest review for Open Letters⬇️ “The lovemaking is less frequent and less operatic than has become commonplace. It is gasping, mannerly and performed at close quarters, bearing no resemblance to the lubricious bouts and emotive yelping that dominates teenage search histories.”

Edith Wharton has me in the palm of her hand⬇️ “It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of; it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary”

Johnson’s is an incorruptible majesty. Whether we consult him on grace or swine, Petrarch or Polybius, malice or mustard, he frees us from ignorance and soothes us with his corpulent wisdom. Never shall we dare limit a sentence to three or four words when seventy-eight will better serve.

That was an eye-popping edition of Milan-San Remo! Pogacar defies anthropological science to leave a peloton spluttering in his dust and MVDP shows he’s undroppable on a good day. Pogacar is the most complete cyclist ever to clench his teeth and is certain to pepper tall stories one century hence!

Now we’ve left the EU, the Brexiteers want us to leave the ECHR. Then, when they continually fail to recognise our economic dependence on migration, they’ll next recommend we leave NATO, the Geneva Convention and - when all sanity has been forsaken - Earth’s own gravitational grip.

Today, a heinous weasel devoid of scruples against malice, had a lifetime’s sexual misconduct aired before the nation. Messrs Farage, Musk and Robinson shan’t be driven to the stump because the criminal does not reinforce their cravenly racist messaging. IT IS ALWAYS ABOUT DEMONISING BROWN PEOPLE!

Reading another P.G Wodehouse novel only reddens the new antagonism within me, because something more than the pot-hurling, Baron-bashing costless fun was possible. And yet, to my knowledge, nothing weightier exists for us to stew!

“To question the veracity of ADHD, and notions of immutable attention spans, is to place oneself on a moral par with Hermann Goering or Darth Vader.“ My latest review for Open Letters ⬇️

Who radicalised him?

Walter Scott was very much a writer after my own heart. His swarthy, polyclausal madness demotes many Victorians into the mist with an unmatchable canter. And yet his dialogue is so light and ruggedly provincial that we cackle at every jest!

Since innocently taking up running six weeks ago, the unreadable algorithm has pummelled me with adverts for ever more cushioned shoes, posters of ever emptier quotations and videos of ever prettier Californians huffing and puffing their way to fitness. Can a man not enjoy his hobby in peace?

A good deed done in ninety seconds⬇️

I wonder whether they've run out of champagne in the Kremlin yet.

“We may fairly consider a man of sense like Henry Crawford, to be providing for himself no small portion of vexation and regret…in having so requited hospitality, so injured family peace, so forfeited his best…and so lost the woman whom he had rationally, as well as passionately loved.”

The worst word salad yet. So vacant, so fatuous and so paralytically tautological. This man is AS THICK AS MINCE. He shouldn’t be trusted to wield cutlery or post correspondence unattended.

“When have we ever been as teary, enervated, exhilarated, provoked, enamoured, quizzed, bemused, thrilled, omnivorously satisfied and honoured than we are in Middlemarch by this masterful chronicler of spilt beans? She is our soul’s sovereign, throned from view, cheered by longing worshippers.”

A word on how freshly and brilliantly unbowing President Macron (left) was yesterday. Hopefully Starmer took note and also corrects that nappy-browning babbler (right) when he visits the White House on Thursday.

Say you what you will about the debatable piquancy of Austen’s novels, she was continually crazed by bloated family webs. Eight pages in and twenty three deserving and undeserving relatives (in-laws, step siblings, cousins of infinite removal) are dangling from us like genealogical baubles!

For any Clacton constituents worried about Farage’s absence, you need only host a right wing conference headlined by the thickest, foulest, fakest, chainsaw-wielding charlatans and he’ll be back in your neighbourhood in a jiffy!

My latest review for Open Letters ⬇️ “On the stylistic front, Unger’s prose is unobtrusive, direct and delightfully prosecutorial when a swine hoves into view. This book isn’t an obsessive doctrinal diatribe, it is a fact by fact rebuttal of the official story.”

The major flaw in the political Right that drove me away is the same one that dogs them still. From the policy-denuded Badenoch via the gloatsome Farage to the ethnonationalistic Konstantin Kisin, they deal entirely in paunchy euphemisms and gripes. They offer not one solution to our problems.

Just heard philosopher James Orr discussing society’s accommodation for secular mindsets. The idea that I must be tolerated…(tolerated!)…from the goodness of theists’ hearts because I choose not to believe in their desert fairy story is another display of religion’s casual barbarism.

“Perhaps that’s the defining asset: a crocodilian nose for inert and preferably moribund prey. Trump can sense when an entity is no longer strong enough or lithe enough to evade predation. He did it with that white elephant the GOP….whose ruins he now bestrides.” Martin Amis - Harpers magazine

If the globalists and corporatists have such sway in American affairs, why hasn’t the backlash against the Trumpian madness been harsh? Surely his assumption of power and the rapid implementation of his agenda shows us the ‘Deep State’ is another invention of the Bannonite grift.

My recent piece on the return of Rugger! ⬇️ “For the man who has taken twenty eight fists to the face after squaring up to a surly ombre, a twenty-ninth fist is unlikely to cause him unique pain. Whereas a man pristine from velvetised success feels the faintest flick to be an initiator of ruin.”

Why don’t the top clubs select their best squads for the FA Cup? Surely the best idea is to blitz the lower clubs with a FULL SQUAD and take them off when it’s 6-0 at halftime. Liverpool and Slot deserve everything they get with such hubris and stupidity!

“If we omit it now, some Massenello may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” - Thomas Paine ‘Common Sense’

This was the most extraordinary hour of competitive entertainment ever to be broadcast. Mahomes and co can’t hold a candle to this magician and his fizzing arm!

Does Trump know those who lose sporting contests tend to do so with grace and bowing dignity? Does he know there can be no infantile shenanigans at tomorrow’s Super Bowl? Odds on an Eagles insurrection if the Chiefs rig the fourth quarter to claim victory?