New European

06:35 – Wake up to 37 missed calls from Chris Mason.  07:03 – Quick scroll with my morning pint of black coffee in a crown-stamped pint glass. I am touched to find a message from my patron, Christopher Harborne: “Give me two missed rings when you arrive at the first count. I need to know you’re safe.” 07:30 – Security detail announces it’s time to leave, but there is a delay when one of my decoy Range Rovers is grounded on one of the new retractable perimeter bollards. It takes the six-man

“Forget Brexit,” said… have a guess… no, it couldn’t be, could it… surely the least likely author of such a phrase would be the man who once so loved to be introduced at MAGA events as “all the way from England, Mr Brexit himself”? But yes indeed, these two words fell from the lips of one Nigel Farage as he was being interviewed on TV in the wake of local election results he was hailing as a historic and seismic shift in British politics. If I was being generous, I might assume that in the

PICK OF THE WEEK Kokuho (selected cinemas) Nagasaki, 1964: Hanai Hanjiro II (Ken Watanabe), a revered master of kabuki – the traditional Japanese theatrical form, dating back to the Edo period of the 17th century – is working in the city under the protection of yakuza boss Gongorō Tachibana (Masatoshi Nagase).  At a lavish banquet, he is impressed by the promise of the crime lord’s 14-year-old son, Kikuo (Sōya Kurokawa), performing as an onnagata: a man or boy playing a female part. This c

In 2012, as Tanya Dick-Stock and Darrin Stock prepared for their wedding at St John’s Manor on the island of Jersey, they happened to be looking for storage space when they found something stranger instead: hundreds of boxes of documents, that were hidden in a locked squash court, along with antique typewriters and bottles of aged ink. It looked, Dick-Stock later said, like an Edwardian forgery shop. The discovery occurred in the midst of a family war. Tanya is the daughter of the late John Dic

As he celebrated local election gains on Friday, Nigel Farage tried to say as little as possible about the £5m handout he got from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. But he ended up saying something intriguing about the supposedly no-strings gift. When Reform’s leader turned up to Havering, where his party had just taken control, he was asked about the donation three times and deflected each query. “We’ll talk about that any other time you like,” he told one reporter, dismissively waving

LUX felt impossible when it came out last year. Rosalía, the Spanish singer, had until then been known for her fun and original songs, blending pop, hip hop and the more traditional flamenco she’d got obsessed with as a kid. She disappeared for three years after her last album, the bouncy, sexy and intense Motomami, and reappeared at the end of 2025 with Berghain. Even six months on, it remains hard to describe this first single. It’s pop and goth and opera and it’s sung in German and it involv

The residents of Zaryadye had clear priorities: “putting a chicken in the pot, delousing their bedding, attending confession at the local parish, and warding off illness.” Founded in the 13th century, this neighbourhood skirting the Moskva River was once densely populated with merchants, craftsmen, thieves, pie sellers and street walkers. It was also home to “the diseased who lived on soup made from vegetable peelings and disinfected themselves with vodka.”  The district takes its name from a ph

We called this in 2023. Three years ago. A front cover with a triumphant Nigel Farage at the door of Downing Street, arms raised in triumph. The headline was “Yes, It Could Happen”. The headline today would, objectively, be “Yes It Will Happen… Unless.” The “unless” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The results in the local elections are panning out to be terrible for the prime minister. It is very clear there is a general and personal antipathy to Keir Starmer that will be hard to sh

If racism is a constant, shifting in form while adapting to circumstance, Australia has its own way of expressing it. As the country examines antisemitism through a royal commission, it is confronting one manifestation of racism while continuing to live with another.  In Alice Springs, that divide has taken a brutal shape. A five-year-old girl who went missing from her home in a First Nations township was later found dead. For five days, residents and law enforcement searched for the child.

Sometimes the cynicism of Britain’s right-wing press takes our breath away. The Daily Telegraph is so incensed by so-called cancel culture that it has its own section on the paper’s website, in which its writers fulminate daily about figures in the public eye being shot down for holding unfashionable views. In the last few days, Telegraph columnists have worked themselves into a froth over the singer MIA being “kicked off [a] US tour after saying she would vote Republican”, over a choir bei

It is usual practice after the results of an election are declared to try to pull them together and explain what they say about the state of the nation. Right now, though, it’s hard to say much more than that our nation’s in a state. The obvious standout in the results is that they seem to be a triumph for Reform and a disaster for Labour – and while even the most die-hard Kwir Starmer supporter would struggle to deny the latter, the overall picture is more complicated than it might seem. It’s

In anticipation of what all observers expect to be a bloodbath for Labour over the coming day or so – out of office in Wales, handing the SNP the beginning of a third decade of office in Scotland, slaughtered from both left and right across England’s councils – what remains of Team Starmer has been briefing heavily of a fresh reset. It is, by my count, the third major reset of a government yet to mark its second birthday, which is not usually a sign of something going well. First, there was

While Britain waits for a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer, the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson has already decided who she doesn’t want as Britain’s next PM. In the past few days, Pearson – who once liked to call herself “the humble handmaiden of Brexit” – has launched a series of attacks on former Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. These include calling her “clueless Ange”, “a new low for Britain”, a “grifter” and “a gobby know-nothing in flappy trousers the colour of toilet cleaner”.  P

Not content with fulminating against the evils of financial regulation and progressive politics, and occasionally suggesting that Greta Thunberg might in fact be the antichrist, everyone’s favourite venture capitalist vampire plutocrat Peter Thiel has a new target in his sights – journalism! Just in case you didn’t think the media was struggling enough, with the death of print, social media becoming less link-friendly and AI news summaries causing traffic and ad revenue to crater, here’s the Th

As Labour prepares for a local election drubbing, Kemi Badenoch has demanded a general election if the results end in Keir Starmer being replaced as prime minister. With her usual grace, the Tory leader told the Telegraph that the possible challengers – Angela Rayner, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting were “just left wingery in a different outfit, with red hair, or with a cheesy grin, or just weirdness. But it’s still the same left wingery.” Suggested Reading

In 2022 the New South Wales arts minister intervened to try to cancel a talk at the Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas called “The Last Taboo”, in which English historian Joanna Bourke discussed – though did not condone – bestiality. It seemed the topic was too dangerous even for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, something that I found both ironic and amusing.  Since then I have had many discussions with people about human-animal sexual relations, as I find it fascinating how reactive people are

When in 2022, Russia seized the mantle of global pariah by invading Ukraine, its absence from that year’s Venice Biennale – the international culture expo hosted by the city every two years – seemed an inevitable acknowledgement of world events. On that occasion, the bleak green facade of the Russian pavilion had the lost, neglected look of a house long uninhabited. Cordoned off by an invisible but palpable boundary of shame, the weeds made the most of it, and the world’s biggest art event pass

Oh, the nasty viruses that we have never heard of until they make their presence known. “Coronavirus” was hardly common parlance before Covid, even though this family of viruses was responsible also for the respiratory diseases SARS and MERS, and causes around 15% of common colds. Now we’re scrambling to Wikipedia to find out about hantavirus, an outbreak of which on a Dutch cruise ship off Cape Verde has caused several deaths and hospitalisations. As with coronaviruses, there are several types

As Wales goes to the polls today in the most consequential election in the Senedd’s history, Reform has taken out a three-page ad in an influential local newspaper – urging those in Mid Wales to vote for the party in London. Nigel Farage’s party placed a huge advert in the Powys County Times, which covers a large chunk of central Wales, attacking Keir Starmer and the English capital’s mayor Sadiq Khan and encouraging its readers to “vote Reform UK in the London elections on 7th May”. Sugge

This week’s New World cover was going to be a damning report by Donald McIntyre on the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza and the charade the world is playing; the blind eye it turns in pretence the so-called ceasefire is ending the Israeli government’s brutality and injustice towards Palestinians. That article has been held for a week. Allow me to explain why. Something urgent needs to be said today about a great crime here in the UK where this magazine’s front cover will this week be visible on