Art & literature

Last year I was on a podcast in which the presenter asked me to name something about myself that no one could find about me online. I said that during the first lockdown I enjoyed watching an old ITV programme called Rosemary & Thyme. It is a crime drama about two middle-aged women who act as...

On the perils of “treating poetry as a sub-set of sociology—we should read non-white poets because they offer us insights into social & political issues. If English is simply another variant of sociology or politics, why should the study of it be distinguished from these subjects?

Unlike many self-described anti-racists today, who engage in performative demands for white guilt, Fanon states: ‘I have not the right as a man of colour to wish for a guilt complex to crystallise in the white man regarding the past of my race’. What he wants, instead, is respect and dignity: ‘I, a...

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and...

So will Trumpism force the head of American literature out of its cocoon of sand? I doubt it. And it’s because there is a new liberal political orthodoxy that I believe will stifle art, particularly literature, in America. Will Trumpism be the subject of literature? I’m sure it will be. But will it...

Fifty years after his landmark book of essays on race, culture, and the ‘social science paradigm,’ the late, great critic and career Air Force officer Albert Murray speaks loudly to today’s divided United States

By pointing up the central place of blacks in American society, Murray’s writing has served as something of an invitation to a black American homecoming, illustrating for blacks the reasons for embracing America; reasons that go beyond the simple lack of an alternative. Simply put, blacks can call...

Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world. [...] We no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated...