The Weekend Essay

The Weekend Essay

Coffee House’s weekly long read

Sunday

3 Jul 2022
Philip Hensher
The intense Englishness of Philip Larkin

The English language has a curious feature, called the phrasal verb. It consists of a plain verb plus a preposition; to go up, to get over, to find out. They are quite often more vivid than their simple synonyms – to ascend, to recover, to discover. New ones are constantly being thought up; they are also totally irrational – get on with or get off with? Most serious writers spend a lot of time thinking about them. One day, the story goes, the poet Philip Larkin was challenged by his secretary at work. She had discovered a cache of pornography in his office cupboard. ‘But what’s it for?’ she asked. Larkin considered. ‘To wank’ – he paused – ‘to wank to, or with, or at.’ It’s the centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth.

The intense Englishness of Philip Larkin

Sunday

26 Jun 2022
William Cook
How to read Ulysses

In the labyrinthine basement studio of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Irish actor Barry McGovern is doing something that would be inconceivable in any other country. Remarkably, he’s reading the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses out loud. Even more remarkably, a substantial audience are paying good money to sit and watch him. He’s been hard at it for five days, and he still has two days to go: 33 hours (plus toilet breaks) spread over an entire week. Like a lot of people, I’ve always found Ulysses a dreadful struggle, so why do I persevere with it? Partly snobbery, of course. Having scratched a living for 30 years writing about the arts, I’ve lost count of all the boffins who’ve told me it’s the most important novel of the 20th Century, yet I could never make head nor tail of it.

How to read Ulysses

Sunday

19 Jun 2022
Stephen Wigmore
Why the West still needs the Bible

If you look to our schools and universities, you will not see a serious engagement with the Bible as part of the study of politics, of philosophy, or even of literature and culture more generally, despite the huge influence of Biblical ideas on the development of British, American and European politics – and so also across the Commonwealth and the world. University courses on political philosophy take a fundamentally ahistorical position of focusing on purely secular philosophers, rather than facing the reality of the Bible’s impact on the actual development of modern politics.  From Bristol to Warwick to Glasgow, the works of Hobbes and Rousseau, Mill and Rawls, are compulsory study; but across dozens of modules available, none focuses on the Bible or the role of religion, historically and in the present day.

Why the West still needs the Bible

Sunday

12 Jun 2022
Francis Pike
How long will Xi Jinping rule China?

For some time now it has been assumed that in November the National Congress will rubber stamp Xi Jinping’s continued role as China’s supreme leader for a third five-year term, which would make Xi the first Chinese leader for a generation to serve more than two terms. Just a year ago his position as one of China's three pre-eminent leaders was confirmed when the 400 members of the Central Committee passed the third ‘Historical Resolution’ in the Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year history. The previous two were organised by Mao in 1945 and Deng Xiaoping in 1981. The resolution highlighted the concept of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ as a historical equivalent to that of his two legendary predecessors. But a number of crises, international and domestic, have put a question mark against Xi’s continued omnipotence.

How long will Xi Jinping rule China?

Sunday

5 Jun 2022
William Cook
The timeless mystery of Charlie Chaplin

Eleven years ago, I was summoned to the Manoir de Ban, a huge white house overlooking Lake Geneva, to meet Michael Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s oldest surviving son. Charlie Chaplin had lived here for the last 24 years of his life. Now the house was empty, and the family wanted to turn it into a museum. I doubted it would ever happen, but I was keen to look around the house and I was eager to meet Michael. Chaplin’s biographer, Simon Louvish, had called him ‘the family rebel’. Michael had written a frank teenage memoir called I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn. The house was all shut up, but Chaplin’s looming presence was everywhere. ‘He was a little man, but he took up a lot of space,’ Michael told me, as we sat in the deserted dining room, looking out across the lake, towards the snowcapped Alps beyond.

The timeless mystery of Charlie Chaplin

Sunday

29 May 2022
Louise Perry
The feminist case for marriage

I regret to inform you that your kitten heels and morning suits will probably not be seeing service this wedding season: once again, marriage rates are down. In fact, this year the rate for heterosexual marriages is the lowest on record. What’s more, fewer than one in five of these marriage ceremonies are religious, in keeping with a downward trend of several decades standing. As a wedding guest, I slightly regret this turn towards the civil ceremony, only because the secular liturgy is so oddly anaemic. Seeing someone from the local council officiate on this most solemn of occasions, I can’t help but be reminded of the Simpsons episode in which a Las Vegas casino worker marries Homer and Marge with the words ‘by the power vested in me by the state gaming commission I pronounce you man and wife.

The feminist case for marriage

Saturday

21 May 2022
Justin Bronk
Inside Russia’s military collapse in Ukraine

The Russian military has performed far worse in Ukraine than anyone could ever have predicted. After failing to take Kyiv, Russian troops have now been forced to focus on the Donbas region. Despite this greater concentration of forces, they are still struggling to make any major gains beyond the final capture of Mariupol, which had been under siege since the first days of the invasion without resupply or relief. For Vladimir Putin this represents a grand humiliation. But for the West, Russia’s struggling campaign offers an unrivalled opportunity to understand Russia’s capacity to pose a future military threat. Key to this will be working out how many of Russia’s current failings are down to the specific circumstances in Ukraine, and how many are due to systemic problems within the Russian military itself.

Inside Russia’s military collapse in Ukraine

Sunday

15 May 2022
Kit Wilson
Cracking consciousness: how do our minds really work?

With scientists mapping our neurons in ever greater detail, and companies like Google claiming they're close to creating human-level artificial intelligence, the gap between brain and machine seems to be shrinking — throwing the question of consciousness, one of the great philosophical mysteries, back into the heart of scientific debate. Will the human mind — that ineffable tangle of private, first-person experiences — soon be shown to have a purely physical explanation? The neuroscientist Steven Novella certainly thinks so: 'The evidence for the brain as the sole cause of the mind is, in my opinion, overwhelming.'  Elon Musk agrees: 'Consciousness is a physical phenomenon, in my view'. Google’s Ray Kurzweil puts it even more bluntly: 'A person is a mind file.

Cracking consciousness: how do our minds really work?

Sunday

8 May 2022
Sean Thomas
Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?

I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing, as if he, or she, or it, disapproves of all this: of everything being stripped naked under the heavens, and revealed to the world for the first time in 130 centuries. Yes, 130 centuries. Because these penises, this peculiar chamber, this entire perplexing place, known as Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient.

Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?

Sunday

1 May 2022
Ian Williams
Ian Williams
Xi has made his choice: he is sticking with Vladimir Putin

Xi Jinping has made his choice. He is sticking with his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin, and no end of Russian atrocities or wishful thinking in the west is going to alter that. Their axis of autocracy presents a far-reaching challenge to western democracies, which the UK in particular is struggling to come to terms with. There has been a chorus of western voices calling on China to act ‘responsibly’, exercise its influence with Putin, and generally live up to its supposed commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. That will not happen. Those principles were always a myth, but fundamentally Xi and Putin have too much in common. China’s state-owned media has continued to echo Moscow’s denials of war crimes.

Xi has made his choice: he is sticking with Vladimir Putin

Saturday

9 Apr 2022
Kapil Komireddi
Le Pen’s last stand

Marine Le Pen, if recent polling is to be believed, is rapidly cutting Emanuel Macron’s lead in the upcoming French presidential elections. If she succeeds in gaining sufficient votes this weekend to enter the second round, we should brace for a serious upheaval in French politics at a time of unnerving uncertainty about the global order. The French press, having forgotten Le Pen for a year, is now energetically reminding voters of her unsuitability for high office. In the public imagination, Le Pen ranges from a modern-day avatar of Joan of Arc to a rancid bigot masquerading as a moderate. Say her name, and people react with fervour: they may despise her, they may revere her, but nobody is indifferent to her. ‘Many French people have the feeling that they have known me forever because they saw me growing up,’ Le Pen told me in her office when we met in February.

Le Pen’s last stand

Sunday

3 Apr 2022
Sean Thomas
Rebuild our cities

For an ancient city with an illustrious industrial history, Derby doesn’t get much attention. But it does boast at least one famous, possibly apocryphal story, known to scholars of urbanism. Sometime in the 80s or 90s (accounts differ), a party of visiting German VIPs was given a tour of the city’s sights: the humdrum housing schemes; the corners of concrete bleakness; the sad disjointed malls and random multi-storey car parks. Struck near-dumb by the ugliness, the Germans apologised profusely for the damage clearly wrought on poor Derby by the Luftwaffe: wiping away a venerable city centre, leaving behind such tragic hideousness. At this point the local bigwigs laughed, perhaps awkwardly, and said 'Oh no, Derby was barely touched in the war, we did all this to ourselves, when we redeveloped.

Rebuild our cities

Sunday

27 Mar 2022
Christopher Booth
The true story about Russian lying

We were having a few drinks in a rented flat in the centre of Grozny in late 1994. A bunch of foreign reporters, including myself, who were usually based in Moscow, had been sent to check out the strange conflict flickering in Chechnya. It was late at night. The room was full of fag smoke. Someone played a guitar, inevitably. There was vodka. Outnumbered women journalists were enduring attention from men who were digging warfare, and living their best life to date. In a few cases, it was vice-versa: young male producers made interesting targets for seasoned female reporters. At the time, the background noise from the Kremlin was that if Chechen rebels didn’t stand down, there would be unspecified but terrible consequences.

The true story about Russian lying

Sunday

20 Mar 2022
David Goodhart
How to fix Britain’s broken asylum system

Asylum is often seen as a simple morality tale—the generous spirited are in favour of it, the hard-hearted against. And we certainly read plenty of high moral dudgeon directed at the Home Office’s pedestrian response to the Ukraine refugee crisis. Much of that criticism was deserved. The lack of preparedness and then the inability to adapt quickly under pressure and allow in anyone with a Ukrainian passport, especially those with relatives here, while sorting out the bureaucracy once they arrived, was indeed dismaying. But the tale relayed for almost a week from almost every media outlet—from the BBC via the Telegraph and Spectator to the New Statesman and Observer/Guardian—of a shamefully mean UK compared with the hospitable Europeans failed to mention one salient fact: for more than ten years the EU Schengen states have allowed visa-free travel from Ukraine.

How to fix Britain’s broken asylum system

Sunday

13 Mar 2022
Casey Michel
Who is Ihor Kolomoisky?

The city of Cleveland, Ohio, is hardly considered the most cosmopolitan or globalised city in the U.S. If anything, the Rust Belt city – whose population is less than half of what it was a century ago – is a symbol of industrial decline across America’s heartland, for a region whose best days are clearly behind it. Which is why, as other major American cities like New York or Miami opened their doors to all kinds of oligarchic money out of places like Russia or Ukraine, Cleveland hardly got any attention as a destination for the kinds of illicit wealth spilling out of the former Soviet Union. Investigators searched out ill-gotten gains in Manhattan and Malibu. They ignored Cleveland, assuming globe-trotting oligarchs would never bother with a Midwestern city in clear decline.

Who is Ihor Kolomoisky?

Sunday

6 Mar 2022
Paul Wood
‘Help us, before it’s too late’

Western Ukraine Outside a military recruiting centre in Lviv, Egor Grushin, one of Ukraine’s most famous classical pianists, was waiting in line to join up. He was tall and slim with a wispy beard, long delicate fingers and large brown eyes that gazed into the middle distance. In other words, he was – as he would admit – no one’s idea of a soldier. He knew he would not be accepted into a frontline unit because, as he explained, so many people were volunteering that there weren’t enough guns to go round: only those with military experience could join the regular army. Instead, he would be part of Lviv’s civil defence forces, ‘hunting saboteurs’ and waiting for the Russian – or Belorussian – tanks. He spoke matter-of-factly about his willingness to die for Ukraine:  ‘We want to live in peace.

‘Help us, before it’s too late’

Sunday

27 Feb 2022
Charles Lipson
The end of the post-Cold War era

Russia’s invasion is not just an effort to retake what was once part of the Soviet Union. It is a push to use military force to overturn the post-Cold War settlement. In fact, the invasion cannot be understood without first understanding what that settlement looked like and why Russia wants to overturn it, despite the high costs. In the 1980s, when Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany, the Soviet Union had become an arteriosclerotic state. It was unable to keep up with the US in high-technology arms, unable to legitimate its rule with Marxist-Leninist ideology, and unable to afford the cost of maintaining its empire in Eastern Europe. When its subordinate partners in Eastern Europe sporadically faced uprisings, Moscow had always sent in troops to restore their puppet regimes.

The end of the post-Cold War era

Saturday

19 Feb 2022
Sunetra Gupta
On Sage’s Covid models

In the confusion that has arisen from the demonstrable inability of a certain type of mathematical model to predict the time course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many have taken to reciting – with a variable mixture of glee and sympathy – that ‘all models are wrong but some are useful’. I have never been comfortable with this statement (it doesn’t really deserve to be called an aphorism) and even less so the smugness with which it is typically pronounced. One might as well say all metaphors are wrong but some are useful. ‘Wrong’ seems to be employed here to suggest that ‘statistical or scientific models always fall short of the complexities of reality (but can still be useful nonetheless)’. But a model, by definition, does not strive to recapitulate reality – instead, it replaces it with an abstraction which advances our comprehension of a system in a way that cannot be achieved simply by spectating upon it or by painstakingly cataloguing its complexities.

On Sage’s Covid models

Saturday

12 Feb 2022
Cindy Yu
Cindy Yu
The fading legacy of Deng Xiaoping

After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, it was clear to pragmatists in the Chinese Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, that Maoism had not worked. By the late 1970s, food production had failed to keep up with population growth and nine out of ten Chinese were living on less than $2 a day. But the Party didn’t want to admit the inviability of communism, its raison d’etre. Instead, it dubbed the ensuing decades of privatisation, foreign investments and lifting of price controls ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. So the country remained nominally communist, even though state-owned enterprises were liquidated en masse and the private sector made up the bulk of Chinese GDP by 2005. For hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese, like my family, reform and opening were keenly welcomed.

The fading legacy of Deng Xiaoping

Saturday

5 Feb 2022
Ross Clark
Ross Clark
Make capitalism real again

The emergence of Covid provoked a worldwide economic crash. That lasted a mere four weeks. By the time western countries were locking down, a bull market had begun afresh. Through months of lockdowns, soaring case rates and death rates, shares were not just rebounding but marking new highs – firstly involving tech shares and online retailers which had done well from social distancing, but then pretty much anything. The arrival of the first vaccine phase 3 trial results in November 2020 sent shares spinning upwards, yet the emergence of the Alpha and Delta strains didn’t seem to do any harm. And now that economies seem finally to be putting Covid behind them? In Britain, plan B has ended. Denmark has ditched its Covid restrictions entirely.

Make capitalism real again

Saturday

29 Jan 2022
John Lloyd
The power of black conservatives

Black conservatism is a particular form of conservative politics. As a movement, it’s American, with strengthening echoes in the UK, in France and beyond. Some of its most prominent activists would be classed, and class themselves, as straight-down-the-line conservatives. Some, such as Glenn Loury, an economics professor at Brown University, confess to being, as Irving Kristol’s neoconservative quip has it, ‘liberals mugged by reality.’ All would say of themselves that they are Americans first, patriots, proud of being and glad to be so, dismissive of the radical critique of their country, and harsh on black personalities and protestors who they believe parade a status of subjugation which they have not earned.

The power of black conservatives

Saturday

22 Jan 2022
Kit Wilson
Will our future lives be like a video game?

A few years ago, the software company Owlchemy Labs released a computer game called Job Simulator. Its premise was simple. Players find themselves in a future world, roughly 30 years from now, in which super-efficient robots have snaffled up all the jobs. No longer needed for work, humans entertain themselves instead by donning virtual reality headsets and reenacting 'the glory days' — simulating what it was once like to be an office clerk, chef, or shopkeeper. The gameplay, therefore, consists entirely of, well, yeah… carrying out endless mundane tasks: virtual photocopying, virtual cooking, virtual newspaper sales. Job Simulator is pretty tongue-in-cheek, crammed full of dry, self-referential jokes. In the game, our robot overlords turn out to be comically literal-minded (one of the chef’s ways of 'succeeding' is to bribe food critics).

Will our future lives be like a video game?

Saturday

15 Jan 2022
Christopher Caldwell
Does the world want America ‘back’?

American foreign-policy strategists used to promulgate doctrines. Now they dream up slogans. ‘America is back’ is the jingle under which the Biden administration has been conducting — or marketing — its post-Trump, post-Covid diplomacy, much as ‘Go big’ has been its jingle in domestic matters. The problem is, being ‘back’ can mean a number of different things. It can mean a sweet and tender reunion. It can also mean barrelling through the front door after a four-day bender hollering, ‘Anything to eat?’ Joe Biden’s advisors were confident of an effusive welcome. Maybe too confident. At their first bilateral meeting with Chinese diplomats in Anchorage last spring, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan attempted to scold China for its ‘values.

Does the world want America ‘back’?

Saturday

8 Jan 2022
Kate Andrews
Kate Andrews
Covid has made America more divided than ever

I knew when I boarded the plane home to America on Boxing Day that I was heading to an unhappy place. There may be lots of shortages in the United States right now, but anger is on tap (so say the think pieces). Americans are ‘furious’, ‘divided’, we’re told, and the ‘two sides’ are completely incapable of engaging in civil discourse with each other and have been for quite some time. I’d been reading about America’s woes constantly and had heard so many first-hand accounts from friends, family and old colleagues about the abject misery that characterises politics right now. But you have to be in America to really feel it. I was blown away by the extent to which discourse has become polarised. It’s not just rage that seems to permeate throughout the country: it’s a sense of hopelessness too.

Covid has made America more divided than ever

Saturday

11 Dec 2021
Dominic Sandbrook
Make History Great Again!

Why don’t today’s children know more about history? In an age when information has never been easier to access, it’s alarming how many youngsters are ignorant about the past. In July, a survey of 1,000 schoolchildren found that four out of ten had no idea what the Battle of Britain was, while another four out of ten had never heard of Cleopatra. More than half didn’t know the Romans spoke Latin. Of course every generation complains that children are ignorant of facts that we used to take for granted. Often it’s simply a question of changing priorities: where children once learned about Walpole and Gladstone, they now learn about the suffragettes and American civil rights. Even so, despite the success of Horrible Histories, you’d have to be wilfully blind to deny that history itself has rarely seemed so embattled.

Make History Great Again!

Saturday

4 Dec 2021
John Lloyd
The SNP’s mountain of mendacity

The Scottish National Party’s great and continuing success has been to mobilize a large part of the Scottish population to see England and the English as a more or less malign force. In this, the party has connected with and deepened strong currents of thought and belief in Scots culture, especially in the 20th century. The country’s most famed and lauded poet, Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Grieve), its most influential ideologist, Tom Nairn and its most prominent literary novelist, James Kelman have all adopted long-running acidic views of the southern neighbour. The Scottish sense of resentment against the elephantine presence of England in the UK, and the view, only partly stated, that the Scots are a ‘more moral people’, is part of a tradition that is longer than the Union itself.

The SNP’s mountain of mendacity

Saturday

27 Nov 2021
Richard Dobbs
The Omicron variant is now in Britain. Here’s how we beat it

As feared, Covid-19 is not going quietly. The arrival of the Omicron strain in Britain - with cases already identified in  Chelmsford and in Nottingham - is clearly not the news we wanted as we prepare for the Christmas holidays. The Prime Minister will hold a press conference later today, likely to mark a distinct change in tone. For a while, it was possible to feel that our vaccine programme, supported by better treatments, mass testing and non-pharmaceutical interventions had started to defeat the virus. So, we started to turn our focus to other activities such as levelling up, addressing the NHS waiting lists, climate change, violence against women and girls, and bickering with the French. But the surge in infection rates in continental Europe has shown that Covid-19 has not been defeated in the way we might have hoped.

The Omicron variant is now in Britain. Here’s how we beat it

Saturday

20 Nov 2021
Paulina Neuding
How gang warfare took over Sweden’s streets

Nils Grönberg was 19 years old when he was shot and killed: one bullet to his chest and one to his face. Images of his lifeless body lying on the ground in one of Stockholm’s more affluent neighbourhoods – the hyper-modern Hammarby Waterfront Residential Area – soon spread on social media. Many Swedes heard the news from their children. Nils Grönberg, or ‘Einár’ as he called himself, was one of Sweden’s most popular artists. And while middle-class Swedes keep hoping that their kids can be kept away from what goes on among the country’s criminal gangs, the murder of Einár once again proved that this is a mess we’re all in together. Many parents were surprised to find that their kids had their own intricate theories of who the killer was, based on what they knew from rap lyrics about the conflicts in Stockholm’s underworld.

How gang warfare took over Sweden’s streets

Saturday

13 Nov 2021
Madeleine Kearns
The grim reality of gender reassignment

Lisa Littman, a doctor and researcher, recently surveyed ‘detransitioners’ — people who thought they were transgender then changed their minds. The majority, 55 per cent, ‘felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.’ Sadly, it seems, their identity issues were more complicated than simply being trans. Many of these individuals are now living with the consequences of medical treatments that failed to help their gender issues and may have caused permanent physical and psychological damage. There is no objective diagnosis for transgenderism, and the evidence supporting hormonal and surgical ‘reassignment’ as an effective remedy for gender dysphoria (the feeling of being at odds with one’s sex) can be sketchy.

The grim reality of gender reassignment