Tag: British government
Exile Changes You Forever – The Atlantic
The onset of the Arab Spring can feel like the distant past amid the grim brutality of our current times, but it raises timeless questions. What is the trade-off between courage and safety; idealism and caution; hope for change and fear of it? In hindsight, we can tell a story of how the wave of revolution crested and the undertow of counterrevolution prevailed. Autocrats remained in power. Uprisings turned into simmering civil and sectarian conflicts. Millions of people sought
The Patronage That Undermines Britain’s Peerage
Something that always bothers liberal Britons is that Americans might believe a TV series such as Downton Abbey is a semi-documentary, and that the United Kingdom is still a class-ridden society in thrall to ideas of inherited rank and social position. Because liberal Britons know this is unfair and untrue. Or rather, it is unfair and untrue with one extraordinary exception: the British honors system, the customary practice of awarding medals and titles to citizens.
This exception of ancient
A Novelist Relentlessly in Search of Her Other Selves
In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.
In August Blue, the South African–born, North London–based novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, a concert pianist named Elsa Anderson
Hong Kong’s Colonial Nostalgia – The Atlantic
The crowd gathered in a wood-paneled London hall struggled to contain their enthusiasm: Like music fans catching a glimpse of their favorite act peering out from backstage, people excitedly clapped and chattered when Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, entered to take his seat. They later rose to their feet in raucous applause as he delivered his speech, a lament about the diminishing freedoms in Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Hours earlier, in Hong Kong, Chinese President Xi
How Republicans Can Win on Immigration
The conservative intelligentsia is in the grip of a profound demographic pessimism—a sense that a diversifying America necessarily spells doom for the right, and that the movement’s only hope is therefore to halt, or at least sharply reduce, immigrant inflows. Portents of demographic doom have long been a mainstay of conservative media, whether on the Fox News prime-time lineup or in highbrow journals of opinion, and embracing restrictionism has become a surefire way for ambitious Republicans to signal their edginess
America Is Not on the Brink of Civil War
In January 1972, when I was a 13-year-old boy in Dublin, my father came home from work and told us to prepare for civil war. He was not a bloodthirsty zealot, nor was he given to hysterical outbursts. He was calm and rueful, but also grimly certain: Civil war was coming to Ireland, whether we wanted it or not. He and my brother, who was 16, and I, when I got older, would all be up in Northern
An Unlikely Threat to the Western Alliance
A simple analysis about the unfolding crisis in Northern Ireland has established itself as settled wisdom among almost all informed observers across Europe, the United States, and even Britain: It’s all London’s fault.
The story is convincing. It was Britain that voted for Brexit despite warnings about the threat it posed to peace in Northern Ireland; Britain that imposed Brexit on Northern Ireland even though the people there voted to remain in the European Union; Britain that chose the hardest
How 2 Afghans Escaped the Taliban
For the past 10 days, thousands of private citizens have been working around the clock, through informal networks of friends and colleagues, to organize evacuation flights from Afghanistan to countries like Albania and Kyrgyzstan, and to help Afghans get their name on passenger manifests and safely reach the Kabul airport. This effort, which is largely taking place on WhatsApp and Signal, has been called a “digital Dunkirk.”
At this point the phrase is too generous. In the spring of