Despite not having won Best Picture or Best Director at the 2026 Oscars, I have no doubts that Ryan Coogler’s Sinners will stand the test of time as one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the 21st Century. In a media landscape saturated with franchises, reboots, and sequels, Coogler’s original genre-bending film about a black community in the Jim Crow south, who find their newly-established juke joint and promise of emancipation devoured by undead vampires, is both inc

Viktor Orbán’s vanquishing in Hungary’s April election was, on paper at least, the kind of moment that once nourished Europe’s left. After sixteen-years of calcified nationalism, prolonged democratic erosion and Hungary’s suffocation beneath the dense smog of permanent culture war, one might have expected the floodgates to buckle for a great socialist or labour revival; a broad, popular movement surging through the opening, wiping out Orbán’s Fidesz and ushering in a fresh pr

Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking syndicate has become one of the defining examples of elite corruption in the past decade. With insurmountable living costs accompanied by a widening wealth gap, stories of elites using their enormous capital to sexually abuse underprivileged children have caused an uproar across American party lines. However, though many of these sexual offenders have been exposed to the public through the ‘Epstein Files,’ federal law enforcement under

In the wake of its victory over the declining Spanish Empire in 1898, the United States of America was faced with a political and moral problem. Specifically, the territories it had acquired under the Treaty of Paris - the largest of which were Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico - were inhabited by over 10 million people, or the equivalent to 12% of the US population at the time. As Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greate

There can be no doubt that the Prime Minister is a very able man. Nor can there be any doubt that he is a very competent man. The Prime Minister conquered the legal profession to its highest attainable rank outside of politics. The Prime Minister entered politics for the right reasons. The Prime Minister climbed the ranks of his party to become its leader just five years after entering Parliament, a record in the Labour Party. Why then, given his glittering resume and clear a

In 1916, a twenty-four year-old British soldier arrived at the Battle of the Somme, where over a million men were killed or wounded over just five miles of ground. John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R) Tolkien lost two of his closest friends in the battle, an experience of indiscriminate slaughter that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Echoes of the First World War can be found throughout Tolkien’s later literary work, most famously in The Lord of the Rings - from the corpse-st

The myth of the demonic trans person who simply transitions to dominate women’s sports is perhaps one of the most effective fables about trans people. It is so dominant that—and those who have incentive to spread this—even allies and sympathisers to the cause of transgender civil rights sometimes have a hard time stomaching the idea of a transgender sportsperson. But it is exactly that: a myth. A myth’s inherent power lies in its ability to replace reality with ideology and i

There is a pervasive sense of societal fracture these days. Politics has become defined by dramatic narratives of battle between the Greens and Reform UK based on story rather than rooted in reality. Culture seems increasingly guided by a furious rejection of tradition, establishment, and imperialist pasts, or a righteous confabulated nostalgia for them. Compare Kneecap with a far-right AI generated rapper , or indeed the culture of the Oscars with the culture of “Looksmaxxi

Lying recumbent and wrecked, roughly 130 kilometres to the North of the glittering Saudi city of Medina, rests the rusted hull of a century-old Ottoman locomotive. Targeted by British Intelligence Officer T. E. Lawrence and future King Faisal I of Iraq’s small cadre of Arab fighters, the sun-baked cadaver exists as a relic of the First World War guerrilla campaign that buckled the formidable Ottoman Empire’s control over the Hejaz, turning the tide of the theatre’s conflict,

Over the past few months, Westminster has been gripped by an all too familiar kind of speculation. It concerns the election that will decide this country’s next Prime Minister. An election that most voters will not participate in, a potential Labour leadership contest. Murmurings within the Parliamentary Labour Party suggest that should the party perform poorly in May’s local and regional elections, pressure on Keir Starmer will intensify. Anonymous briefings have become a lo

19 th Century Methods for 21 st Century Problems Following the abduction of Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, combined with the National Security Strategy (NSS) release in December of 2025, the Trump Era of “Gunboat Diplomacy” consolidated as the world watched on with morose horror. The Trump “Corollary,” as it were, is to represent an abandonment of international good faith and an embracing of the world's brutal dictators, Vladimir Putin and many more across th

The prolonged war in Yemen, which has been locked in a stalemate for a decade, has now entered a new stage. The Southern Transitional Council (STC), supported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a major player in the war in Yemen, was able to successfully penetrate the regions of Hadhramaut and Al Mahra , effectively controlling the official borders of the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) – South Yemen. The STC has been the sole representative of the souther

For the past six months, Westminster has been swirling with rumours that the Prime Minister’s days are numbered. Commentators have been split as to whether the Prime Minister would be challenged following the local elections in May, or before that, but they seem pretty certain that he will be challenged . The Prime Minister himself has appeared in the media stating that he will be Prime Minister by the end of 2026 . Critics both within the Labour Party and the media have pinn

It was a grey, overcast Thursday after a dreary day of sixth form when I saw Prince William step out, with eyes fixed and ready, to deliver a statement pertaining to BBC impropriety regarding the acquisition of the infamous 1995 Panorama interview with his mother Diana, Princess of Wales. This statement was one intended for the ears of current BBC bosses and of days gone by. Responding to the findings of the report written by Lord Dyson, William did not refrain from discred

New Yorkers have now experienced about two months under the new Mamdani administration. Last November, more than a million New Yorkers, including myself, headed to the polls and cast our ballots for Zohran Mamdani. The New York City mayoral election drew significant media attention from within the five boroughs and beyond. Mamdani stood out as markedly younger than his opponents, born in Uganda, and as New York City’s first Muslim mayor. Yet the aspect that drew the greatest

Across Europe, a striking consensus has taken hold. Quiz a passerby on the streets of Paris, Berlin or London on the state of society and you are likely to hear all too familiar lamentations concerning the declining state of both government performance and social cohesion. The cost of living continues to rise whilst wages stagnate and public services buckle, politics is brittle and the future looks more precarious than the past. This transnational belief , one which has been

Following Labour’s November budget, much of the commentariat mourned the supposed death of New Labour. The Times’s Danny Finkelstein, for instance, suggested the fiscal event marked the end of the ‘New Labour dream’ , while The Independent’s John Rentoul suggested the faction laid buried beneath the budget . Much of the country will, however, have, even if quietly, been uttering the following sentiment subsequent to reading of its passing: ‘phew’. Seen as a necessary evil by

This Trump administration’s recent Latin American chevauchées are old school. But the world has moved on since Monroe, and regional actors may well respond in more modern manners to the egregious treatment of Venezuela. ‘Gunboat diplomacy’ was the name awarded, perhaps most famously, to the actions of US Commodore Perry in the 1850s. The USA gained access to the closed-off Japanese economy by pounding Japanese infrastructure from the sea until it got its way. Though this infa

The Balkan Legacy Winston Churchill supposedly posited that the Balkans produced far too much history for it to be accurately consumed, largely echoing the typical “orientalism” rhetoric that Edward Said aptly pronounced as the ignorance many in the West have of anything the wrong side of Rome. Once more, Western nations have made a deep folly in not fully appreciating the precariousness of the peace following the Homeland War of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Througho

“Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination …” An apropos quote from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a longtime prisoner of the gulag and dissident from Soviet Russia. The insights that we have today from the Cold War, whether Soviet gulag prisoners or those struck down in the hysteria of McCarthyism, have become crucially important in the United States of late, as T