On the subject of art and artists, and especially the tendency to use biography as a substitute for engaging with the work, see also my piece on Wagner and antisemitism, which was published in the @spectator . openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/epr…

‘An inquest is under way into Arday’s death, and Cambridge and other universities have commissioned reviews. The Samaritans’ media guidelines stress the complexity of suicide and warn against assigning a single “trigger” or cause.  Yet categorical explanations appeared almost immediately: at a vigil in Trafalgar Square, the Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, Lord Woolley, claimed that Arday had undergone a “public execution” and a “lynching”. Diane Abbott told the crowd that “the vicious media campaign drove him to his death”. She also described a longer campaign stretching back to his Cambridge appointment in 2023, waged by anonymous people and “other professors who just didn’t believe that a black man should be a Cambridge professor”. Dawn Butler said: “We let him down, and I’m sorry to his family; we couldn’t protect him”, and characterized the conflict as one “between good and evil, between racists and antiracists”.  Nor was this framing confined to black public figures; Jolyon Maugham KC’s Good Law Project launched a petition demanding a public inquiry, signed within days by over 96,000 people, including MPs and the leader of the Green Party, declaring that “there cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story”, on the basis of comparison with lesser coverage for white academics and politicians also facing allegations.  The disparity is real, but its cause is not thereby established: seniority, timing, institutional response and the number of contested claims all bear on volume of coverage—and in this case only a minority of articles primarily concerned the plagiarism, rather than the biographical claims which Cambridge had itself promoted, or wider related issues. Maugham’s petition treats the question as already answered. But Black politicians were not of one mind: James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch blamed Cambridge instead, for elevating Arday too fast and without due diligence. Those alleging the racist motives of some writers on Arday are entitled to do so, but evidence must be supplied. The plagiarism claims first received widespread attention following a Substack post of 21 July 2026 by Nathan Cofnas, whose views on genetics and IQ have been highly controversial. But Cofnas was not the first to discover the plagiarism: academics Dave Harris and Martyn Hammersley had done so back in 2023. It was three years before the evidence became public, following a lawyer’s letter and police involvement. That interval is the phenomenon this essay has been describing. “Lynching” takes the debate onto another level, likening academic and journalistic scrutiny to brutal, organized racist killing, before an inquest has even sought to investigate the relevant causal claims. A letter I signed, organised by Alka Sehgal Cuthbert of Don’t Divide Us and published in the Times on 25 August, disputed attempts to blame Arday’s death upon academics and journalists undertaking legitimate scrutiny of a high-profile figure, and warned against curbing press or academic freedom as a result.’ cafeamericainmag.com/self-ce…

‘There is indeed something peculiar about treating conservative politics among minorities as requiring explanation. “Ethnic minority” is an aggregate category, not a social class or political constituency. It bundles populations with different migration histories, religions, class profiles, occupations and generational trajectories. Furthermore, migrants came from countries with their own political cultures: India, Pakistan, Ghana, Jamaica, and many others contain powerful conservative, nationalist, religious or market-oriented traditions; there is no reason migration should erase them. British Indian and Chinese voters need not share the same economic interests as British Bangladeshi or Caribbean voters merely because all fall outside “White British” or within “global majority”. […] Heterogeneity is visible at the summit of politics: Conservative governments since 2010 saw seven different ethnic-minority politicians in at least one of the four Great Offices of State: Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak, Nadhim Zahawi, Kwasi Kwarteng, Suella Braverman and James Cleverly. Labour governments since 1997 have so far seen just two ethnic-minority politicians in these offices: David Lammy as Foreign Secretary and Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary. This does not demonstrate that Conservative policies were antiracist, nor that racism disappeared, but it does make minority conservatism difficult to render as an anomalous or token phenomenon. The case of Badenoch, who became in 2024 the first black woman to lead a major British political party, is especially revealing. I disagree with some of her politics and those of her party, as one who believes more strongly than her in the welfare state and a mixed and regulated economy. But her positions can be criticized without recourse to racial categories. After Badenoch’s election as leader, however, the Labour MP Dawn Butler reposted a message (which she later deleted, and which was claimed by its author Nels Abbey to be satirical) describing Badenoch as belonging to “white supremacy’s black collaborator class” and “Badenochism” as “white supremacy in blackface”.  Earlier, Labour MP Rupa Huq had said of Kwasi Kwarteng that “you wouldn’t know he’s black”, while, after the acquittal of a teacher charged with a racially aggravated offence for carrying a placard describing Sunak and Braverman as “coconuts” (brown on the outside, white within), Baroness Warsi posted a photo of herself drinking from a coconut in celebration, then left the Conservative Party after they opened an investigation. The implication—which one would have thought to be rejected by antiracism—is that racial ancestry carries political obligations, and so a non-white woman failing to advocate what some others believe to be acceptable politics must be an avatar of “whiteness”. ‘ cafeamericainmag.com/self-ce…

Great article. I agree that Art and Artist should be separated (but I thought that before reading it).

This is well worth reading

A woman who got famous for showing the world her vagina is shaming a newer younger actress for not showing her vagina

In the section where the two sides cross-examine each other, I replied to a comment suggesting that no-one ever buys a book or encounters another art work without knowing its author, ‘what about folk tales, or folk music?’ The response was ‘wouldn’t it be so great to know who originally wrote that folk tale or folk song?’ I think that is, er, a bit of a category error.

This article is very worth reading.

What happens if you write a novel without the letter ‘e’? Or a poem as a palindrome? The magnificent Oulipo construct literary labyrinths and then try to escape from them. They’re bonkers, and rather beautiful.

Amid all the fallout from the Jason Arday affair and his tragic death, one thing is notably missing, says Dr Linda Hall: an acknowledgement from Cambridge of the seriousness with which it takes Arday's plagiarism. dailysceptic.org/2026/09/22/…

"They would, wouldn't they" Cambridge Cancels Probe into Jason Arday Hiring, Will Instead Focus on University Support nationalreview.com/news/camb…

No, don’t always blame the therapists. My decision to cut off my mother was my own, then I spoke to a therapist about it afterwards. Sometimes years of attempting communication is fruitless and only makes things worse for you. With a parent or a partner, when this happens, it is time to cut them out of your life.

In the language of grievance, feminist academics keep writing papers about themselves. Arduously Reconciling the ‘Good Mother’ With the ‘Academic Worker’: A Collaborative Autoethnography on Academic Motherhood and Sisterhood in Australian Higher Education ABSTRACT: Globally, in higher education (HE), a “good mother” and a “successful academic” are two personas often residing uncomfortably within one body. The career-oriented, productive woman academic enthusiastically pursuing a linear, unfettered research and teaching career path is, in most cultural contexts, a mythical creature, particularly when constrained by family responsibilities. Simultaneous performance of motherhood and academic roles can be an arduous and isolating experience, potentially imperceptible to the predominantly heterosexual White men who occupy management in Anglophone and Eurocentric institutions. Convening as an academic sisterhood of three colleagues and academic mothers in a regional Australian university, we use collaborative autoethnography (CAE) and conversation as a blended methodology, sharing and unpacking our lived experiences as mothers and academics, and crafting critical insights into negotiating and reconciling these often-conflicting identities. Through an intersectional lens, we work toward an awareness of commonalities and differences in our experiences of meaningfully performing motherhood and academe. Reflecting on the “how” and “why” driving our efforts to pursue this reconciliation leads us toward acknowledgment and appreciation of the collaborative enactment of “academic sisterhood” and triadic allyship, which enables self-care and negotiating ongoing gendered marginalizations. Resisting normative identity formations in HE, we advocate for creating stronger nongendered alliances through inclusion and diversity encompassing all mothers and creating dialogic spaces for resolutions.

After a century-and-quite-a-bit of Mallarmé, Wilde, decadence, Proust, the Russian Formalists, the New Critics and the intentional fallacy, structuralism and poststructuralism, the death of the author, and any amount of experimental literature, it is hugely disappointing to find large numbers of young people and others who are still stuck in the nineteenth-century quagmire of literature as self-expression, as a ‘window onto the soul’, biographical reductionism, and neo-Victorian moralism.

Maybe you hear right-wing politicians talking about violence against women and children in relation to immigration so much right now because these are the very cases your side decided were too politically inconvenient to confront. Victims like me were sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism. We were ignored. Dismissed. Blamed. Failed over and over again. And perhaps they talk about it because, even now, survivors like me are still attacked and vilified by people on the left simply because of the colour of our abusers' skin. Maybe they talk about it because justice was withheld from us, our experiences were minimised, and acknowledgement was refused because telling the truth didn't fit the narrative you wanted to protect. For years, victims like me were treated as an acceptable price to pay for preserving a particular political ideology. So when people on the right stand up and talk about what happened to us, don't lecture us about them “weaponising” our suffering. Where were you when we needed you? Where was the outrage when children were being abused? Where was the political courage when authorities were being warned? Where was the concern for victims when acknowledging what was happening risked creating uncomfortable conversations about race, culture and immigration? The right didn't create these scandals. They didn't create the institutional failures. They didn't create the victims. The victims were already there. And when the political establishment failed to speak for us, others eventually stepped into the silence. Yes, some politicians may now use these cases politically. That is the nature of politics. But don't pretend the conversation exists because someone on the right invented it. It exists because thousands of children were failed. It exists because warnings were ignored. It exists because institutions chose protecting reputations, political narratives and community cohesion over protecting vulnerable girls. And it exists because survivors like me refused to stay silent. You don't get to condemn the people shouting about these injustices while ignoring the fact that we were left screaming into the void for years. The greatest political weaponisation of our suffering wasn't when politicians finally started talking about it. It was when vulnerable children were effectively sacrificed because telling the truth was considered too politically dangerous.

Some DeLillo

Most men don’t understand female relational aggression. It is subtle yet vicious. There is always plausible deniability. The aggressor in a mean girl dynamic will always play the victim and deny any wrongdoing. She will trash another woman behind her back, make up lies, actively work to turn people against her and destroy her social reputation, all while maintaining the facade of being the nice good girl. It’s a very subtle and insidious form of DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Every woman I know dealt with this growing up. Some women never grow out of it and operate this way into adulthood. Seeing even a hint of it in another woman is enough for me to avoid them like the plague.