Ben Sixsmith

4 days ago | thecritic.co.uk | Ben Sixsmith

Judges should not be softer on criminals for being constitutionally rather than calculatedly dangerous Sometimes, it’s the little details in reportage that affect you. You can be reading about terrible crimes and disasters more or less soberly, and one aside brings home its sheer awfulness. It’s horrifying enough that three teenagers burned 76-year-old widower Robert Price to death, for example, by throwing a firework through his window.

5 days ago | thecritic.co.uk | Ben Sixsmith

Young people are more open to faith — but not necessarily religious When I was a young evangelical Christian — having inherited faith more than I had accepted it — I was often baffled by optimistic talk of “revival”. Ours was the “Revival Generation”, preachers would declare, which seemed difficult to believe when The God Delusion was selling almost as many copies as The Bible. But has the moment come? “Gen Z is flocking to church,” declares the Independent.

1 week ago | thecritic.co.uk | Ben Sixsmith

This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25. Are Hamas more evil than the Nazis? “The Nazis,” Douglas Murray writes in On Democracies and Death Cults, “attempted to cover over the worst of their crimes.”Hamas have also denied the worst of the crimes they perpetrated in their appalling massacre of 7 October. True, the killers filmed their rampages as they perpetrated them.

1 week ago | thecritic.co.uk | Ben Sixsmith

Veteran Conservatives are still not taking responsibility for their mistakes Imagine a gigolo who suddenly becomes a priest. He has regrets, he says, but his regrets are vague, and what has changed his mind is vaguer still. Imagine that gigolo and you will have a sense of the strange world of Michael Gove — Conservative politician turned Spectator editor. Suddenly, now he has left the House of Commons, Baron Gove has realised the many senses in which he was wrong.

2 weeks ago | thecritic.co.uk | Ben Sixsmith

There is a difference between bad posts and crimes News that the police are considering whether to prosecute Gary Lineker — outgoing Match of the Day presenter and prolific online left-wing commentator — because of an Instagram post should be a moment of inter-ideological accord. Can we all agree that things have grown ridiculous? Lineker made a bad error of judgement.