Matthew d’Ancona

Jan 23, 2025 | standard.co.uk | Anna van Praagh |Chris Blackhurst |Matthew d’Ancona

As Matthew d’Ancona argues in his column, “ceremony reveals where power truly lies” — and no one at the inauguration was more prominent than the tech barons, who seem to be rapidly forming an oligopoly, not just because of their financial prowess, but also their staggering influence.

Jan 14, 2025 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Matthew d’Ancona

Let’s face it: he’s having the time of his life. At Jimmy Carter’s state funeral in Washington DC last Thursday, Donald Trump was chatting away with Barack Obama and smiling as if they were old friends trading banter. You would never have guessed that he had spent years spreading flagrant lies about Obama’s birthplace and religion. Even the president-elect was struck by what he saw on screen afterwards. “I said, ‘Boy, they look like two people that like each other’.

Jan 10, 2025 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Matthew d’Ancona

An odd-couple buddy story, a road trip movie and a plangent reflection upon the legacy of the Holocaust: it couldn’t work, could it? And yet it does, triumphantly so, in Jesse Eisenberg’s second outing as writer-director. David Kaplan (Eisenberg) is a neurotic, OCD-afflicted New Yorker, married with a child and holding down a steady job selling digital ads – the polar opposite of his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) a charming, outspoken slacker from whom David has become partially estranged.

Jan 7, 2025 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Matthew d’Ancona

In the past month, I have read or heard many obituaries for “wokeness”. In the Times, Lionel Shriver declared that “Donald Trump’s emphatic victory is a woke watershed” and that “progressive lunacy” faced extinction. In the Mail, Leo McKinstry wrote that “wokery is in retreat. The creed has lost its ugly potency”. The hip lifestyle magazine Dazed asked: “Is being “woke” now considered cringe?” Well, according to the president-elect himself: “Woke is bullshit”. I beg to differ, however.

Dec 10, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Matthew d’Ancona

Nigel Farage is the uranium-235 of British politics. Poisonously radioactive already, he awaits the correct configuration of public disappointment, resentment and bigotry – the necessary bombardment of neutrons – to achieve electoral fission. One of the strengths of the Reform UK leader is that he understands that absolutely nothing is certain in the contemporary world. If there ever were reliable laws of politics, they no longer apply.