Will Lloyd

Dec 7, 2024 | thetimes.com | Will Lloyd

Andy and Tracey stand in the cold night outside the Brighton Centre with the slightly furtive look of recently escaped convicts. They don’t want their children to know where they have sneaked off to: Ricky Gervais’s new show, Mortality. “Loads of people don’t like him,” Andy says quietly. He looks around nervously. What people? “The woke brigade,” Tracey murmurs. “Our kids are the woke brigade,” her husband says, half-laughing, half-worried.

Nov 23, 2024 | thetimes.com | Will Lloyd

Tax-rich Ireland should be the happiest country in Europe as it enters the final week of its general election campaign. No other major European economy looks as healthy as Ireland’s. Britain, Italy, Germany, and France do not have a budget surplus — Ireland does. And no other European finance minister could afford to do what Ireland’s finance minister, Jack Chambers, did in last month’s budget. A sweeping package of pledges worth €2.2 billion saw voters’ pockets stuffed with gold.

Nov 22, 2024 | airmail.news | Will Lloyd

Sixty-four years ago, Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor was pretending to be the most doomed monarch in British history when he learnt that Andrew, his brother, had been born. On February 19, 1960, the 11-year-old Charles was playing the role of a young Richard III in a Cheam School production of The Last Baron, a play written by one of the staff.

Nov 17, 2024 | thetimes.com | Will Lloyd

When Karl Marx acidly condemned the “idiocy of rural life” in a throwaway line of The Communist Manifesto, I’m fairly sure we can all imagine what he meant. Yokels. Mud. Muckspreading. Indigents who sleep with their cousins in hay-strewn outhouses. Udder-clenchers and goose-chasers, imprisoned in a timelessly rotating cycle of seeding and harvesting. The idiocy of rural life today has almost nothing to do with farmers.

Nov 17, 2024 | thetimes.com | Will Lloyd

When Karl Marx acidly condemned the “idiocy of rural life” in a throwaway line of The Communist Manifesto, I’m fairly sure we can all imagine what he meant. Yokels. Mud. Muckspreading. Indigents who sleep with their cousins in hay-strewn outhouses. Udder-clenchers and goose-chasers, imprisoned in a timelessly rotating cycle of seeding and harvesting. The idiocy of rural life today has almost nothing to do with farmers.