Wrong Side of History

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Reflections on the Turquoise Revolution in England

5 days ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

Good morning, and welcome to the era of Leo XIV - the first Anglophone pope since Adrian IV, and that was so long ago that the English he spoke was Middle English (in fact, Nicholas Breakspear grew up in an England where Old English could still be heard). Remarkable to think that, God willing, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday with an American pope in Rome and an American Caesar in Washington.
A nation’s rebirth after Nazism

1 week ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

On a train journey earlier this year between Cologne and Berlin, I began to read Harald Jähner’s Aftermath, a fascinating account of the years when Germany emerged from the destruction and shame of the Third Reich. The war ended 80 years ago today, and in the defeated nation the scenes were primeval and apocalyptic.
Friends and enemies of the liberal order

1 week ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

A theme of Greek myth is that those condemned by the gods to face disaster do everything possible to avoid their fate – and their very actions only ensure that it happens. Oedipus, warned that he will kill his father and marry his mother, escapes from Corinth for Thebes where he kills a man about 20 years older than him and weds a middle-aged woman. Which must have seemed rather foolish in retrospect - how he must have kicked himself.
The Bards of the Second Reformation

1 week ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

Childhood summers in Dublin were my induction into music. Our much older and cooler cousins had all sorts of records from the 1960s and 70s, that period of explosive creative energy in the Anglo-American world, but mostly we listened to the Beatles. Endlessly. I loved them then and love them now and forever.
Against Critical Trade Theory

1 month ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

When my children were all still in primary school I gave them the one-chocolate test, better known as the ‘ultimatum game’. They were offered the choice of either being given one piece of chocolate, and their siblings getting two - or none of them having any. They all chose communism, I’m afraid to say, but they were young and a sense of ‘fairness’ is inherent in all of us. Many people would rather go without than allow their neighbours to become richer than them.
Fiction is truer than fact

1 month ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school and delivered a style of memoir so warm, so funny and affable that I wanted nothing more than to do the same. The other was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a very tattered tenth-hand copy borrowed from a friend (and never given back, sorry). I was mesmerised.
The seed of Elon Khan

2 months ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

Niall of the Nine Hostages was a fourth century Irish warlord who caused his enemies to tremble with fear; he is credited with a particularly devastating raid across the water during the later Roman period, when Irish pirates frequently took Britons as slaves (including later, of course, St Patrick). According to the legend, Niall found a beautiful wife after he and his friends were stopped by an old hag guarding a well - and made to kiss her in exchange for water.
The Lives of the Othered

2 months ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

A few years back I found myself sitting on a train in tears after someone shared video footage of a Syrian man hugging his two dead daughters killed in a gas attack. One looked just like my own dear daughter, the same age, the same hair colour. I remember the day because I was on my way to a wedding in Sussex to meet up with my wife and children. I found it hard to stop thinking about the tragedy, but the next day, dozens more children were probably dead in Syria and I moved on.
Farewell to Our Kith and Kin

2 months ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

In May 1940, days after the Dunkirk evacuation, Churchill defender Andreas Koureas recalls how the great British war leader was ‘informed by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, of more dreadful news. Roosevelt had no faith in Churchill nor Britain, and wanted Canada to give up on her. Roosevelt thought that Britain would likely collapse, and Churchill could not be trusted to maintain her struggle.
Phantom Borders

2 months ago | edwest.co.uk | Ed West

Post-war Germany was perhaps the largest natural experiment into the relative effects of free market capitalism and socialism. Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, West Germans remain more liberal by most measures, but there are considerable differences in attitudes between those areas able to access West German television and those left in the dark.