In 2012, Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and was widely criticised by western writers who accused him of accepting and working within the bounds of China’s state censorship program. He had a duty, they argued, to speak out against the...
There’s a meme that’s been doing the rounds online for a few years: a top-hatted dog sits at a kitchen table with a mug of coffee as flames engulf his house and smoke billows throughout the room. In the next panel, the dog is shown in close-up; he’s...
In his April 2016 TLS review of the late British philosopher Christopher Hitchens’ posthumous collection of essays, And Yet…, Geofrey Wheatcroft posed a prescient question, one that has long troubled anyone who has ever admired the Hitch: ‘If he was so good, why was...
A ‘good caricature, like every work of art,’ said the Italian Baroque painter, Annibale Carracci, ‘is more true to life than reality.’ This is why, I think, Bill Leak’s cartoons are so often failures. Like several pundits that take up column inches...
There’s no surer gauge of the depth and breadth of someone’s stupidity than the potency of his racism. The science on this has been settled for some time; we are all, if traced back far enough, evolved from bacteria. But, paradoxically, the equivocalness...