Daniel Trilling

‘It’s time​ for the police to stop virtue-signalling and start catching robbers and burglars,’ the home secretary, Suella Braverman, said at the Conservative Party Conference last autumn. ‘More PCs, less PC.’ It’s not surprising that the government’s most committed culture warrior would use her speech to launch an attack on wokery. What’s...

The racist assumptions of some of the reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some commentators remarking on the tragedy of war affecting people who look white and Western, have been widely noted. But media attention can be fickle. Several million Ukrainians were displaced in the previous stage of the war, between 2014 and 2022, yet this rarely made the headlines. It’s helpful to pay attention to where the silence falls, because it shows you the way power operates. Libya is a particularly revealing example.

In August 2015, two treasure hunters announced that they had discovered a train buried deep underground in the countryside outside Wałbrzych, in the Polish region of Lower Silesia. The legend of the Golden Train – filled with looted valuables that were supposedly hidden by the Nazis in a complex of tunnels dug using slave labour – had long circulated in the region. Here, it...

In the summer​ of 2018, Lucy Knell-Taylor, a youth worker at King’s College Hospital in Camberwell, noticed that teenagers were talking more often about guns and knives. One girl said she had seen someone pistol-whipped at a party; other stories suggested that weapons were becoming more easily available. Knell-Taylor’s workload began to rise. She told Ciaran Thapar that she felt...