Mary Wakefield

Weekly magazine featuring the best British journalists, authors, critics and cartoonists, since 1828

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California is everywhere at the moment, earnestly assuring Americans of his unwavering loyalty to poor, senile Biden, while at the same time frantically pitching to replace him. This sort of deep duplicity comes quite naturally to Newsom, who is, God help America, a huckster of a very familiar sort.  It’s

Some of my good male friends, Tories, are sick of terfs. I can see it in their shifty eyes, in the way they won’t quite look at me when terfy issues creep into conversation, but stare gloomily at the skirting board. Terf stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and terfs are women who insist that

Weekly magazine featuring the best British journalists, authors, critics and cartoonists, since 1828

It’s only when you read the old stories again, to a child maybe, that you become aware of the extent to which the characters still live inside your mind, bobbing about just below the level of consciousness. I still find myself puzzling over the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, decades after I first read

I was on the bus recently and bored when I decided not to ignore but to answer one of those online questionnaires about adult ADHD. It was on Facebook, I think. Question 1) Am I easily distracted? Well, yes. 2) Am I often late? 3) Do I regularly forget appointments? Yes and yes. By the

There have been protests in 30 cities across France, people marching in outrage over the case of Dominique Pelicot who drugged his wife Gisèle and raped her and invited more than 70 other men – strangers – to come to his house and rape her too. Pelicot is a monster, a modern-day Bluebeard. But what

Last week it was reported that a 14-year-old boy, Sewell Setzer, killed himself for the love of a chatbot, a robot companion devised by a company called Character AI. Sewell’s poor mother insists that the chatbot ‘abused and preyed’ on her son, and frankly this would make no sense to me at all were it

It’s amazing how many people have responded to what they think of as the shattering catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory by crafting: making rag rugs, ceramic pots, knitting scarves. A woman I know from long ago is so traumatised that she has started quilting. I’m not sure what sort of quilt she’s making – a

Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe. There’s so much going on both visually and intellectually that there’s no room at all for a viewer’s own feeble thoughts. ‘When a work lands the excitement is physical, like biting into chocolate. You feel