The argument
Openly angled · signed · the other side stated first
The Long View
What Orwell Actually Said
Everyone quotes Orwell, and almost everyone quotes the half that flatters them. Read the whole of him and you find a man who fits no current team - which is the most useful thing about him.
The Crossbencher · 20 Jul 2026 · 2 min read
The Long View
The Anywheres Have Always Been Here
The split between the rooted and the mobile is described as a modern affliction, a wound globalisation opened. It is one of the oldest fault lines there is. Treating it as new is how you misread it.
The Crossbencher · 20 Jul 2026 · 2 min
The Long View
Teaching the Nation Its Story
A country hands itself on through the story it tells its young. The argument is stuck between a whitewash and a confession. The honest version is neither, and it is harder than both.
The Crossbencher · 20 Jul 2026 · 2 min
The Long View
The Respectable Lag
Whether an idea is respectable and whether it is true are different questions, and they come apart on a delay. Most disreputable ideas deserve their disrepute. The trouble is that a few do not, and respectability alone cannot tell you which.
The Crossbencher · 19 Jul 2026 · 2 min
The Long View
The Norman Yoke
For three centuries, the claim that England's elite was a foreign occupation was the radical left's founding story. Today the same argument is coded far right. The evidence, inconveniently, never moved.
The Crossbencher · 18 Jul 2026 · 5 min
The Long View
Who kept the loaf
The Saxon-and-Norman story of English is partly a Victorian romance, and the sceptics who say so are right. Sort the borrowed words by what they are for, and something survives the debunking.
The Crossbencher · 17 Jul 2026 · 3 min