Alec Charles
Journalist, author, and academic.
News from Nowhere: The Flip Side
New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern last month admitted she had given all she had to give, and chose to step back from public life, having, as she put it, “no more in the tank”. In doing so, she set an example and a precedent which others might be very wise to follow.
News from Nowhere: The Infernal Triangle
Imagine a right-angled isosceles triangle laid flat upon its hypotenuse, with two of its angles sharply acute, and the third very nearly obtuse. We must remind ourselves that, in the end, it’s not so impossibly great a leap from the likes of Clarkson to Carrick, when one travels via Tate.
News from Nowhere: The Invisible Man
The era of photoshop makes it rather easier to airbrush our unwanted leaders from history.
News from Nowhere: Cry God for Harry!
His memoir is called Spare, ostensibly in acknowledgment of his role in the line of succession: his older brother being the heir, he himself being merely the spare.
News from Nowhere: The Year Ahead
The UK is at a low point in its political and economic history. It’s now up to us to demand something different, perhaps even to demand the impossible, in an unstinting effort to try to turn things around.
News from Nowhere: An Impossible Year
2022 was a year of contradictions, a year of paradox. A year that made history for all the wrong reasons. A year we’ll never forget, although many may well wish to. A year from which almost everyone in Britain should feel relieved to move on.
News from Nowhere: Christmas Carols
Whether you believe in Christmas or not, you might not help watching into some of the holidays' traditional movies with an eye for today's politicians. Some of them might even serve better main characters!
News from Nowhere: State of Decay
This column usually attempts to find the lighter side of the ongoing series of calamities that have recently come to characterise British political, economic, and social life. But there’s really nothing funny in any of this. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s nothing much to laugh about here.
News from Nowhere: A World of Difference
It's sometimes difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy with the complaints of some of the world’s most pampered and privileged people, which is unfortunate, as it hardly helps to promote the seriousness and urgency of the causes they often support.