Black Earth, Still Water
This book is about the fens. I live on the edge of the fens, a flat place. When the wind blows it stops for no one. But the fens are not about wind. They are about earth and water. Black earth.
The rest of the blog
This book is about the fens. I live on the edge of the fens, a flat place. When the wind blows it stops for no one. But the fens are not about wind. They are about earth and water. Black earth.
Whipple’s Uncharted is less a chronicle of Trump’s comeback than an unflinching autopsy of a decaying liberal order that mistook gerontocracy for stability and denial for strategy
On the Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v. Scottish Ministers
A ruling on the definition of “woman” risks codifying exclusion into law, leaving trans women even more vulnerable in the name of protection.
The Trump–Starmer trade deal and the culture war as foreign policy
Farage’s tanks aren’t new, they’re the tanks of the 1970s, steered by mad generals and aimed squarely at working-class power.
If Reaganism found its myths on the big screen, Trumpism built its own spectacle—and may now be searching for its Riefenstahl.
A film about marines and monsters, yes—but also about empire, capital, and the systems that survive by turning crisis into opportunity. Watching Aliens now is like reading the minutes of a future board meeting: the Company adapts, the hive expands, and the mission continues.
Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador’s mega-prison wasn’t about enforcing policy, it was about staging power for the camera in a theatre of authoritarian realism.
Pete Hegseth’s rise to Defence Secretary marks the moment Christian nationalism stopped playing insurgent and started running the world’s most powerful war machine.
Alienation is the defining condition of modern politics. The gap between power and the people has never felt wider; work is increasingly precarious and meaningless; and the sense of community that once bound societies together has frayed. In this vacuum, neo-fascism has flourished, not by resolving alienation, but by weaponising it. Trumpism, Reform UK, and their European counterparts do not seek to challenge the economic structures that produce this disaffection; they thrive on it, repackaging frustration as grievance and grievance as political identity.