“Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), to which this column owes its title, devotes a chapter to the subject of men’s hair and beards. However, while Mackay locates the fashion for western men to wear their hair short in St Paul’s declaration that ‘long hair was a shame unto man’, his reticence when it comes to the mass follies of religion means that he only dichotomises his way through history, noting that this faction wore theirs long, while that one went for the No 1.

Journalism, New Statesman | No Comments »

To watch Will Self on last night’s Question Time along with Carol Vorderman, the Transport Secretary Lord Adonis, London Mayor Boris Johnson and Liberal Democrat peer Shirley Williams, visit the BBC iplayer here. The Question Time website has the clip about Jon Venables that partly accounted for the fact that “Will Self” and “Carol Vorderman” were trending topics on Twitter last night. (And, no, for those of you still asking, Will Self does not have a Twitter account.)

To read James Macintyre’s blog about Vorderman’s appearance, visit the New Statesman here.

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In Walk, the magazine of the Ramblers, Will Self argues that urban-fleeing walkers’ tunnel vision of the countryside is both damaging and self-defeating:

“The modern rambling movement began with a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District, but in my view what’s needed now is a mass exodus. The last time I was on Kinder Scout workmen were hard at it, laying a stone-flagged staircase all the way up from Edale. Even when I gained the ridge, I saw that more stone-flagging lay ahead of me, as if wayward Romans had been building wonky roads. Actually, the Roman analogy isn’t that misplaced, because in the last 20 years legions of walkers have invaded the British hinterland intent on stealing beauty.

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Jason Solomons from the Guardian talks to Will Self about half-Jews and Jews on the margins – and explains why he believes that his American mother was a self-hating Jew. Listen to the Jewish Book Week podcast here.

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“At what mute, inglorious juncture in the history of British cuisine did the ‘all-day breakfast’ make its appearance? I can’t recall it being scrawled on a yellow cardboard sunburst in Magic Marker until the early 1990s – which makes sense, dating it to the same era as 24-hour rolling news and the export of western values through the cross hairs of a USAF bombardier.

Journalism, New Statesman | No Comments »

Will Self is going to be appearing on Question Time from Canary Wharf on March 4, along with Boris Johnson, Shirley Williams and Carol Vorderman.

Television, Will's Diary | No Comments »

Will Self is going to be talking about Alice in Wonderland tonight at the British Library, 6.30pm.

Will's Diary | No Comments »

“Conspiracy theories are articles of faith for the masses in an age of unbelief. You will have had the same experience as me on numerous painful occasions: a perfectly ordinary exchange with someone about current political events suddenly veers off-piste and disappears down a crevasse yawning with credulousness. ‘Everyone knows,’ your interlocutor asserts, ‘that Princess Di was assassinated by MI5 to stop her having a Muslim baby … that the September 11 attacks were mounted by the Bush government to provide a pretext for their Iraq oil-grabbing venture … that global warming is a fiction devised by the scientific establishment in order to stop us enjoying our city breaks … ‘

Journalism, New Statesman | No Comments »

Will Self kicks off a series of Lent Talks on Radio 4 on Wednesday February 24 at 8.45pm, reflecting on the relationship between art and spirituality.

There is also a version of Self’s talk in the New Statesman here.

Essays, Journalism, New Statesman, Radio and Audio | No Comments »

“Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time has become something of a badge to be worn with pride by the contemporary British dilettante. I often find myself groping for conversation, when my interlocutor, perhaps sensing my abstraction, will reveal that she listens to – and loves – the Radio 4 discussion programme on the history of ideas. I, too, am happy to concede that I’m an In Our Time fan, preferring to catch up on it via podcasts listened to on my iPod when I’m walking the dog.

London Review of Books | No Comments »