The Critical Commentator

  Whatever else it is, Prince Harry's proposed return is a gripping story to tell around the smouldering national campfire. Animals live in the moment but human beings need narrative: gossip, myth, parable, legends. Stories can be inspiring or malicious, sacred or profane, downright dirty or innocently funny but we need them. The problem and pleasure lies in  embroidering: inflating villains, weeping for victims, adjusting the plot... No New s Thomas Sword Good ( 1789-1872) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] So all weekend millions gasped at the suddenly reanimated tale of a discontented prince and his wife: as twisty as an 18th century picaresque only posher and unsettlingly subversive to a functioning monarchy. They fled, hurling resentment at fatherland and family, made big money and friends and lost some of both. They gathered sympathetic admirers, angry opponents and gleeful mockery. They waged legal battles and lost the biggest, narrated a new family story and served it on...

 MPs have been accused of failing to learn their lesson over freebies after taking almost £400,000 of hospitality to concerts and sporting events this year... Despite the outcry in 2024 over Keir Starmer accepting football tickets and clothing, MPs appear to have been declaring hospitality this year on a greater scale than previously seen. The most recent disclosures include tickets worth £858 to a Harry Styles concert at Wembley from PRS for Music, an industry group, which was accepted by Powell, Labour's deputy leader and now education secretary. Rave Punk Gal Jaksta Image Credit:  Maarten Roes Franken [CC BY-ND] Wes Streeting, now defence secretary, accepted tickets to the Chelsea flower show worth £1,839 from Lloyds Banking Group. Haigh, who is Andy Burnham's deputy, accepted a £1,314 ticket to the Ivor Novello awards, while Annaliese Midgley, now chief whip, enjoyed Brit awards hospitality for two worth £3,432, hospitality at Cheltenham festival worth £350 from the bettin...

  Ordinary has become an insult in the 21st century. [ Goodness, I didn't know that. ] No one aspires to be average, that sounds mediocre and dull: they want to excel. [ So that's what I must be then - mediocre and dull .] Everyone now dreams of being extraordinary, talented, gifted, different, unique in their own way. [ I don't really remember my dreams .] It's all about "main character energy" as Gen Z. calls it.  Nothing less, we have become convinced, will make us feel contented and fulfilled [ Are Gen Z Chinese? Don't they believe in energy flow when using holistic medicine?] We need to max our lives in every way, push ourselves to the limit, perfect our daily routines and sleep schedules, curate our existence and compete to win. [ This sounds very complicated to me. Is there to be any time for the craic and banter? The pub? Reading? Walking? No time to stop and stare?] A Portrait with Books Madge Gill (1882-1961) Photo Credit: London Borough of Newha...

  According to his former economic adviser, Gary Cohen, "Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing." Instead he gets most of his news from screens: Fox News and Truth Social are favourites. This preference explains a lot about the chaos of our present politics. The president is hardly alone in his allergy to the written word. Reading is in decline everywhere. Most widely cited are a series of reports suggesting that students from universities  are increasingly unable to read the books their lecturers assign to them. According to one professor, his students were "intimidated by anything over ten pages." And this is more than merely the sort of thing professors always said about their students... The Inattentive Reader Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC ND] A study of the leisure habits of nearly a quarter of a million Americans found that the number who spent time reading on a typical day (including n...

  What I find strange is that everywhere else in psychiatry we take a person's circumstances  seriously and understand that the world someone lives in can impact on how they feel and behave. No competent doctor treating a depressed woman would disregard the fact that she has been made redundant, or hasn't slept since the baby arrived, and we'd think it negligent to hand her a prescription and not consider the environmental, psychological and social factors. With ADHD that habit has been mislaid and we have settled on the idea that the difficulty sits inside the child and the world around him is beside the point. Patients Waiting to See the Doctor, with Figures Representing Their Fears Rosemary Carson (b.1962 Photo Credit:: Wellcome Collection [CC BY]   Yet look at the world we have built for him. The criteria have widened over the years, so behaviour once thought unremarkable now falls inside the diagnosis. We've handed children devices engineered to capture their at...

  You may think it's a commitment to buying a round, the ability to chat at length about the weather or make a proper cup of tea. But when it comes to what makes people proud to be British there is a consensus across all ages, demographics and political groups and tea, pints and the weather don't get a look in. Hard work, fair play and community are the values that voters - no matter which political party, age group, social class or region they come from - instinctively believe capture what it means to be British, according to a large-scale study of values by the research firm Public First. The Food Queue Joseph Edward Southall (1861-1944) Photo Credit Gallery Oldham [CC BY-NC-ND]  "When you talk to people across Britain it's clear they have a shared set of values - if fairness is Britain's moral compass, hard work is its character, and community the thing that binds us," said Olivia Walsham, the director of social policy at Public First... In the study, which...