Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

When I walk along Broadway Market, and through London Fields and the surrounding streets, my ears twitch. It sounds like I’ve gone east of central London and continued east for several thousand miles. Everyone is Australian – and “everyone” is only a small exaggeration. Aussies are buying £5 coffees. Aussies are serving £5 coffees. Aussies are walking through the park in yoga pants and Aussies are on the grass basking in what little sun kisses the land of the Poms. Between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, the Australian population in London declined from 53,959 to 43,418, likely due to Brexit, Covid and its homeland’s higher wages. But look at the ward-by-ward change and it’s a massacre in the west. Queensway had a 2.6 percentage point drop in the proportion of its population that was Aussie; Fulham Broadway, 2.2; Shepherd’s Bush West, 2.5; Clapham North, 1.7. By 2021, the most concentrated group of west London Australians – they make up 2.1 per cent of people in Clapham Common West – is in the shadow of north-east London clusters in Highbury Fields (now 2.3 per cent Australian), Angel (2.4 per cent) and Dalston Kingsland (2.5 per cent). A whole 1.3 per cent of Dalston Kingsland hails from New Zealand, for God’s sake. @josiahgogarty: The British Empire lives on in London Fields newstatesman.com/politics/socie…

The deep-state cult of Leo Strauss, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (@peermohambert) If all you know about Leo Strauss are the bare facts of his life, it is hard to work out why anyone would consider him all that influential, let alone the originator of a cult. After fleeing the Nazis in 1937, Strauss spent most of his life locked away in the Political Science department of the University of Chicago, scribbling out heavy, prolix books with titles like ‘On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s Hiero’. Yet for some reason, in the years since his death in 1973, he has managed to send wave after wave of conspiratorial panic crashing through the political establishment. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/0viCbU7

Harry Potter has ruined Britain via @FT ft.com/content/8d7a78…

"Britain is a country where it's easier to imagine where the next pogrom will happen than how a new high-speed rail line will be built." newstatesman.com/politics/2026/…

Next weekend at Verdurin: Out of Print, or the problem of literacy Where does literacy begin and end? We take the Iliad to be the foundation of literary culture, but such texts stem from an oral tradition, embodied and mutable. Writing a ‘definitive’ version brings permanence, but does the artefact thus become a monolith, effectively spelling the word’s end?  Technology gets the blame today for us no longer reading enough, not writing well, and failing to parse the written word. Yet already in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche bemoaned mass literacy. AI read-write tools make authenticity a premium, while the Chinese state is investing in the promotion of reading as a geopolitical tactic. Are reading and writing, therefore, a battleground of both our tastes and resources? These questions are the haunting of language itself. With contributions from Edmund King, @alisonmarybrady, @kitwilson_wordsandmusic, Daniel Hadas, and aesthetic interruptions, Out of Print will examine the ostensible crisis of reading in our age in literary, philosophical, historical, and sociological forms. 📅 20 June, 2-6pm 🎟️ verdur.in/event/out-of-p…

Aoife Monks: Let’s not make the same mistake as the UK. ‘Sensible’ degrees are overrated irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/0…