Will Self

By a writer I don’t always admire – this is the most brilliant work of thinking/writing and deserves, David is right, much wider circulation

this is great 🤘🏻

Incredible stuff

I’m not in agreement with all of this but it is once again an astonishingly articulate deconstruction of how we got to how we live now.

A really brilliant article: "Suppose football now bears such extraordinary emotional weight precisely because it has become one of the very few arenas in which large numbers of ordinary people still experience themselves as participating directly in history."

One of Britain's most provocative and original writers - @wself - is officially joining us for the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn London 2026 festival! 📚 A novelist, satirist, journalist and cultural critic, he challenges orthodoxies, dissects modern life, and reshapes contemporary literature across more than two dozen books. We can't wait to hear what he has to say this September! 🔥 Check out the rest of the line up from the link now! 🤩 howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/lond…

"Deep literacy is only one expression of a more fundamental ethical capacity: the willingness to stop, to notice, and to respond."

"Whenever I pass Jehovah's Witnesses standing beside their display of The Watchtower and their neatly arranged pamphlets, I am struck by their extraordinary stasis. Very often—not merely nearby but almost at their feet—lies someone damaged, diseased or destitute, precisely the sort of person any compassionate Christian should first attend to. Yet their attention is directed elsewhere: towards the prospective recruit rather than the immediate neighbour."

@GylesB1 @wself I think he might be the best-ever podcast interviewee!

@MannGeorgia @wself Thank you, Georgia. Will is a joy, isn't he?

This is an absolutely brilliant podcast from @Wself & @gylesB1 There’s pretty much everything imaginable covered in this & I loved it podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ros…

Read differently, MOD (& UK data more broadly) is being traded in the hope of a seat at the geopolitical table.

'That arrangement gave the British state a fantasy of autonomy: Atlantic enough for Washington, European enough for NATO, mercantile enough for Riyadh, and corrupt enough, in the old imperial style, to be called pragmatism. Hormuz has blown that settlement apart.'

“This is why Streeting is not merely phoney in the old sense: he is phone-y—his emotional life, at least as represented in the memoir, is mediated by bidirectional digital attention. He does not so much suffer privately and then communicate publicly; he appears to discover the meaning of suffering through its circulation, while, not being apprised of difference, he cannot understand that each retweet attenuates rather than reinforces it.”

If you want to join the campaign against cliché, this article will be right up your street...

“Amis’s famous triad, the clichés of the pen, the mind and the heart, needs now to be extended. All governing, like all writing, should be a campaign against cliché—against the inherited verbal, emotional and institutional mistakes by which societies repeat themselves into decline, death, and, once that death—having been memorialised only in cliches, is forgotten—utter oblivion, whether they’re former health secretaries or knights of the realm.”