Last night I finally got around to watching the Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It wasn’t quite as pretentious as I expected, nor did it rise above the level of a three-star movie, but it did speak to a theme I’ve discussed on here before, namely the death of the monoculture.

The film starts out well enough, with an artistic crisis and meeting a girl, then gradually falls apart later on. We are expected to care about a rockstar going to therapy, which is a tough sell at the best of times, and we’re not really given a reason why poor old Bruce is depressed about his massive success. It seems to be related to his relationship with his father, which is also underdeveloped.

It’s as if they’re expecting us to have read Springsteen’s autobiography, and come in already caring about these things. Well, I have read most of the autobiography and love his music, and I still didn’t care.

The relationship angle is slightly more interesting, though ends up very much like the recent Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown, i.e. with Bruce binning off the girl because he’s too dedicated to his art and his own self-mythologising.

Thankfully the film doesn’t go into Springsteen’s political views, which are those of any rich Democrat NPC.

What is most interesting to me about the movie is the extreme reverence for the artist displayed by those around Springsteen. Obviously this is largely due to their own commercial interests, but even that is telling, as an artist as serious as Springsteen also being a giant cash cow is something that belongs to a particular era of the ‘monoculture’.

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Dixon Cox returns once more.

This week:
-The horrific Berlin attack and the left’s deranged response
-Zack Polanski shares a shocking post about Nigel Farage
-Cambridge University takes DEI to insane new levels
-Labour gets a very mild ‘Burnham bounce’
-Andy Burnham meets the public and finds they don’t know who he is

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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Hello,

I don’t normally link to Nick Reads from this page anymore, but my new video is quite political in theme, so I hope you don’t mind.

It is a piece on J.M. Coetzee’s masterpiece, Disgrace, which, as well as dealing with violence and tension in South Africa, also arguably predicted the MeToo movement.

It concerns a professor who has an affair with a student, but refuses to abase himself at an academic struggle session, instead claiming ‘I became a servant of Eros.’

When he leaves the university and heads to the Eastern Cape to live with his daughter, violence and violation soon ensue.

The novel raises uncomfortable questions of race and power, and though those might sound like leftist talking points these days, Coetzee takes no clear side and offers no easy answers. This is no doubt why the book was condemned by the ANC, and Coetzee left South Africa for Australia not long after.

Here I delve into the complex ambiguities of this extraordinary novel. Please give it a watch below.

Thanks,
Nick

Dixon Cox is back.

This week:
-Shocking new details in the Ann Widdecombe case
-Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting caught joking about early release of prisoners
-Andy Burnham selects his new cabinet
-Natalie Fleet steps down as safeguarding minister
-Stella Creasy has a massive birdwatching fail

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Cheers,
Nick

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Hello, we are back with another episode of God Knows, with the Rev Dr Jamie Franklin.

This time we discuss:

-The World Cup (skip to 27:40 if you don’t like football)
-The terrible murder of Ann Widdecombe
-The bizarre state of Woke publishing
-Writing practices and the nature of creativity
-Steven Pressfield and the War of Art
-The difference between obligation and discipline
-Outsider fiction
-Lewis vs Tolkien
-Jamie’s novel
And loads more

Sign up now to watch this episode, which is over two hours and only available for paid subscribers of either me or Jamie.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my topical podcasts with Paul Cox, all my articles, and you can comment on posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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Dixon Cox is back.

This week:
-The shocking murder of Ann Widdecombe
-The left’s sickening response to this tragic event
-Zia Yusuf demands proper security for all politicians
-Keir Starmer’s last PMQs
-Kemi’s approval rating goes positive

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of ‘banned’ books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.

For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).

Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. ‘The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection’ would make a funny meme—as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey—but it would likely not be much of a career boost.

And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.

Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).

Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: ‘The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices’.

What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.

This is most notable in the ‘Voice’ section, which, we’re told, ‘amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented’.

Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the Woke era of radical leftism, aggressive conformity, and cancel culture.

Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism—a hostile force attacking it from the outside.

Lipa’s list falls within the first camp, with the key distinction that she is implicitly claiming this progression into Woke is a good thing. Just as few Woke ideologues even now will admit to being against free speech, Lipa knows that there is something good and important about the literary achievements of the past, and tries to harness that energy to bolster the oppressive contemporary ideology her list ultimately advocates.

We can see this hypocrisy in, for example, the fact that publishers have relentlessly weeded out the Salingers of today. Catcher would be instantly dismissed as the narcissistic ramblings of a privileged white male, and would not have a hope of being published. In that sense it really is ‘banned’ in spirit, but that is certainly not what Lipa means by the term.

William Burroughs also features, yet he would definitely be cancelled today, and probably in jail (the latter perhaps a reasonable outcome from shooting your wife in the head). Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is in the ‘Control’ section, along with Kafka’s The Trial. These are apparently works that ‘explore the mechanisms of control, both visible and invisible, including surveillance, propaganda, technological influence and ideological conditioning.’

It’s hard not to laugh at the last part, in a list stuffed with works on decolonisation, ‘antiracism’, and gender ideology. But there is also little evidence the Woke authors on this list offer a real critique of bureaucracy or technocracy, and typically the Woke were the most fierce enforcers of state tyranny during the Covid era (along with Piers Morgan).

The Handmaid’s Tale also appears in this section, and is the perfect representative of the whole list. It imagines an oppressive Christian patriarchy which in many ways resembles the real Islamic patriarchies that are in operation in parts of the world right now. As with Lipa’s list, it is far safer to create a straw man opponent and pretend you’re ‘banned’.

This is why the one genuinely brave choice on the list is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. One key distinction between the liberal and Woke eras has been the latter’s tendency to ignore Islamic oppression in favour of viewing all Muslims as victims of the West. Rushdie exists on the faultline between these two worldviews, and it would have been typical for a list like this to duck controversy by not including him. This almost makes me think he is there by mistake, or perhaps it’s because Lipa’s library is in Portugal, where they may not have got the latest Woke memo, much in the way that Michel Houellebecq is still allowed to be a literary star in France.

Rushdie’s horrific stabbing in 2022 proves that this book is still highly dangerous. The rest are largely classics that are no longer considered controversial, or, to the extent that they are, it is at the hands of the kinds of people behind the more recent works on the list. It is they who love to tear apart the canon and let loose ‘sensitivity readers’ upon the very giants on display here.

Lipa doesn’t look like she eats a great deal of cake, and that is to her credit, but here she is trying to have her cake and eat it. You either celebrate beauty, individual expression, and artistic risk, or ‘identity’, ideological conformity, and activism posing as art. You can’t have both.

Dear Legends,

This is just to let you know I have now launched Nick Reads as a separate Substack page, which you can find here.

It has a cool logo and everything.

I have added all my literary videos there as an archive, and from now on I will put all the book stuff on there and the politics on here.

The Nick Reads YouTube channel is doing very well, and already has 100k views, despite some topics that I assumed were fairly obscure. So the channel has potential.

But I didn’t feel I could send these book fans over to a Substack about British politics. It just wouldn’t make sense.

Thus I have started this new Substack page, and I hope some of you will follow me on both. As long as you understand that Nick Reads is apolitical!

In future I hope to get a book club going on there where we can read great books together. For now, I will have solo videos, articles, personal essays, interviews on literature, and notes and observations on what I’m currently reading.

Founding members of my current site will get a comp if they want it (feel free to message me), though I will make most posts free initially. For paid subscribers, I know it’s not ideal to pay twice, but hopefully there will be enough value over time for some to consider it.

But for now please subscribe for free here.

Best,
Nick

Dixon Cox is back!

This week there is plenty of drama and absurdity as:
-Farage announces he will resign to stand in a Clacton by-election
-The other parties refuse to contest the election
-Count Binface announces he will stand against Farage
-Farage accuses the media of ‘hounding’ his family

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my videos on literature, all my articles, my new Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Thanks!
Nick

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Hello,

I have a new video up on Nick Reads about how modern publishing has killed the novel, from sensitivity readers to strict page counts, and even the banning of metaphors!

I also discuss the general risk aversion of the industry, the death of the monoculture, and the decline in male readership.

Check it out below.

Thanks!
Nick

Hello,

I have a new video up on Nick Reads about how to get more reading done.

This is extremely wholesome content, and my only goal is to help. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

Sorry to spam you with two posts in a day, but if you do watch this short video it would really help my new channel, and it might help you read more!

Check it out below.

Thanks!
Nick

Today SDP leader William Clouston returns, as we discuss:

-The legacy of Keir Starmer
-His take on Andy Burnham
-The positive sign for Britain’s future that no one has noticed
-Why immigration is the left’s Achilles heel
-The implications of the Makerfield by-election
-What the future of the right looks like
-If Reform UK have peaked
-Whether the Tories will recover
And lots more!

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you will also gain access to the full versions of all my other guest interviews, topical podcasts, videos on literature, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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Dixon Cox is back.

This week we look at the legacy of Keir Starmer, and ask if Andy Burnham will be any better. We also discuss the work of Scottish psychedelic dance pioneers, the Shamen.

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my videos on literature, all my articles, my new Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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One of the most insightful literary YouTube and Substack accounts is Pens and Poison AKA .

For my first interview on Nick Reads, I spoke to Liza about:

-Why academia has contempt for literature
-‘Sensitivity readers’, and the general state of publishing
-Whether more traditionally-minded people have done enough to defend literature
-Why publishers don’t want writers using metaphors anymore (yes this is real)
-The bizarre word limit for individual sentences imposed by publishers
-What contemporary writers have to do to get their work read
-Whether Substack is the antidote to the malaise of modern publishing
And loads more that is too intricate to list here!

I am sure everyone here will enjoy this conversation, so watch it below, or paid subscribers can listen in the audio player.

Thanks!
Nick

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Hello. Over on my new and very exciting ‘Nick Reads’ channel, I decided to rank the ten greatest American novels of the postwar era.

This is a very specific, though hugely rich, period of literary history. It is the era of the Beats, but also of giants like Roth and Bellow, and goes all the way up to the advent of postmodernism in fiction.

These days no one really talks about the Great American Novel, or the novel much at all. But there was a time when it mattered. And these are the authors and books I think mattered most.

Watch below to see if you agree with my choices, and my reasoning for each.

Thanks,
Nick

P.S. I was going to upload the audio for paid subscribers, but where I am the wi-fi is operated by horse and cart, so it proved impossible. However, watching the video will help the new channel more anyway, so please do that if you have a moment.

Michel Houellebecq's Submission was published in France on the 7th of January 2015, the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

It imagines a near-future France that elects an Islamist president. It was called racist. It was called dangerous. It was called fantasy. But the latter is looking less certain every year.

Following my recent video on this extraordinary novel, I sat down with comedian, writer, and general legend Simon Evans to pin down what Houellebecq actually argues in the book, and to get his take on anything I might have missed.

As always with Simon, it was a fascinating conversation, so have a watch/listen.

Cheers,
Nick

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There’s nothing the British media loves more than to destroy someone, then build them back up.

Just as you can be utterly annihilated by the fairly trivial, you can be rehabilitated from the borderline heinous.

This process is now beginning with Keir Starmer, and it is already very annoying. Tim Farron claimed ‘the vitriol and hatred towards him is just weird’. Matthew Syed came out with the bizarre assertion ‘Starmer was hated. Says far more about the electorate than the man’, and concluded ‘Starmer was a good man leading an ungovernable country’.

And you can find many more examples currently stinking up X.

All of it, of course, is nonsense. Starmer was not a good man. And to those of us with our moral compass still intact, this was immediately clear following the horror of the Southport murders.

Starmer’s total lack of empathy for a nation stunned and disgusted by what had taken place was striking. He seemed furious that not everyone was following ‘the process’. And, with an efficiency seldom seen when it comes to actually improving people’s lives, had as many people locked up as possible.

This is not to say, of course, that rioting is the answer. But his lack of understanding of, if not outright hatred for, the British people only encouraged the unrest. Where he needed to say ‘I get it, but let’s be calm’, he went with ‘Far-right thuggery’.

But it’s not just me saying this. Tim Shipman confirms in the Spectator that ‘His second foundational error, according to voters in focus groups, was his handling of the Southport killings of three young girls…it still comes up to this day, unprompted.’

At the time, various MSM goons claimed Starmer had handled it well. But that’s because they exist in the same bubble as Starmer, and, like him, barely acknowledge the existence of the British people, particularly the white working class, unless it is with a passing disgust, like something you have to wipe off your shoe.

But, although the current slow-moving coup happening in our government shows we barely live in a democracy, you still can’t quite get away with that level of open contempt for the people who put you in power.

Shipman calls this the ‘second foundational error’. The first was winter fuel. In a poll I annoyingly can’t find now, this was shown to be the policy voters were both most aware of and hated the most (Southport, pace the Starmer sycophants, also scored highly on both metrics).

Then of course we have the Mandelson fiasco, which was entirely predictable to absolutely everyone in the country except Starmer and his football mates.

Syed doesn’t mention any of this, because the ‘ungovernable’ memo has gone out, just as the ‘handled it well’ memo went out over Southport, and the ‘decent man’ memo has been deployed which increasingly desperate frequency. Such clichés make clever people sound very stupid, and it is left to the gammony thugs not allowed in the mainstream media (at your service) to set the record straight.

Starmer was not and is not decent. As his perfectly apt nickname implies, he was flagrantly two-tier. Just three days ago he was commenting on a violent incident in a way he would have urged everyone not to if it had been done by one of his precious ‘communities’, rather than a white man. ‘The suspect appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred’, he posted. Ah, so we’re doing speculation now? What happened to the ‘process’?

The post has 47 thousand replies, and I’m sure you can guess the tone of them. Starmer has driven everyone to the end of their collective tether, and pushed the country further towards civil unrest. This could have been avoided or at least tempered by a sensitive approach. Instead, he doubled down on blatant unfairness, either through stupidity, or sheer hatred of the native British.

Of course it’s true that the state of our state makes governing extremely difficult. Not so much for the reasons Syed et al cite regarding the unrealistic expectations of voters (though there is that) but due to the bureaucratic quagmire of Whitehall that Dominic Cummings spoke out about (again) the other day.

Cummings claims:

That is why you see two things happening on the Left now: one, the plan to change the electoral system to PR (proportional representation), and then, secondly, discussions about how you encode protections for the civil service to make it extremely difficult to actually do what I’m talking about. What they’re thinking is — and it’s actually logical from their point of view — that if you pass certain kinds of legislation defending the current Whitehall system, and then you do PR, you make it extremely hard for anybody coming in to actually change anything. You completely embed the current catastrophic situation, which is what they want to do.

Thus the trouble with using the byzantine nightmare of the system as a defence of Starmer is that, while he may have struggled to get certain policies through (probably more with his own backbench than the Civil Service) Starmer is very much on the side of the Blob.

He was the latest attempt by the Regime to prevent real change, or do anything that voters actually want. In a way he felt like the last attempt, but the spawning of Burnham proves that they will never stop pumping out these people and their drab policies, in a kind of endless, infuriating meme-based bartering. ‘What’s that, you want lower immigration? Best I can do is breakfast clubs. Okay, okay, I hear you—how about jogging to the Stone Roses and an improved bus system in the North? Wow, you’re a hard man to please...’

Burnham will soon end up hated, and his already irritating selfie with the strategically-placed Labour Fembots (whom they still don’t quite trust to lead) will age about as well as the dancing nurses of the Covid era.

But he still probably won’t be quite as hated as Starmer, who managed to combine a soulless, jobsworth vibe with a lack of effectiveness, thus leaving the entire country wondering what the point of him was. In the end, even his own party concluded that there wasn’t one.

At least Starmer will now have time to write his autobiography. Though it’s hard to imagine what will actually be in it. This is a man, remember, who resolutely claimed he didn’t dream at night, and appeared to have very little inner life during the day either.

I have suggested a selection of titles for the prospective book, the most popular of which seems to be I, Keir. For a man as forgiving and charismatic as a plank of wood, and as deep as a set of flatpack furniture instructions, it is not a bad shout.

Hello,

I am back home with incredibly dodgy Wi-fi (just attaching the above photo was nightmarish). I’m told we’re finally getting proper speed broadband soon, due to some long-delayed levelling up scheme, at which point I will be able to move back forever and do podcasts about the latest migrant stabbing from the shores of Grasmere.

But until then, please have a look at the videos I posted before I left on ‘Nick Reads’. My entire C.S. Lewis series is now up there. I’m sure you’ve seen the Narnia one, but I have one on The Abolition of Man, plus three on the Ransom trilogy.

I didn’t want to spam you every day, so I’m putting them all together in this post.

Abolition of Man is here.

Out of the Silent Planet is here.

Perelandra is here.

That Hideous Strength is here.

I’m always surprised how many people are interested in That Hideous Strength. It always does much better than the other two, but people should ideally read them all (and of course watch all the videos!).

I have a couple of new videos coming on ‘Nick Reads’ next week, including my top postwar American novels.

And if you’re lucky, and the Wi-Fi allows, I may release a discussion with Simon Evans about Michel Houellebecq on the main channel.

So far it has been a good trip. Less strange than last time, because I hadn’t been back for many years then. This time it’s only a year. In fact it turns out it was one day off exactly one year since I last came back. I even got the train at the exact same time. No one can ever doubt my autism (it wasn’t even deliberate, which is arguably more disturbing).

It’s good to not leave it so long. But then, as the song goes:

Don’t cry for me, Rydal Water
The truth is I never left you

Of course, there are many unfortunate changes here. Various rude foreigners who never used to come. Today I even saw four Japanese girls dressed as Elves. Fake ears included. At least, I assume they were fake. They were nice, but still, this should not happen.

It has been a merciful ten degrees cooler than London, which will apparently hit 36 next week. In my flat that would mean spontaneous combustion. Another reason I chose to come home.

Now I have to go for dinner. More soon.

Best,
Nick

Andy Burnham has won the Makerfield by-election with 24,927 votes, a 9,231 majority over Reform UK's Robert Kenyon, while Restore Britain got 3,111 (6.8%).

What does this mean for Labour, Reform UK, Restore Britain, and the Tories (who lost badly here but did well in Aberdeen)? I break it all down here (including why I was sadly right about it all!).

Watch below, or if you’re a paid subscriber, listen in the audio player.

Thanks!
Nick

P.S. Also check out all my new ‘Nick Reads’ videos here:

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Hello, we are back for another catch-up with the Rev Dr Jamie Franklin. We have decided to call this occasional podcast God Knows.

The title is not mentioned in the pod because we only decided it after.

I think this is the best episode we’ve ever done. Though it could be just that I was feeling better.

We discuss:
-Why Jamie loves horror and Nick hates it
-Which is the best Cohen brothers film?
-Quentin Tarantino’s top films of the 21st Century
-The world cup, and whether football is too woke
-Who we would have voted for in Makerfield
-Why the left tends to win
-Whether law can have a secular basis
-Assisted dying
-Jamie’s new beliefs about intellectual Christian ideas vs the power of prayer
-The Abolition of Man
-The strange flaw in Roger Scruton’s views on beauty
-Advice for people who struggle to believe
And much more

Sign up now to watch this episode, which is only available for paid subscribers of either me or Jamie.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my topical podcasts with Paul Cox, videos on literature, and my new Q & As. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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